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People Who Excel in Life Tend to be Emotionally Intelligent
It is God’s will that we be free men and women enabled to rise to our full potential both temporally and spiritually. People who excel in life tend to be emotionally intelligent. The recipe for handling relationships smoothly is to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way. Indeed, the costs of poor emotional skills can be high. They range from problems in marriage and parenting to poor physical health. A lack of emotional intelligence (self-control, self-awareness, sensitivity to the feelings of others, persistence, and self-motivation) can ruin careers and sabotage achievement. Perhaps the greatest toll falls on children and teenagers. For them, poor emotional skills can contribute to depression, eating disorders, unexpected pregnancy, aggression, and violent crime. We should promote emotional competence as well as intellectual skills. The result would be greater self-control, altruism, and compassion—all basic capacities needed if our society is to thrive. What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which it opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of it, perhaps? We have already become acquainted with a few of these methods, but not yet with the one that appears to be most important. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
What happens in an individual to render his or her desire for aggression innocuous? Civilization obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within one to understand why they feel the way they feel. The tension people feel in jealousy may be that of much greater Worlds colliding than can be seen by looking only at our personal situations. Its pain comes, at least in part, from opening up to unexplored territory and letting go of old familiar truths in the face of unknown and threatening new possibilities. It is not unusual for a jealous person to feel so altruistic and reasonable about one’s own life, so clean of the vice of selfishness, that one finds the loved one self-serving. Many people experience jealousy because the soul wants complete openness and freedom. That leaves a sense of order and limit in the darkness of repression, where it stirs and becomes wild and unreasonable, and potentially violent. It also may be time for one to reevaluate one’s beliefs. People who feel rage and suspicious call for some kind of adjustment and reflection. To begin with, if we ask how a person comes to have a sense of guilt after unjustifiably hurting another person, we arrive at an answer which cannot be disputed: a person feels guilty (maybe even sinful) when he or she has done something bad. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
When your jealousy, with or without your conscious consent, is setting limits on your life it is because your jealousy is drawing out a strange cast of characters—the moralist, the detective, the paranoid, the archconservative. People often feel jealous because they assume that something threatening and dangerous is near. They believe that they are hard on the trail of facts, but they behave as if they do not know any details. Then aggressiveness is introjected, internalized. It expresses itself as a need for punishment. Since a person’s own feelings would not have led one along this path, one must have had a motive for submitting to this extraneous influence. Such a motive is easily discovered in one’s helplessness and one’s dependence on other people, and it can best be designated as fear of loss of love. If one losses the love of another person upon whom one is dependent, one also ceases to be protected from a variety of dangers. Above all, the individual feels they are exposed to the danger that this stronger person will show his or her superiority in the form of punishment. At the beginning, therefore, what is bad is whatever causes one to be threatened with the loss of love. For fear of that loss, one must avoid it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Feelings of violence can show how slit off one is from the power of one’s knowledge. Blinded by a cloud of innocence, people seem not to know their friend or oneself or the complexity of relationships in general. They plead for simple attention and care. When one does not get these things, one feels controlled and toyed with. Then, in place of a more genuine power, violent rage pours out of the individual. The paranoid element in one’s jealousy both keeps the possibility of deeper knowledge within reach, but also dissociates itself from will and intentionality. It makes little difference whether one has already done the bad things or only intends to do it. In either cause the danger only sets in if and when the individual discovers it. This state of mind is called a bad conscience; but actually it does not deserve this name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love, social anxiety. Consequently, such people habitually allow themselves to do any bad things which promises them enjoyment, so long as they are sure that the authority will not know anything about it or cannot blame them for it; they are afraid only of being found out. For instance, when people vandalize cars of someone they are jealous of, they usually do so when they know people are in deep sleeps so they will not be held accountable for their crimes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
The obsessive side of jealousy seems in part to be a function of its hiddenness, arising when it is not being revealed and given place. When jealous feelings and images penetrate the heart and mind, a kind of initiation takes place. Their souls become profoundly disturbed. Sometimes people also become jealous of other person, who they do not know, because some people might appear to have a lot of talent, or be an insanely inspired artist or seem to possess the power of a politician graced with the charisma that might make him or her a World leader. How can anyone compete with a person who has desire of cosmic proportions without always feeling threatened? They become fitful, outrageously infuriated, betrayed, and offended. If one did not become jealous, they feel that too many events would take place, too much life would be lived, too many connections would be made. Therefore, jealousy serves the soul by pressing for limits on an individual one does not have control over, but deeply desires to control or possess their absolute beauty and fulfilling absolute power. From the jealousy person’s point of view, not only is their possessiveness right, it is required that one be outraged. This serves to compensate for a sense of union that does not exist or is not terribly deep. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
When a jealousy person’s feelings come upon them, they feel alien and do not know what to do with them. When some part of one longs for more experience, new people, and starting over, jealousy remembers attachment and feels the unending pain of separation and divorces. These types of people become tormented by jealousy. They sense tension between attachment to what is and the promise of a new passion. How does one care for the soul when it is presenting itself through jealousy? Can we perceive that the soul wants when it wrenches us with longing for what another person has? Jealousy can be consuming. It can crowd out every other thought and emotion with its pungency. It can make a person distracted, touched, aching for the life, position, and possession of others. My neighbors have happiness, money, success, children—why do I not? My friend has a great career, good looks, luck—what is wrong with me? There may be a good dose of self-pity in jealousy, but it is the longing that is so bitter. Jealousy eats away at the heart, soul, and mind. It has a corrosive power. In jealousy, desire and self-denial work together to create characteristic sense of frustration and obsessiveness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
The jealous person thinks he or she is the victim of bad fortune it also involves strong willfulness in the form of resistance to fate and character. When misfortune befalls an individual, one must search one’s soul, acknowledge sinfulness, heighten the demands of one’s conscience, impose abstinences on oneself and they often punish themselves with penances. Whole people have behaved in this way and still do. Fate is regarded as a substitute for the parental agency. If any person’s unfortunate it, they sometimes take it to mean that they are no longer loved by their higher power; and threatened by such a loss of love, they become more conservative, and no longer neglect their religion. However, a person with a jealous nature fights fervently against the deal fate has handed them. They feel deprived and cheated. Because jealous people are so out of touch with the potential value of his or her own fate, one has elaborate fantasies about others being blessed with good fortune that belongs to them. The point of caring for the envious soul is not to get rid of the jealousy, but to be guided back by it into one’s own fate. The pain in jealousy is like pain in the body: it makes one stop and take notice of something that has gone wrong and needs attention. Jealous people simply fail to see the necessity and value in their own lives. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
When things turn bad, there is a tendency to blame others or even God. Sometimes a sense of entitlement arises, and individuals or groups try to shift their responsibility to others. Some people allow their jealousy to allow them to have a preoccupation with the lives of others and then neglect their own. Their angry explanations for their misfortune distract them from the pain of their past and dealing with it productively. Symptoms are often obviously painful, but at the same time they may protect against a deeper pain associated with awareness and facing the fundamental realities of fate. It is through their jealousy that they suck all that pain into itself and in an odd way keeps them from owning their past. The problem is not the individual’s ability to have a good life, it is his or her capacity not to have one. Jealous people need to be taught to care for their soul. If in jealousy the person wishes life were better, then maybe it is a good idea to feel that emptiness deeply. People must take more responsibility for their situations, and over time eventually improve it. And it is important to be honest with oneself. In jealousy, fantasies are potent and utterly captivating, yet floating in an atmosphere somehow removed from actual life. These fantasies are illusions, images kept at bay so they cannot touch life directly. Dwelling in an imaginary life is a way of avoiding soul. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
Jealousy is resistance to reason. If a jealous person is met with a misfortune or denial of a desire, they do not throw the blame on oneself, but on one’s fetish, which has obviously not done its duty, and one gives it a thrashing instead of punishing oneself. When one has a sense of guilt after having committed a misdeed, and because of it, the feeling should more properly be called remorse. It relates only to a deed that has been done, and, of course, it presupposes that a conscience—the readiness to feel guilty—was already in existence before the deed took place. Remorse of this sort can, therefore, never help one to discover the origin of conscience and of the sense of guilt in general. What happens in these everyday cases is usually this: an instinctual need acquires the strength to achieve satisfaction in spite of the conscience, which is, after all, limited in its strength; and with the natural weakening of the need owning to it having been satisfied, the former balance of power is restored. The task is to care for the soul, but it is also true that the soul cares for us. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
