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At the Heart of Each Atom there is Quiescence, that Mysterious Stillness of the Unseen Power of God!

December 14, 2019 4:12 am

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant people, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The professional actor has a modest say over how the stage is assembled, the props selected, and the other characters positioned, as well as a say over his or her own presence in the play. This is also true in private life. In both cases the person is locus of the acting process. However, something more operates when institutions are involved, for within institutions various elements of acting are taken away from the individual and replaced by institutional mechanisms. The locus of acting, of emotion management, moves up to the level of the institution. Many people and objects, arranged according to institutional rule and custom, together accomplish the act. Companies, prisons, schools, churches—institutions of virtually any sort—assume some of the functions of a director and alter the relation of actor to director. Officials in institutions believe they have done things rights when they have established illusions that foster the desired feelings in workers, when they have placed parameters around a worker’s emotion memories, a worker’s use of the as if. It is not that workers are allowed to see and think as they like and required only to show feeling (surface acting) in institutionally approved ways. The matter would be simpler and less alarming if stopped there. However, it does not. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Some institutions have become very sophisticated in the techniques of deep acting; they suggest how to imagine and thus how to feel. As a farmer puts blinders on his or her workerhorse to guide its vision forward, institutions manage how we feel. We commonly assume that institutions are called in when individual controls fail: those who cannot control their emotions are sent to mental hospitals, homes for disturbed children, or prisons. However, in looking at the matter this way, we may ignore to shape feeling. We might ask instead what sort of church, school, or family influence was unavailable to the parents of institutionalized patients, who presumably tired to make their children into adequate emotion managers. One of the ways we guide visions into progression is by prearranging what is available to the worker’s view. A teaching hospital, for example, designs the stage for medical students facing their first autopsy. Seeing the eye of a dead person might call to mind a loved one or oneself; to see this organ coldly violated by a knife might lead a student to faint, or flee in horror, or quit medicine then and there. However, this seldom happens. The immaculate, brightly lit appearance of the operating room, and the serious professional behavior required, justify and facilitate a clinical and impersonal attitude toward death. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Certain parts of the body are kept covered, particularly the face and genitalia, and the hands, which are so strongly connected with human, personal qualities, are never dissected. Once the vital organs have been taken out, the body is removed from the room, bringing the autopsy down to tissues, which are more easily depersonalized. The deft touch, skill, and professional attitude of the prosector makes the procedure neater and more bloodless than might otherwise be the case, and this increases intellectual interest and makes it possible to approach the whole thing scientifically rather than emotionally. Students appear to avoid talking about the autopsy, and when they do talk about it, the discussion is impersonal and stylized. Finally, whereas in laboratory dissection humor appears to be a widespread and effective emotional control device, it is absent in the autopsy room, perhaps because the death has been too recent and [humor] would appear too insensitive. Covering the corpse’s face and genitalia, avoiding the hands, later removing the body, moving fast, using white uniforms, and talking in uniformed talk—these are customs designed to manage the human feeling that threatens order. Institutions arrange their front stages. They guide the way we see and what we are likely to feel spontaneously. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Consider the inevitable institutional halls, especially those near the areas where people wait. Often in medical, academic, and corporate settings we find on the walls a row of photographs or oil paintings of persons in whom we should have full confidence. In the waiting room of the psychiatrist: With crossed legs you claim repose, tranquility. Everything is under control. With the straight shoulder you say dignity, status. No matter what comes up, this guy has nothing to fear, is calmly certain of his worth and of his ability. With the head turned sharply to the left you indicate that someone is claiming his attention. No doubt hundreds of people would like this guy’s attention. He was engrossed in his book, but now he is being interrupted. And what was he reading? Reader’s Digest? Architectural Digest? The Bible? Oh, no; he is into something heavy. We cannot see the title, but we know it is plenty important. Usually it is Osler’s Principles and Practice of Medicine. And the finger marking his place? Why he is been at it so intently, so diligently, he is already halfway through. And the other hand, lying so lightly, so gracefully, on the book. That shows intelligence, experience, mastery. He is not scratching his head trying to figure out what the hell the author is getting at. Anytime you knock on this guy’s door, you will find him just like that, dressed to the nines, tie up tight in his buttoned-down collar, freshly pressed jacket, deeply immersed in one of these heavy tomes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