We must do our best to honor whatever the soul presents to us. It suffering can only be relieved by the reestablishment of the will placed on us by the Heavenly Powers. And we may well heave a sigh of relief at the thought that it is nevertheless vouchsafed to a few to salvage without effort from the whirlpool of their own feelings the deepest truths, toward which the rest of us have to find our way through tormenting uncertainty and with restless groping. God wishes only good for everyone. We are all rooted in pure spirit, in perfect life, and at any moment we can so unify ourselves with the power of good that evil will disappear from our experience. We have to live each day as though all the joy there is in the Universe were ours now. And we have to live each day as though all the joy we ever expect to experience were ours now. If we make every day a day of praise and thanksgiving, a day in which we recognize the divine bounty and the eternal goodness, and if we live today as though God were the only presence and the only power there is, we would not have to worry about tomorrow. We are all human and have all made mistakes. The starting point for creating a better future for ourselves is to deliberately free our minds from the mistakes of the past and feel they no longer be held against us; they need no longer be a liability. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
Suppose we have had a deep sense of animosity toward others and because of this we find that we are not meeting people in the right spirit; they, naturally, respond to us the way we meet them, and out whole set of human relations is out of harmony. We cannot go back over the past and relive it. We cannot make adjustments in the past. We have to make them in the present. It is not going to do us any good to sit around and cry over the past and bemoan our fate, because in the very day in which we are living we are creating our future, which will become monotonous repetitions of the past. The one who is suffering from one’s past mistakes of resentment and animosity merely turns quietly to oneself and prays: I have decided to change al this. I want to like people and I want them to like me. I want to get along happily with others. I forgive myself for everything that has happened up until now. I lose it and let it go. I not only forgive myself, I forgive everyone who I feel has held anything against me. I forgive and I am forgiven. Furthermore, the power of the Universe conspires to help us. We should feel that we live in an eternal presence of pure spirit whose whole purpose is good, whose whole desire is constructive, and whose whole feeling toward us is one of love and compassion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
The No-Harm Charm
Having an optimistic mental attitude and high self-esteem can literally double the chances of career success. We have been primarily concerned with the self-concept as a social product. The fundamental questions addressed has been: how do social conditions or experiences—social interaction, social structure, social contexts—shape the individual’s self-concept? However, the self-concept may also be examined as a social force. The question is: how does the self-concept influence behavior in major institutional areas? Before addressing this question, it is relevant to say a word about the personal consequences of the self-concept. Even if the self-concept had no bearing on society, it would still be important if it influenced people’s ability to lead full, rich, satisfying lives. The importance of a healthy self-concept for mental health can scarcely be exaggerated. It is clear that self-esteem is characteristically deeply implicated in the neurotic (though not necessarily the psychotic) process. Whether the research has been essentially clinical or quantitative, the results demonstrate clear and consistent relationships of low self-esteem to psychological depression, anxiety, somatic symptoms, impulse to aggression, vulnerability, negative affective states, and other neurotic symptoms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
The social roots of self-esteem are thus an important topic in the sociology of mental health. However, the sociologist is also properly interested in the influence of personality on society. On theoretical grounds, there is reason to think that the self-concept, at least as a proximal influence is implicated in almost all social behavior. Much of what people do voluntarily depends upon what they conceive themselves to be. Each takes one’s personal identity so much for granted that the individual does not realize the extent to which his or her life is structured by the working conception one forms of oneself. The things that a person does voluntarily, and even involuntarily, depend upon the assumption one makes about the kind of person one is and the way in which one fits into the scheme of things in one’s World. Believing in oneself can strongly influence long-term career advancement and overall health. People who score high on self-evaluations enjoy success earlier in their careers, engage in continued higher education, and advance more quickly than those who score lower on self-evaluations. The advantaged gained by having an optimistic self-image is also strongly correlated with overall career satisfaction, higher pay, and better health. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
The self-concept plays a major role in occupational decisions. The selection of an occupation depends on a view of the self. How you feel about yourself will either spawn motivation and energy or will several hurt your changes for a great career. The individual making an occupational choice must achieve stereoscopic vision as one is making an occupational incumbent. Although the answer to the question: what should I become? has some important consequences for the occupational system, it always emerges from the ulterior question: what am I like and what do I like to think of myself as? As an obvious example if girls are socialized to believe that they are competent in mathematical ability or assign this talent to a high position in their system of self-values, then they will be more likely to seek occupations such as engineering, physics, and related fields demanding such skills; and, indeed, the facts show them to be strikingly underrepresented in such fields. That is more than likely because people’s self-concepts tend to match the stereotypical characteristics associated with their chosen occupations. For example, students planning to enter the field of sales tend to describe themselves as sociable, talkative, aggressive, and having initiative, whereas those selecting accounting are likely to describe themselves as precise, self-controlled, organized, and thorough. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
When individuals increase their confidence level, they are able to interview more effectively, negotiate higher salaries and, subsequently they will receiver a wider range of occupational choices. Furthermore, the self-concept is not only consonant with prime occupational choice, but with second occupational choice as well. In selecting an occupation, people seek to achieve self-role congruence. If people have high global self-esteem, then their occupational choices tend to be consonant with their self-concepts, but if their self-esteem is low, the self-concept and the occupational choice are unrelated, and they are going to be paid less, given fewer responsibilities and will end up accepting a position that they are overqualified for. In making an occupational choice, people with high self-esteem sought to be true to their pictures of what they were like; people with low self-esteem, on the other hand, tended to make their occupational choices on the basis of other considerations, for example, certain extrinsic rewards of work, such as money, status, or security. The question of why those with high self-esteem tend to implement their self-concepts whereas those with low self-esteem do not is currently under active debate. Perhaps people with higher self-esteem feel they are a gift and people with lower self-esteem feel lucky to get a job and believe they can prove themselves worthy of that and more. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
The results can be interpreted within the framework of cognitive consistency theory. Humans are motivated by inconsistences and a desire to change them. Cognitive inconsistences cause imbalance in individuals and the tension from this inequality in individuals and the strain from this disparity motivates people to alter these irregularities. The pressure arises when thoughts conflict with each other and this stress creates a motivation to change and correct the inconsistency. When this hardship is reduced, balance is achieved in the individual. The right mindset significantly boosts one’s overall state of being and performance. People anticipate consistency, inconsistencies create imbalance and dissonance in individuals, and that tension motivated the individuals to create consistency in order to achieve balance. This is meaningfully understood as consequences of the self-esteem motive. Global self-esteem has also been shown to bear a relationship to occupational aspirations, expectations, values. A study of high school juniors and seniors showed that youngsters with low self-esteem were more likely to avoid occupations that required the exercise of leadership, to want jobs in which they were free of supervision, and to avoid jobs involving competition. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
Other economic attitudes, orientations, or behavior may also be influenced by the self-concept. Psychiatric attendants reconceptualize the nature of their work for the purpose of enhancing self-respect. In studying the self-concepts of executives and supervisors, it can be seen how historical developments have produced change in self-concepts among Greek army officers. Sociological research has also been conducted on the process by which a trainee—say, a medical student or a music student—comes to see himself or herself as a doctor or musician. Individuals navigating along their career path build on feelings of self-confidence, self-worth, and inner strength to transform the journey into career success. Through experience, you are building wisdom that can be applied in different situations and across different industries. Keeping track of the skills, knowledge, and abilities, you possess builds your self-confidence and facilitates a feeling of self-worth. It may be no exaggeration to suggest that the self-concept, in its full rich complexity, pervades virtually every aspect of occupational life. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Showing gratitude also helps people keep an optimistic attitude. We all like working with people who are happy, genuine, and have good attitudes. Even on a bad day, look for something to be thankful for and have gratitude for all the blessings that have been bestowed. Your goals are sacred to you. They are the gold that will help you create the life and career success that you want and deserve. Once you have proved to yourself you can be successful, your confidence will soar. It is also important to do the same in your career by showing others how competent you are. You have exactly what you need. If you use what God has given you, he will get you where you are supposed to be. It is not necessarily the amount of talent, education, or money, but what makes the difference is God’s anointing on our life. You can have average talent, but when God breathes in your direction, you will go further than someone with exceptional talent. Be confident that you have exactly what you need. It may not be as much as others have, and that is okay. You are not running their race. Do not envy their talent. Do not covet what they have. Do not wish you had their looks, their personality, or their opportunities. God equipped you with everything you need to fulfill your destiny. You have the talent, confidence, strength, and the creativity to fulfill your purpose. With a view like that, the World changes completely. It brings transcendence and takes people further. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
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C’est tres en Vogue en ce Moment!
The loneliness trap of withdrawal is self-explanatory: it is a silent admission of total defeat and a reluctant resignation to the status quo, to a life devoid of human love. It is frequently the case that privilege and disprivilege are cumulative and reinforcing, low position along one stratification dimension may produce a corresponding position along another. A prime example is social stratification. As a consequence of prejudice and discrimination, even some who are considered to be privileged are not allowed to enjoy equality in education, prestigious occupational positions, nor do they have access to equal pay or full constitutional rights. As a result, they are not only victims of discrimination and have to work harder for occupational prestige, but they are also socially stigmatized. Hence, a general consequence of prejudice and discrimination is to bring about other conditions of life for people who are victimized that produce unfavorable comparisons with those who are allowed social and legal equality, and the comparisons are obviously damaging to self-esteem. And these days, anyone can be a victim of unfair treatment, injustice, and sexual harassment. People you would not even expect to be victims of discrimination have been. From tall, attractive men you would expect to be accept by everyone to beautiful Academy Award winning actresses. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
Another principle of self-esteem formation is self-attribution. Internal psychological processes are inherently unobservable. Inner states (such as hunger, anger, excitement, sympathy)—are ordinarily understood to be based on private internal stimuli—and may in reality reflect past training in the application of certain descriptive terms to overt behavior and the conditions under which it occurs. Thus, the man who, after devouring an enormous meal, concludes that “I guess that I was hungrier than I thought,” is drawing conclusions about his level of hunger not by consulting his inner experience but by observing his own behavior or its outcomes. Furthermore, it is not just inner states but any aspect of the self that may be influenced by the individual’s observations of his or her own behavior. People derive much of their knowledge [about themselves] from direct experience of the effects produced by their action. Thus, the child who is dejected and gazes at one’s poor report card, or the unequally treated adult whose social identity includes a low prestige job, lack of material possessions, or other evidence of failure would be expected to develop low self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
Because people who are taken advantage of or not fully appreciated in society are victims of prejudice, and hence negative reflected selves (reflected appraisals); because, on the average they tend to compare unfavorably with those who are accepted and worshipped in such valued areas as school achievement, educational level, and occupational success (social comparison); and because they may interpret their unfortunate life circumstances and experiences as overt reflections of a lack of essential work (self-attribution), many professional have simply taken it for granted that people ranking low in the various prestige hierarchies would tend to have lower self-esteem. The facts, however, speak otherwise. Monumental synthesis of this research, involving a review of several thousand studies, offers little support for the conclusion that people who have been consistently subjected to prejudice and discrimination have appreciably lower self-esteem. Why have these sound psychological principle failed to yield the expected results? The critical error, we believe, had lain in viewing the situation from the perspective of the broader society rather than from the viewpoints of the people who are actually facing discrimination. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
Investigators have frequently overlooked the reality of the situation, in many cases, when it comes to people who are being discriminated against. If we want insight into an individual’s self-esteem, especially when we know they are being discriminated against frequently, then we need to attempt to understand the individual’s definition of the situation, in order to gain entry into his or her phenomenal field or psychological World. You will find that people who are not accepted, in whatever majority considers themselves to be tres en vogue en ce moment (very fashionable at the moment or in the case accepted), has just as high as, if not higher self-esteem. It has a lot to do with principle of reflected appraisals—we tend to see ourselves through the eyes of others. However, which others? Do we see ourselves through the eyes of the broader society or of those with whom we directly interact? The people in our role-set, that is, our God, parents, classmates, teachers, employers, and neighborhood peers, that is where our interaction goes on primarily. Whatever else these particular others may think of us on other groups, they are unlikely to derogate us. Thus, we are more likely to see ourselves from the perspective of members of our own group who love us, than the dominant majority. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
The traps inherent in attempting to find human companionship as quickly as possible are less immediately apparent. Two traps are particularly difficult to avoid. The first is the trap of panic. Because of intense feelings of shame, stress, and pain, the person sets out immediately to find a mate with single-mindedness that borders on an obsession. While such a strategy may produce a mate, all too often it also produces greater loneliness. One problem is that the single-minded pursuit of a mate, other humans who could provide companionship and friendship are discarded. Therefore, principle of reflected appraisals is thus entirely sound, but by expecting my self-esteem to be degraded because of your mob mentality, you have misapplied your judgments, as I do not chiefly see myself through the eyes of your majority. And the thing with social comparison is equally sound and equally misapplied. It might be expected for some to have lower self-esteem because they compare unfavorably with the majority in terms of socioeconomic status, school marks, or intact family. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
However, when people know they are good people and doing the best they can, they also understand that everything runs its course. If you are constantly bullying and harassing others, you will lose your favor with God and your fortune will be turned into misfortune. And those who are working hard and doing what is right will eventually be favored. Also, you cannot just attack a person relentlessly and expect them not to respond. The self-attribution principle is also sound but misapplied. For example, career self-concept and, to a lesser extent, global self-esteem tend to be influenced by the person’s evaluation; in other words, one important basis for assessing one’s own work is to observe one’s achievements. However, this is precisely why it is so important to recognize that some of the individual’s statuses are ascribed, whereas others are achievements. But this is precisely why it is so important to recognize that some of the individual’s statuses are ascribed, whereas others are achieved. There is evidence to suggest that the chief ascribed statuses—race, ethnicity, gender, religion—show virtually no association with global self-esteem whereas achieved statuses do show such an association. Social class is achieved, but no matter your economic standing, you can behave like you come from a good home. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
It is thus apparent that it is not the individual’s behavior but one’s interpretation of the behavior that has consequences for self-esteem. The issue, in other works, is one of attribution. Thus, we have observed that one factor protecting the self-esteem of many adult groups is the system-blame interpretation. Some behavioral outcomes, people may attribute it either to internal properties of the individual or to factors in the external situation. To further highlight this illustration, if someone does well on a work assignment, one can attribute this outcome either to the fact that one is smart (an internal characteristic) or to the fact that the project was easy (the external situation). If occupational failure is explained by prejudice and discrimination (external factors), then the lower occupational status of the group being discriminated against may do some damage to self-esteem. Therefore, any easy and automatic assumption that low prestige in some stratification hierarchy will produce correspondingly low self-esteem is a gross oversimplication. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
What research has demonstrated is that, although the principles on which this assumption primarily rest—reflected appraisals, social comparison, and self-attribution—are perfectly sound, researchers have tended to overlook the psychological World—the phenomenal field—of people who are considered to be part of an underrepresented group and, in doing so, have frequently reached erroneous conclusions. God has brought light our of darkness, not our of a lesser light, and he can bring your summer out of Winter, though you have no Spring. Though in the ways of fortune, understanding, or conscience you have been benighted until now, wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied, now God comes to you, not as the dawning of the day, not as the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon. God has shifts in your future that if he showed you now, you would not believe. It is exceedingly, abundantly, above and beyond. Suddenly, a dream comes to pass. Suddenly, a promise is fulfilled. Suddenly, the negative turns around. You need to get ready for the surpassing greatness of God’s favor. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
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Growth and Development of the Green Grass
Give careful thought to your ways. Although the emotion of love is one of the strongest of which the mind is capable, it can hardly be said to have any proper or peculiar name of expression. The boundaries of a sentiment vary in their permeability by public observation and involvement in one’s feeling. Sentiments expressed in a public or community setting become conventionalized as the individual makes social comparisons about the sentiment’s quality and intensity. Private feeling, secret and isolated from social involvement, is less manageable and loses social significance for lack of validation by others. For example, medieval customs required mourners to show sorrow for a fixed period of time. Public ceremonies tamed grief, shielding mourners from extreme or prolonged sorrow. With privatization of grief, however, the sentiment became idiosyncratic, often insurmountable as the mourner languished persistently. For 350 years medical science ignored relationships between emotions and physical illness because science ignore the study of emotions (since emotions were a reflection of the human soul) and instead focused exclusively on the physical cause of aliments. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
Expression is part and parcel of the feeling. It is believed to be a general law of the mind that along with the fact that inward feeling or consciousness, there is a diffusive action or excitement over the bodily members. A very considerable number of the facts may be brought under the principle. States of pleasure are connected with an increase, and the states of pain with an abatement, of some, or all, of the vital function. Ideas about physical health have been rigidly fixed. Germs are seen as being outside and they somehow get inside the body, leading people to believe that they were the passive victims of external forces in nature. It was widely held that human behavior did not cause disease; rather, humans were victimized by it. In some primitive cultures, even today, people assume that spirits control all their behavior and they have little choice in their own destiny, because it is controlled by good and evil spirits and by fate. Once you were stricken by these foreign invaders, the only logical course of action was to go to a physician and be purged of your illness. Until the late nineteenth century, most people did not believe that they were responsible for their own physical health, a belief that has lingered on into the late twentieth century. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
Even today, many people still resist the idea that there is a connection between their overeating, their lack of exercise, their smoking, or their loneliness and their health. They still believe that human disease is caused by germs out there and that nothing they do matters. Very similar beliefs about mental disease dominated the nineteenth century thinking. Mental illness was thought to be caused by something foreign to the human body. Since it was a mental problem, it had to involve the human soul, and so the source of these problems was attributed to an invasion of evil spirits or possession by dark emotions. Since the mind was a reflection of the human soul, mental disturbance could only be caused by agents which troubled the soul, namely dark emotions. The attitude toward human emotions followed precisely the same line of thought. Emotions were viewed as a quality of the human soul; they were nonmaterial, and therefore had little to do with physical disease. Like mental disorders, emotional disorders were viewed as an indication of a disturbed soul and show how caused by evil spirits or dark emotions. If a person was emotionally upset, then he or she prayed for spiritual guidance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
Feeling management through public rituals allows the discharge of traumatic emotions. In some cultures, is in considered normal for hostile sentiments to be expressed publicly, like a short of live theater play, in noisy but mostly harmless encounters in which antagonists play to their audience, who intervene if a fight becomes too serious. These exaggerated dramas make hostility appear so intense as to be avoided when possible, and provide support for folk beliefs, such as a particular group of people are terrible when they fight. However, as you may know, anger, grief, fear, and embarrassment are unavoidable experiences in social life, but often cannot be discharged or resolved immediately because social controls. Rituals provide a dramatic frame that restimulates distressful emotion but also gives the person a sense of control or distance from the feeling, so that it may be discharged through catharsis. Most modern rituals are insufficiently involving emotion, however, and participants are overdistanced from their distress. An emotional emptiness has developed from a poverty of identifying rituals. Rituals have become and impersonal because we lack agreement on symbols as collective reference points. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
We only have shallow feelings for romantic love, religious reverence, and esthetic sentiments. Because we do not sense that others share the same feeling and meaning. Emotions are serviceable habits and are expressed in a manner designed to effectively communicate to others what is being felt inside. Emotional expression serves definite purposes: they mobilize people into some definite course of actions, and/or they communicate a specific message to other people which leads them to behave in a certain fashion. The emotion of love is an exception to all the general rules—it is the strongest of all emotions, and yet it is the only one that has no peculiar means of expression. And, as you may know, emotions can significantly affect our physical and mental well-being. It is not betwixing that men and women, beset by emotional stresses, turn and go to faith healers and to others who recognize the reality of these unsettling states. Fear, when strong, expresses itself in cries, in efforts to hide or escape, in palpitations and trembling and these are just the manifestations that would accompany an actual experience of the evil feared. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
The destructive passions are shown in a general tension of the muscular system, in gnashing of the teeth, beating on the chest like a bongo, clapping of the hands, and protrusion of the claws, in dilated eyes and nostrils in growls; and these are weaker forms of the actions that accompany killing of prey. The general law is that feeling passing a certain pitch, habitually vents itself in bodily action, and an overflow of nerve-force undirected by any motive, will manifestly take first the most habitual routes. If these emotions are to expressed and resolved, they start affecting the internal system. I grew up in a small farming town where water is the lifeblood of the community, and 30 percent of our water came from the snow melt, which was declining. The people in our society are constantly watching, worrying, and praying over the rain, irrigation rights, and water in general. People in our community are so preoccupied with the rain because it is a matter of survival. Under the stress and strain of our climate, sometime people were not always at their best. The city council, mayor and governor squabble over people who water their lawns, and they turned to the television news media to request that people report and confront their neighbors over water waste. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
Sentiments are not differentiated through innate bodily patterning, but through interpretation of feeling according to cultural vocabularies of labels and meanings. It was innocent enough at first, but over the years people started targeting people with green lawns and would quarrel over water. Two mean who lived in our community who I will call Sam and Dean had a disagreement over water, and the two men allowed their disagreement to turn into resentment and then arguments—even to the point of threats. One August morning both men felt they were short of water and that it was being stolen. Angry words were exchanged; a scuffle ensured. Dean was a great man with a lot of strength, and Sam was equally yoked and tenacious. In the heat of the moment, the men had a fist fight. The next morning, Sam called the city out to issue Dean a fine for wasting water. However, Dean was economically challenged and because the fines kept adding it, his water was shut off. These two neighbors and best friends had fallen captive to their anger and let it destroy their lives. We should learn to resolve our differences early on, lest the passions of them moment escalate into physical or emotional cruelty, and we fall captive to our anger. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
The social processes that create and shape love, hatred, envy, and other sentiments only enhance the richness and meaning of life. Make full haste to reduce arguments, eliminate ridicule, do away with criticism, and remove resentment and anger. We cannot afford to let such dangerous passions ruminate—not even one day. The lack of human companionship, the sudden loss of love, and chronic human loneliness are significant contributions to serious diseases (including cardiovascular disease) and premature death. The Savior asks us to forsake and combat evil in all its forms, and although we must forgive a neighbor who injures us, we should still work constructively to prevent that injury from being repeated. Forgiveness does not require us to accept or tolerate evil. It does not require us to ignore the wrong that we see in the World around us or in our own lives. However, as we abstain from sin, we must not allow hatred or anger to control our thoughts nor actions. Good human contact can alter and even eliminate the usual cardiac responses to fear and physical pain, and it can significantly influence the human ability to resist infectious diseases. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
Forgiveness means that problems of the past no longer dictate our destinies, and we can focus on the future with God’s love in our hearts. “I will give you honor and praise among all the peoples of the Earth, when I restore your fortunes, before your eyes,” says the Lord (Zephaniah 3.20). May the seeds of unforgiveness that haunted my neighbors never be allowed to take root in our homes. May we pray to our Heavenly Father to help us overcome foolish id, resentment, and pettiness. May God help us to forgive and love, so that we may be friends with our Savior, others, and ourselves. All knowing, God grieves even at the mere thought of evil. Dear Lord, we are sorry that we have been naughty and disobeyed. Please forgive us for disobeying and help us to listen to your commandments. Thank you for loving us and removing our sins that weigh heavily on our conscience. There is more righteousness in the World and thank you for your compassion, grace, and everlasting life. And please grant from your divine mysteries all your mercies. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
Love and Virtue—Joy to Continue Living Together
God did not call us to be impure, but to live a virtuous life. Therefore, those who reject this instruction does not reject humanity but God, who gives us this virtuous Spirit. For each unsuccessful or incomplete relationship in your past, there are also moments for you to honor. Effective social communication does not require feelings to be consistent with expressive gestures. Displaying a gesture in the absence of any corresponding feeling is a form of obeisance to society, showing that one recognizes the appropriate sentiment even if he or she does not feel it. Mouring is not a natural movement of private feelings, but is a duty imposed by the group. It is a ritual attitude one is forced to adopt out of respect for custom, but which is, in large measure, independent of one’s affective state. While people do feel the loss of an individual when they pass into Heaven, and it can take years to let go of the pain from their departure from Earth, even a lifetime for some, certain cultures are also made to mourn publicly to show respect. For instance, after the passing of her daughter and husband, Mrs. Sarah Winchester was celibate and never remarried, nor did she allow men, who were not her employees, into her mansion. She also wore black and abstained from social functions and kept to herself, she did not even allow photographers or painters to reproduce her image out of respect for her husband. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
We have been taught by God to love each other. People learn more about themselves from each missed connection, bruised feeling, or wounded heart. These situations are valuable building blocks in the creation of our whole self. The aim of learning through soul is to increase porosity on the side of giving out and to reduce it on the side of taking in. This is not an abstract process, but something that can be seen in the World. Our Sun is the best instance of porosity that gives out and does not take in. Our Sun is a star, and all the stars gives out without taking in, until they die and become a blackhole. Life is the most beautiful and precious thing upon the Earth and has the power to pull down kings and princesses. Western civilization has been described as the gradual domestication of impulsive expression—an increasing tendency to self-consciously check our behavior and mold it to group standards. Public expression of affect has been controlled by an intensifying range and rigor of restraints since the Middle Ages. Violations of display rules are met with shame, embarrassment, and disgust in an ever-broadening scope of situations. People are free and all things are given to them which are expedient to humanity. And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through God. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
For middle-class parents, deviant and immature temper may signal serious difficulty in an individual’s attempt at self-mastery. Colonial Americas believed that feeling can be channeled, but its basic nature cannot be altered. Social control was directed at regulating behavior, rather than at shaping inner impulses. A belief that emotion is disclosed involuntarily and inevitably became widespread in the nineteenth century. If a person were genuinely moved, the feeling would show beyond any power of the person to conceal it. Withdrawal from feeling itself became the only recourse, if one’s feelings were not to be read by others in public through gestures, slips in speech, and other cues. Suppression of both feeling and gestures made them consistent. These cultural values and beliefs are reflected in expression and feeling management when we indicate their meaning to the social self. And not choose eternal death, according to the will of the flesh and the evil which is therein, which gives the spirit of the adversary power to captivate, to bring you down to hell, that he may reign over you in his own kingdom. Soul learning does not consist of the internalization of knowledge, the determination of right mean, the achievement of accuracy, but is to be found in what sounds right. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
It was discovered in ancient psychology that the soul sings. At one time, it was possible to hear celestial sounds as one viewed the aurora borealis, which the solar particles blown into the Earth’s magnetic field more than 60 miles above the Earth’s surface. The movement of the planets in their relation to each other could be heard. We manage our feelings and gestures after indicating to ourselves the probable meaning that they would have for other people. We transform feeling and expression according to their implications for our self-conception, our more stable, continuous, unifying idea of the real me. A self-conception is a working compromise between one’s ideals and values and the self-images one infers from how others react to one’s feelings and behavior. Some self-images will be accepted as representative of one’s self-conception, but other images will be rejected as spurious or unrepresentative of one’s real, deeper identity. In situations and relationships that we value in relation to self, we pursue credit for optimistic images, and seek to avoid responsibility for feelings and acts that generate negative self-images. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
We manage expression and feeling by taking our self-conception into account in at least three ways: assuming or avoiding responsibility for a sentiment, detecting social support for the meaning of a sentiment, and committing oneself to a relationship. Our-self image in a situation reflects the appropriateness of our feeling; we feel proud or guilty about feeling a certain way. The incongruity between a trifling event and a deep sense of shame can evoke a double shame; we are ashamed because of the original episode and shame because we feel so deeply about something so slight that a sensible person would not pay any attention to it. If we do not modify our feelings into an appropriate quality and intensity, it becomes merged with our moral reaction to it. For example, we may feel guilty love if, as in traditional Japan, love marriages are defined as selfish. Even in modern Japan, individuals who have contracted love marriages are often reported to feel considerable guilt about it. However, keep in mind, you are the author and can go back to check out all the separate parts of your story when you need to. Reviewing old relationships is hard work emotionally, no matter how carefully one has been trying to use the past as material to study in the service of creating a healthier present. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
Society requires us to undertake many actions for which we do not want to assume full responsibility. These actions may have uncertain outcomes, or conflict with our predispositions not to perform them. Feeling management that intensifies feeling can facilitate these behaviors while shielding the self from responsibility. A functionally determined emotion carries one through the situation, such as the bitterness which enters into the divorce process and so often disappears just afterwards. The institutionalized irrationality of romantic love overcomes self-restraint in courtship and guides lovers into marriage, although rational self-seeking might dictate against this certain commitment. A socially structured and legitimated passion conquers doubt and gives behavior spontaneity, while exempting the self from full responsibility for its outcome. How does this intensification of feeling occur? Emotion is the experience of passivity, during which we interpret our behavior as being beyond our control. Deeply internalized desires and aversions erupt as compelling passions. The soldier for whom fury or courage has become second nature rushes into combat in spite of its dangers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
Overwhelmed by emotion, we enact socially prescribed punishment even through other norms forbid aggression. The self is not held responsible for violating those norms, however, because it was passive within the experience of emotion. The passive self may be an important interpretation we make within romantic love, jealousy, indignation, and other intense sentiments. For example, a study found that students who believed that life events are generally caused by external forces beyond their control reported falling in love more often than others, and viewed love as a mysterious, emotional experience. However, there are consequences. Samantha, for instance, learned her lesson about lack of self-control. She grew more self-blaming when she began to watch herself distancing from Darren. She had fled from her first marriage to escape the burden of being forced to be a mother to her husband. Her leaving reinforced her growing image of herself as hard-hearted and unfair. However, she had not adequately resolved her decision to leave her first marriage, so her self-blame became almost immobilizing as she felt herself pulling away from Darren. Moreover, the self also enters into feeling and expression management by restraining sentiments that we anticipate would not be validated meaningfully by a particular person or group. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
By fully engaging in almost any form of group or community, we will have more people to learn from, people whose actions and ways of being can teach us a lot about relationships. This can be particularly helpful when one has been stuck in a narrow, little emotional room filled with our solitary thoughts about closeness, or when we have been limiting oneself to the thoughts and beliefs contained within our couple relationship. In some cultures, jealousy is nothing short of a crime. Some societies have a code, and if one is hurt in these light affairs, one must expect no sympathy. So, if one falls in love, one conceals it from one’s friends as best one can. Our self-indication of a sentiment’s meaning to others may lead us to segregate it from another sentiment that an audience would see as being incompatible. For example, Samantha and Darren were undergoing marital separation, and much like others, they desired to re-unit, at least temporarily, but they also wanted to express anger against one another. A common pattern that has been observed was couples would meet secretly to express affection, concealed from the social circle of kin and friends who had observed the bitter rivalry in the couple and would not understand the contradictory sentiment. That is why it is best for us to stay out of people’s business when they have a dispute. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
Feeling management may reflect the self as a commitment to a relationship the supplementary character of faithfulness is directed toward the continuance of the relationship, independently of the original forces that brought it about. Communes, families, fraternal organizations, and other groups require love as a voluntary, responsible commitment to enhance the lives and growth of other persons. Groups foster love by eliminating sources of seduction, subversion, and competing loyalties. Love is routinized to promote steady, unrewarded care, effort, and self-sacrifice. People withdraw from commitments by rationing or restricting feeling. Women, more than men, report diminishing their love consciously in faltering relationships. Women also identify more problems in their heterosexual relationships, and women’s scores on a longitudinal measure of love predict relationship outcomes better than do the love scores of their male partners. The more vulnerable and emotionally perceptive partner is likely to modulate feeling more consciously in response to relationship trends. “It is God’s will that we should be sanctified: that we should avoid sexual immorality; that each of us should learn to control our own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like a heathen, who does not know God; and that in this matter no one should wrong their family nor take advantage of them. The Lord will punish people for all such sins, as we have already told you (1 Thessalonians 4.3-4).” #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
Faith Loves and Knows the One Who is Leading
Dimly swings this atom of a World, and far beyond all reaches the infinity of God! Necessity compels us to be earnest. We do not simply feel and express a sentiment, but also interpret, socialize, evaluate, and modify it according to our beliefs and assumptions about it. A sentiment is a general feeling, attitude, or opinion about something. The goal is to awaken us to that which is more than we can comprehend, for all that we will never fully understand it. We must be like immortals insofar as possible and do everything toward living in accordance with the best thing in us. Love is the name given to the desire to seek out that which we sense we lack. A sentiment vocabulary also provides culturally meaningful categories for interpreting one’s own sensations and behavior. Sentiments are explanations in self-perception, as well as for other people. A vocabulary of sentiments facilitates and limits the kinds of meanings we can experience for our sensations, gestures, and social relationships. A correct judgment avoiding all distant and high enquiries, confines itself to common life, and to such subjects as fall under daily practice and experience, leaving the more sublime topics to the embellishment of poets and orators, or to the arts or priests and politicians. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Tease me all you want for being sentimental. I think some souls have a way of connecting without our knowledge, and that is why you cannot meet someone for the first time, but inside you just know. You know it is not the first time you have ever felt them. A vocabulary of sentiments is a selection from the entire potential range of emotional experiences by specialized emphasis. The name for a sentiment is a kind of sensitizing concept. In German Schadenfreude, or malicious glee over another’s misfortune, is more easily recognized as a common feeling by virtue of the presence of them. The vocabulary defines our sensations and gestures by naming them, showing us what these mean to other people. Ideological beliefs about a sentiment are linked with its name in the vocabulary. Like an ideology, these beliefs protect the social reality of a sentiment as a meaningful category, explaining and justifying particular instances of interaction in terms of popular knowledge about the sentiment. For instance, how does one recognize envy? Or what are the rights and obligations of friendship? Is shame natural or learned? Does romance inevitably fade into companionate love? Is it possible to conceal real grief? One who has been wandering in a maze of false conceptions, and upon whom, at length, has burst the truth of God’s paternity, opens one’s Bible as a new book. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
The word of God will spread around one a firmament of sudden glory, and reveals to one’s eyes unexpected riches. Pains from the moral source are the pains derived from the unfavorable sentiments of humankind. These pains are capable of rising to a height with which hardly any other pains incident to our nature can be compared. No sentiments can be beautiful without being proper; that is, suited to the character and situation of those who utter them. It is not contended that people learn precise definitions or complex formal principles about each sentiment, but they do learn informal theories or folk wisdom. Communication about the sentiment in terms of these popular beliefs preserves each sentiment as an available resource for explaining interaction. More elaborate ideologies surround some sentiments than others. Romantic love has an extensive popular ideology, and religious doctrines explain and justify guilt, reverence, and compassion. In contrast, shame and pity seem to be relatively undefined in our society at present. The vocabulary also includes evaluative beliefs about each sentiment that influences how we express, label, and identify sentiments. Is pride a mark of self-worth, or one of the seven Christian sins? Depending on social group, esthetic feeling may be a sign of personal cultivation or aloof snobbery. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Our response to a person who reveals or claims a sentiment depends partly on evaluative beliefs about the feeling. People are encouraged to interpret certain mixed feelings as love because our culture insists that certain reactions are acceptable one if one is madly in love. In contrast, envy may be a universally condemned and feared sentiment that few people seriously admit. The vocabulary within which we communicate about sentiments places boundaries on affective experience, confining it largely to socially significant, shared meanings. The vocabulary within which we communicate about sentiments places boundaries on affective experience, confining it largely to socially significant, shared meanings. Reason, utility, fear of punishment and love of praise may all lead us to behave in appropriate ways, but they are not definitive of human nature. We do not attribute to the springs of a watch its coming into being or ability to keep good time. These belong to the watchmaker. Similarly, the wisdom of God, rather than human reason or social learning, is the origin of human nature and the ultimate purpose of human life is nobler than the simple maintenance of social order. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
The administration of the great system of the Universe is the care of the Universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of humans. To humans is allotted a much humbler department, one much more suitable to the humbleness of one’s powers, and to the narrowness of one’s comprehension. Sentiment is a different combination of a social relationship and cultural beliefs with emotional sensations and gestures. Social factors determine which component is most salient at a given time. We become highly aware of bodily sensations when we are physiologically aroused. A set of spiritual exercises is designed to incite dedication to moral purity among humanity. Sensations may also become problematic by their absence. Gestures become salient when their meaning is challenged, when we are being socialized into expression, and when we must express deliberately what is not spontaneously felt. How do compassion, sorrow, and other sentiments in a cultural vocabulary become capacities and resources of the individual? The deeper our moral life and the keener our spiritual vision, the clearer appears his truth. Wisdom, justice, truth, and power—it kindles in the soul a loftier and serener spirit of devotion, touches spring of penitence, and makes us good because God is good. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
We may thank God that we can feel pain and know sadness, for these are the human sentiments that constitute our glory as well as our grief. Another process is the management of expression and feeling according to norms and other social constraints. How do people suppress, magnify, and alter their gestures, feelings, and interpretation of a sentiment? If God is the beginning of all things, he is, in a peculiar sense, the beginning of our religion. Our highest endeavors after virtue will be attempts to imitate him. Our decisions upon specific questions of right and wrong will be governed by our conceptions of the Divine nature. We shall religiously cherish the sentiments of which God is the absolute expression. It is what we say to God alone, of ourselves, upon the revelation of his Fatherhood, and with our thoughts fixed in contemplation of his attributes. The father has swept away all the barriers of distance, it has streamed into our soul through all the glories of the Universe, it has touched us with the intimate nearness, the infinite condescension of God, and gathered into that one name all that is venerable with all that is lovely. Let us habitually avail ourselves, then, the privilege made known to us. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Hope Preaches in the Soul
Beautiful objects arouse pleasure. Beauty relaxes, but the experience of sublimity is of great emotional intensity. Every sentiment is organized around a relationship to a social object, usually another person or a group such as a family. We associate a sentiment closely with particular persons or groups. If we try to recall love, pity, or other sentiments, we usually think of people by whom or toward whom these sentiments have been felt. We feel shame, pride, guilt, or embarrassment toward our selves as social objects when we imagine how other people judge our appearance to them. A sentiment may develop around a nonhuman object, such as love for a pet or reverence for a deity, but the object is usually personified with human qualities. The soul is said to strive toward beauty, which is a manifestation of the spiritual force that animates all of reality. Given that beauty is an objective property, attainable artistically and knowable critically, by reference to the rules, the question of the percipient’s response to it is usually scant. However, beauty can be expected to arouse the appropriate response, which is referred to briefly and loosely as pleasure or delight. It is the total object, the whole of form and expressiveness and what the form is of, that possesses the beauty. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
Just as one can see the Sunlight without looking into the Sun itself, so can one have knowledge of divine ideas. A sentiment established a framework of meaning within which specific events, gestures, and sensations can be given a social interpretation. A sentiment is identified through an organization of responses toward a person, not through particular acts viewed separately. For example, a sentiment may be detected by others even when the individual does not acknowledge his or her feelings. One may deny being in love with a person, but may be imputed the love sentiment by observers who detect a pattern of protection and preoccupation with another person. We believe that we have detected a man’s love for a woman when he demonstrated joy in her presence, sorrow in her prolonged absence, fear when there is danger of losing her, and anger when she is criticized. The characteristic organization of hatred includes being sorry over the enemy’s good fortune, feeling anger at his or her very presence, being happy at their misfortune, and sensing anxiety over his or her possible success. We interpret, justify, and anticipate acts and feelings in relation to the sentiment’s overall pattern. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
We attain these ideas in terms of the residual effects of the divine actions—effects which remain in the soul like habitual or buried memories. Our mind is simultaneously enlightened so that it is moved to judge correctly about the object and is hence in accord with God’s own mind on the subject. A sentiment sustains a relationship as an enduring, latent tendency to respond emotionally and overtly toward another person when the opportunity is given. Situational constraints often inhibit direct expression. One factor is over view of what the relationship means to the other person. Sentiments differ in the importance of reciprocal feeling. Reciprocation of hatred will magnify animosity. Failure by the other to reciprocate romantic love may simply heighten the lover’s passion as much as reciprocation. The other person may validate a sentiment with an appropriate but different pattern of gesture and feeling, such as showing gratitude for my kindness. The meaning of a sentiment depends on how the other responds to it. When people have a bad experience, they are often more concerned about how they feel about it, than the issue itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
Timely and effective communications can help one manage negative sentiment, rebuild trust, and promote loyalty. We become highly aware of a sentiment when a controversial discrepancy arises. A single salient act can seem to contradict the whole pattern. Stealing from a loved one, helping an enemy, or cursing a deity are acts that call the sentiment into question. Most acts within a relationship, however, are assimilated into a sentiment and are anticipated and assessed as reflecting its meaning. Bodily sensations are an intermittent phase of every enduring sentiment. Arousal is more frequent and intense in passionate sentiments, such as romantic love, jealousy, and awe, than in others like kindness, loyalty, and gratitude. These visceral and muscular sensations are essentially autonomic arousal symptoms associated with the flow of adrenaline: heart palpitations, accelerated breathing, flushes, and tremor. However, they may be experienced simply as diffused, generalized excitement. Arousal does not persist unabated, even in passionate sentiments, but arises intermittently. Get involved with your business and reputation to reduce the risk of negative perceptions. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
Bodily sensations do not define the nature of the sentiment. Even if regulatory issues make your company leery of social media, it is becoming riskier not to have a readily available, reassuring presence online because your people expect you to be there. As individuals often voice concerns online, you may receive double the negative feedback if you do not respond. Even a few thoughtful communications can show people that you are listening and ready to help, and that is a good thing. Listen to people’s concerns, admit any mistakes, and be clear about how you will improve their experience. There are no explicit patterns of arousal that correspond to different sentiments. Instead, we interpret our sensation in terms of the encompassing relationship. A feeling of excitement can be interpreted as indicating the continued vitality of a sentiment, whether love or hatred. We express sentiments more spontaneously when we are aroused. Of course, we feel bodily sensations of various types much of the time, and many of these—dizziness, fatigue, hunger, aches—have nothing to do with social relationships. We are socialized to attend selectively to our own sensations, however, and to sometimes attribute them a social meaning in terms of the course of interaction with another person. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
A sentiment is expressed situationally through a person’s conventional gestures, such as kissing, and overt, involuntary bodily signs of arousal, such as trembling. A review of cross-cultural differences in gestures such as hand movements, laughter, crying, and posturing concluded that there is no natural language of emotional gesture. In dealing with negative sentiment, do not try to respond to everything. Focus on concerns to create the greatest optimistic response. Think beyond a simple apology or refund to what people might expect; what might delight them—perhaps a bonus gift or new benefit. By showings you care about your people and reputation, you may win loyalty and motivate them to praise your brand to others. For facial expressions of emotion, however, there is evidence that anger, disgust, fear, and several other emotions may be expressed and recognized similarly across very diverse cultures. Researchers admit however that in social situations, any natural, innate facial emotion is masked beneath culturally conventional expressions. Even when negative sentiment looms in social media, you can often find loyal customers who will defend your brand. Engage people directly to express appreciation, learn what they like about your company and how you might delight them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Your personal attention might motivate more business and prompt people to help influence more beneficial sentiment online. Social media is a powerful channel to quickly address key concerns, clarify misconceptions, and offer reassurance. Showing people that you are listening and that you care about how they feel can help transform negative sentiment into a winning experience. We interpret a conventional gesture, such as a smile, in terms of situational factors, previous interactions with a person, subtle details in expressive style, and other social criteria. Human gestures are parts of social communication that become significant to symbols when they arouse the same meaning in the observer as in the expressing person. We indicate ourselves the meaning of our own gestures in terms of the perspective of the other person and shape our gestures in terms of the perspective of the other person and shape our gestures according to the meaning we intend them to have. Gestures become meaningful when interpreted as sentiments, which serve as significant categories or symbols held in common by group members. “Those who live without God in the World, judgment of an everlasting punishment is just upon them; and they shall quake, and tremble, and shrink beneath the glace of God’s all-searching eye (Mosiah 27.31).” #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
The Culture of Poverty—It Tends to Perpetuate itself from Generation to Generation!
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty. The social structural conditions to which the poor are exposed (chronic unemployment and under-employment, low income, lack of property ownership, absence of saving and chronic shortage of food, money, medical care, and other necessities of life) give rise to distinctive patterns of community and family disorganization. These, in turn, produce a distinctive set of beliefs, attitudes, and values (that is, strong feelings of marginality, of helplessness, of dependence, and of inferiority, weak ego structure; confusion of sexual identification; lack of impulse control; strong present-time orientation, with relatively little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future. The cultural of poverty, however, is not only an adaptation to a set of objective conditions of the larger society. Once it comes into existence, it tends to perpetuate itself from generation to generation because of its effect on the children. By the time underprivileged children are age six or seven they have usually absorbed the basic values and attitudes of their subcultural and are not psychologically geared to take full advantage of the changing conditions or increased opportunities that may occur in their lifetimes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. Initially (time/generation I) structural conditions of poverty give rise to subcultural patterns (that is, family and community disorganization), and both of these create in children and adults the patterns of individual personality and behavior characteristic of the poor (for example, weak ego structure, inability to delay gratification). For persons who first become poor as adults (for example, as a result of migration, economic depression, drought, and so forth), this personality and behavior pattern is an adaptation to changed structural conditions. However, their children know nothing else and tend to recreate the same subcultural patterns and to pass on these same personality and behavior patterns to their children. And so on for succeeding generations—a shared set of individual beliefs, values, and attitudes (cultural of poverty) become self-perpetuating and may persist in spite of changes in the larger structural conditions. Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth, these are one and the same challenge. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
New generations resemble preceding ones because they confront the same structural conditions and hardships. A housing crisis is increasing poverty levels in California. As of now, 51 percent of adults live in middle-income households, and 29 percent live in lower-income households, while only 20 percent live in upper-income households. The lack of affordable housing, and apartments for middle class, and lower-income families is the reason so many people are struggling to make it. The median cost of a house is now $500,000.00, which is twice the national cost, and homelessness is rapidly increasing across the state. While the region’s median household income is $61,320.00 and the nationwide median is $53,291.00. In contrast the poor are bring in between $14,000.00 to $24,000.00 a year, and there is no place less than $1,000.00 a year for rent. As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our World, none of us can truly rest. Poverty, including rates of unemployment, crime, school dropout rates, and drug use, are assumed to be the result of behavior preferred by individuals living within conditions of poverty. The culture of poverty theory presumes the development of a set of deviant norms, whereby behaviors like drug use and gang participation are viewed as the standard (normative) and even desired behaviors of those living in low-income neighborhoods. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Alternatively, individuals behave in ways that are nominally illegal, like participation in the underground economy or participation in gangs, not because they wish to do so or are following cultural norms, but because they have no choice, given the lack of educational and job opportunities available in their neighborhoods. In other words, individual living in poverty may see themselves as forced to turn to illegal methods of getting money, for example by selling drugs, simply to survive within the conditions of the hot economy. Poor children generally share the values, beliefs, and attitudes of the larger society, but as they experience the same lack of socioeconomic opportunity as their parents, they adopt the peculiar social and individual modes of response that characterize the culture of poverty. Also, some people who turn to selling drugs, for instance, to make a living, after they get started, they are not willing to turn to conventional means of earning a living because some of them can make $10,000.00 in a weekend, others have reported making $60,000.00 a month, and they are not willing to give that up to make $10 an hour, as they are making more than a lot of doctors. Hard core drug users spend approximately $60 billion a year on drugs. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Although the dealers are putting their lives and freedom in danger with every transaction they make, and many do get shot and beat up, they feel it is worth it because the money gives them something to live for. They can buy brand new cars, houses, and where there is money, there are a lot of beautiful women. If the set of structural conditions persist, they will recreate the same sociocultural and personality patterns in the new generation. Living in poverty and being unable to participate in the economy is oppressive. People are walking on eggshells. If they are accepted for affordable housing, it is a blessing, because most of the waiting lists in most cities are 20,000 people long. Then affordable housing is no way to live. The people are usually the undesirable people like criminals, uneducated, prostitutes, and drug attics. Also, because most people in affordable housing are on government assistance, they do not work due to physical disability or serious mental problems and tend to be dirty, loud, rude, and violent. They also attract a lot of homeless people and that is why people do not want affordable housing in their communities. The solution would be to give people vouchers, like a supplement to their rent, so they could spread out the undesirables, and they are not segregated to one apartment building or neighborhood. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
When affordable housing is erected in high-income areas, the strong housing prices drop very locally and then it radiates outward over time. The new low-income building can lead to a loss of approximately $17 million, as the poverty values individual decrease by 15 percent. That is why education is to important. Education promotes equality and lifts people out of poverty. It teaches children how to become good citizens, how to work for a living, and the righteous values. Education is not just for the privileged few, it is for everyone. It is a fundamental human right. When people are educated it changes their culturally patterned ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that will be passed on from one generation to the next. That is why a lot of people in the early 19th and 20th century enlisted in the armed services, it taught them discipline and provided education benefits, and helped them learn to deal with society. “The poor and the needy search for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst. However, if I the Lord will answer them; I, the God, will not forsake them. I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys. I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched grounds into springs.” (Isaiah 41.17-18) #RandolpHarris 6 of 6
The American Public have Become Increasingly Liberal
The American family structure and the distribution of occupational roles has changed significantly since the 1950s. Specifically there has been changes as the increase of the number of women who combine paid employment with more traditional family roles, the increased divorce rates, the decline in fertility, the increase in the age at marriage, and the increase in female educational attainment. With the female employment rate increasing and education confers benefit in the labor market, then progressive families will invest more in girls’ education. However, the increase in female mobility in education and careers has been of such magnitude and importance that they have affected all groups of women irrespective of their experiences and characteristics. Women have an increased desire for the independence that working outside of the house affords. Attitudes towards women’s roles have become liberalized, but sexual harassment and equal pay have still been problems that women face in modern times. Still, because more women are going to work, their roles are changing and they may no longer stay in relationships that are pleasing and that may be why the divorce rate has increased. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
In general, attitudes of the American public have become increasingly liberal. The liberal shift has been a slow, but steady movement at least since 1942. Attitudes, institutional action, legal developments, and public behavior have moved in a consistent direction. Careful tracing of events will show that in government, in the armed forces, on television, on college campuses, and in most public spheres of life, people are more accepting of women and individuals of different ethnic backgrounds. The consistency between general attitudinal changes and macro-level social movement is seductive. However, the United States is also experiencing what is probably the most acute crises in race relations since the end of the Civil War. City after city has suffered racial violence. A spasm of riots has shaken the nation, Colin Kaepernick has decided to take a knee during the National Anthem. People have become more militant as they no longer have civilized leaders encouraging them to calm down, get an education, and respect people in positions of authority, and that even goes for people who are in positions of authority, as they no longer show respect others higher up in the hierarchy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
Many have resorted to aiming themselves and the trade papers have carried accounts of guerrilla warfare. In several cities gunfights have broken out, and mass shootings in churches, nightclubs, concerts, and in schools has taken place. Concurrently with these dramatic events the attitudes of Americans toward integration and acceptances have continued to increase almost as though nothing was happening. Perhaps Americans, given their increasingly liberal attitudes, interpreted the violent acts as justified expressions of rage. This interpretation might then have led many Americans to the conclusion that, to prevent further disruption, a more integrated society was a social necessity. And that is why Barack Obama was elected president, it is why Jerry Brown has been Mayor of California four times, and the very reason Kevin Johnson, with his shady past, was elected the first Black mayor of Sacramento. Some of these positions may not have been earned by the people elected. However, with Americans becoming more liberal, so have the communities, like Sacramento, California building a $600 million sports complex with no parking, which 50 percent of the complex was paid for by tax payers, at a time when there is a housing crisis in California. People have also complained that the many reporters are acting unlawfully and as if they are on drugs and many of this would not have been tolerated in the past when people were more conservative. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
A Universe may form a scale for a population at a given time and may not at a later time. Such a change in time would tend to indicate that a change is one of kind, rather than degree. Still, a different issue is raised by the response pattern to the integration in neighborhoods. Large cities have become increasingly diverse, and there is a widespread of acceptance of residential integration. Nonetheless, neighborhoods that were once mostly populated by Whites are seeing White Flight. Whites are moving to more upscale communities. With the houses costing $350,000.00 to $500,000.00, White must be making a lot of money to afford to more to real suburban communities where the houses costing $600,000.00 to $1 million and more. Overall, the trends in general attitudes concerning gender roles and race relations apparently have moved in an egalitarian, liberal direction. Perhaps these shifts are but a part of a general societal trend toward greater tolerance. If you consider only the negatives, you will be discouraged and doubt will creep in, keeping you from God’s best. When you focus on God instead of your circumstances, doubt, fear, anxiety, and negativity do not have a change. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
Hostility is probably the most common expression of aggression, ranging from mildly edgy to snarling. Being on the receiving end of hostility can be not only very unpleasant but also sometimes scary, because we know that whoever is delivering it has us in their sights and out of their heart, with attack weaponry ready for the reloading. We need community leaders to be shinning stars and to promote that community members keep the peace, protect their communities, get their education, and act responsible. When we magnify God instead of magnifying your difficulties, faith rises in your hearts. That faith will keep your fully persuaded that God will make a way, even though you do not see a way. And the beauty is that God will show up and do amazing things! Is not a soul at this time as precious unto God as a soul will be at the time of his coming? Is it not as necessary that the plan of redemption should be made known unto this people as well as unto their children? Is it not as easy at this time for the Lord to send his angel to declare these glad tidings unto us as unto our children, or after the time of his coming? Lord, please forgive our unworthiness, and remember our families, friends, and community in your mercy. May the Lord bless your soul, and receive you at the last day into his kingdom, to sit down in peace. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
How Come He got the Holy Ghost and Not Me?
There are three ways for language to affect us. It can move us toward what is good; it can move us toward what is evil; or it can, in hypothetical third place, fail to move us at all. What a dream has told us of our relations to the present (reality) we will then seek also in our consciousness, and we must not be surprised if we discover that the monster we saw under the magnifying-glass of the analysis is a tiny little infusorian. For all practical purposes in judging human character, a person’s actions and conscious expressions of thought are in most cases sufficient. Actions, above all, deserve to be placed in the front rank; for many impulses which penetrate into consciousness are neutralized by real forces in the psychic life before they find issue in actions; indeed, the reason why they frequently do not encounter any psychic obstacle on their path is because the unconscious is certain of their meeting with resistances later. In any case, it is highly instructive to learn something of the intensively tilled soil from which our virtues proudly emerge. For the complexity of human character, dynamically moved in all directions, very rarely accommodates itself to the arbitrament of a simple alternative, as out antiquated more philosophy would have it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
And what of the value of dreams in regard to our knowledge of the future? That, of course, is quite out of the question. One would like to substitute the words: “in regard to our knowledge of the past.” For in every sense a dream has its origin in the past. The ancient belief that dreams reveal the future is not indeed entirely devoid of truth. By representing a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, which the dreamer accepts as his or her present, has been shaped in the likeness of the past by the indestructible wish. Awaken our souls! No longer droop in sin. May our hearts rejoice an give place no more for the enemy of our souls. May the gates of Hell be shut continually before us, because our hearts are broken and spirits contrite! God, do not shut the gates of your righteousness before us, that we may walk in the path of the low valley, that we may be strict in the plain road! God, please encircle us around in the robe of your righteousness! Lord will you make a way for us to escape from our enemies. Will you make our path straight before us! God, please will you not place a stumbling block in our way—but will you clear a way before us, and hedge not up our way, but the ways of our enemies. #RandolpHarris 2 of 10
It was not just a scare tactic employed by our church. I wanted God to show himself to me, so I had no choice, but to get worthy and become a person God paid attention to, before it was too late. I wanted God to be my best friend, so I made it my goal to mention him every day and thank him and tell him what I desire. It is important that we maintain a deep, personal faith. God loves us and he protects us. This makes us want to be good to others. It is generally accepted that all life on Earth has been created by God exactly as it exists in the present, and the belief that life forms cannot change is known as fixity of species. The plan of the entire Universe is viewed as God’s design. The argument from design explains that anatomical structures were planned to meet the purpose for which they were required. Wings, arms, eyes, and so on, fit the functions they perform, and nature was a deliberate plan of the Grand Designer. Also, many people believe that the Grand designer had completed his work fairly recently. An Irish archbishop called James Ussher (1581-1656) analyzed the begat chapter of the Book of Genesis in the Holy Bible and determined that the Earth was created in 4004 B.C. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
Behold, my soul delights in the things of the Lord; and my heart ponders continually upon the thing which I have seen and heard. Archbishop Ussher was not the first person to suggest a recent origin of Earth, but he was the first to propose a precise date for it. And this date was so important to people, that for decades, book printers put in it Bibles, in the margin next to the Genesis account of the creation. This idea that we have been exposed to has impacted our lives in the most profound way possible. The prevailing notion of Earth’s brief existence, together with the fixity of species, provided a huge obstacle to the development of evolutionary theory because evolution requires time, and the idea of immense geological time, which today we take for granted, simply did not exist. Lord, we have trusted in you forever. We will not put our trust in humans as our saviors; for we know that cursed is one who puts their trust in the human as an idol. Yeah, cursed is one that puts their trust in humanity or the strength of human beings. Yeah, we know that God will give liberally to one who asks. Yeah, our God will give us, if we ask not amiss; therefore, we will lift up our voice unto God, as he is the rock of our righteousness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
Behold, our voices shall forever ascend up unto God, our rock and our everlasting God. Truth is the stubborn, objective restraint which evil endures to overcome. Base rhetoric is therefore always trying to keep its objects from the support which personal courage, noble associations, and divine philosophy provides individuals. Naturally enough, examples of the typical base rhetorician are the journalist and political propagandist, who especially avoid true dialectic and the concept of acts without agents; indeed, these features now also apply more closely to the so-called mental-health professional than to anyone else. Contrivance [that is, of base rhetoric] occur on every hand in the impassioned language of journalism and political pleading. In the World of affairs which these seek to influence, the many are kept in a state of pupillage so that they will be most docile. Nothing is more feared than a true dialectic. By discussing only one side of an issue, by mentioning cause without consequence or consequence without cause, act without agents or agents without agency, the cause-and-effect reasoning is blocked. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
Small groups, as a feature of the social environment, is a convenient place to study many social phenomena; they are laboratories of social life, literally so in the experimental work of social psychology. This, each group represents a reality of social life, in addition to exemplifying more abstract principles of group dynamics. As the base rhetorician uses language to increase his or her own power, to produce convert to his or her own cause, and to create loyal followers of his or her own person—in contrast, the noble rhetorician uses language to wean people away from their inclination to depend readily accept anything they hear without proof, facts, and comprehensive consideration. We also encourage people to think and speak clearly so that they can be their own masters. The rhetoric at its trustiest sense [that is, noble rhetoric] seeks to perfect people by showing them better versions of themselves, links in that chain extending up toward the ideal, which only the intellect can apprehend and only the soul have affection for. This is the justified affection of which no one can be ashamed, and one who feels no influence of it is truly outside the consciousness of the Lord. If we know what happens to one particle, we can predict better what will happen to the other. This can be just as true in the description of a physical object as of a social unit. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
It is possible to save time by turning people it the sources of spiritual power in their cultural heritage. We can define member of a social group in a similar way, for instance, by saying that is one member’s opinion is changed, this will affect the opinions of the other members of the group. This, of course, is just as true of different parts of the individual, for instance, of various organ systems, or of larger units of a society, of social classes, or of ethnic groups. The unity of groups is just as real as the unity of any other object we may specify. An individual cannot help his or her age; one can only express that it is doomed. And this is the only way in which one can bring help to it. The science of psychoanalysis has not yet acknowledged that human beings come in two genders. However, there is also an ungendered species of humans who do not accept the way they are born and are brained washed into thinking they are something other than what is described by their natural biology. All that is true and noble lies concealed in the origin. As nature is the origin of human life, so language is the origin of human creativity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
The base rhetorician seeks to move people toward evil; since it seems to be the nature of people that he or she wants to go to Hell as quickly as possible, it is not surprising the effective base rhetoricians can greatly accelerate this process for millions, and tens or even hundreds of millions of persons. After all, many individuals try to drive people into slavery, as if they are nothing more than human capital. And it makes sense, people who harvest organs value a healthy human being at about $1 million because that is how much they can get by illegally harvesting and selling organs. African American young men, for some reason, are especially vulnerable to these practices. We must urge people to be better than they are, the noble rhetorician cannot possibly succeed in changing those who prefer to remain as they are or become evil. Indeed, because our task is to bring people to themselves, not to us. Therefore, we should be judged on our clarity which we proclaim our counsel. Should not a single person heed our advice, the noble rhetorician will still have to be judged successful in proportion as we succeed in perfecting our own soul by perfecting our own language and behavior. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
Success is purifying one’s self by purifying one’s own language. Did you know people who drink a lot of alcoholic beverages can develop gout in both legs and will eventually be confined to a wheel chair? It is fruitful to look at the small group as an extension of an individual in space or time. After all, the individual could not exist without the tradition of human culture as it has been developed, or without any other fellow human beings to keep one in the human condition. Many traits that makes us human are only developed and take on meaning from association with others, and from their meaning beyond individual lives. Examples of this would be the capacity for language and for nonverbal communication, the agility necessary for tool use, which depends on cooperation, and the capacity of the young to learn the culture of their society. The young, especially, by being born unprotected and needing a social group for a long time, assure human continuity. A child learns that obtaining real satisfaction is possible only through the medium of another person, and thus the circle between perception of a need, such as hunger and its gratification includes signaling and influencing another person who can supply nourishment. Dr. Freud constructed an early model of this interpersonal relationship as a basic part of the individual self. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
These scriptures, which you had not with you, the Heavenly Father commanded that we should share them with you; for it is wisdom in one that they should be shared for generations. In many other ways, the development of a complete human being is emotionally as we as instrumentally incomplete without direct interaction with others. Social atom is distinct from physical atoms. Groups can be studied according to their common features as types of social atoms. One can also classify groups into different types according to their function in the social World, and according to some characteristics, such as their existence in time and space, the relationship between the members and between groups, or by abstract characteristics. And God did expound all things, even from the beginning until the time that he should come in his glory—yeah, that all people, and all kindreds, and all nations and all languages shall stand before God, to be judged of their works, whether they be good or whether they be evil—if they be good to the resurrection of everlasting life; and if they be evil, to the resurrection of damnation. May we all be found to be good. Bless it be. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Randolph Harris II International 