The professional’s office, of course, should be done in a pleasant but impersonal décor, not too messy and colorful but not too cold and bare; it should reflect just the amount of professional warmth the doctor or lawyer or banker himself or herself ought to show. Home is carefully distinguished from office, personal flair from professional expertise. This stage setting is intended to inspire our confidence that the service is, after all, worth paying a lot for. Airlines seem to model “stage sets” on the living rooms seen on daytime television serials: the Muzak tunes, the TV and movie screens, and the smiling flight attendants serving drinks are all calculated to make you feel at home. Even follow passengers are considered part of the stage. At American Airlines, for example, flight attendants in training are advised that they can prevent the boarding of certain types of passengers who pose a security threat. One’s effect on the emotion memory of other money-paying passengers might he all wrong. Sometimes props are less important than the influential directors. Institutions authorize stage directors to coach the hired cast in deep acting. Buttressed with the authority of a high office or a specialized degree, the director may make suggestions that are often interpreted at lower levels as orders. The director’s role may be simple and direct, as in the case of a group of college students training to be clinicians in a camp for emotionally disturbed children. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

These students, who composed the junior staff, did not know at first how they were supposed to feel or think about the wild behavior of disturbed children. However, in the director’s chair sat the senior counselors, advising them on how to see the children: “They were expected to see the children as victims of uncontrollable impulses somehow related to their harsh and depriving backgrounds, and in need of enormous doses of kindliness and indulgence in order to break down their images of the adult World as hateful and hostile. They were also taught how to feel properly toward them: The clinician must never respond in anger or with intent to punish, although one might sometimes have to restrain or even isolate children in order to prevent them from hurting themselves or one another. Above all, the staff were expected to be warm and loving and always to be governed by a clinical attitude. To be warm and loving toward a child who kicks, screams, and insults you—a child whose problem is unlovability—requires emotion work. The art of it is passed down from senior to junior counselor, as in other settings it passes from judge to law clerk, professor to graduate student, boss to subordinate. The professional worker will implicitly frown on certain uses of emotion memory. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The senior counselor of disturbed children will not allow one’s self to think, “Brett reminds me of a terrible brat I had to babysit when I was thirteen, and if he is like that I will end up hating him.” Instead, one will reconceive Mark in another way: “Brett is really like the other kid I used to babysit when I was fourteen. He was difficult, but I got to like him, so I expect I will get to like Brett despite the way he pushes me away suspiciously.” A proper way to experience the child, not simply a proper way to seem to feel, was understood by everyone as part of the job. And the young caretakers did admirably: To an extraordinary degree they fulfilled these expectations, including, I am convinced, the expectations that they feel sympathy and tenderness and love toward their charges, despite their terrestrial-like behavior. The speed with which these college students learned to behave in this way cannot be easily explained in terms of gradual learning through a slow process of internalization. In more circuitous ways, too, the formal rules that prop up an institution set limits to the emotional possibilities of all concerned. Consider, for example, the rules that guard access to information. Any institution with a bit of hierarchy in it must suppress democracy to some extent and thus must find ways to suppress democracy to some extent and thus must find ways to suppress envy and resentment at the bottom. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Often envy is suppressed by enforcing a hierarchy of secrets. The customary rule of secrecy about pay is a case in point: those at the bottom are almost never allowed to know how much money those at the top get each month, nor, to the fullest extent, what privileges they enjoy. Also kept secret are deliberations that determine when and to what level an individual is likely to rise or fall within the organization. As one University of California administrative memorandum explained: “Letters concerning the disposition of tenure review cases will be kept confidential, in order that those involved not hold grudges or otherwise harbor resentment toward those unfavorably disposed in their case.” In this situation, where the top depends upon being protected from the middle and the bottom—from those involved as the memo put it—leaks can cause panic. Finally, drugs of various sorts can be used to stimulate or depress mood, and companies are not above engineering their use. Just as the plow displaced manual labor, in some reported instances drug use seems to be displacing emotion labor. The labor that it takes to withstand stress and boredom on the job can be performed, some workers have found, by Darvon and Valium. Workers at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, for example, found that nurses in its medical department used to give out Valium, Darvon, codeine, and other drugs for free and without prescription. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

There are a number of ways, some of them company-sponsored, to “have a nice day” on the job, as part of the job. The stage actor makes the finding and expressing of feeling one’s main professional task. In Stanislavski’s analogy, he seeks it with the dedication of a prospector for precious metal. He comes to see feeling as the object of painstaking internal mining, and when he finds it, he processes it like gold. In the context of the theater, this use of feeling is considered exciting and honorable. However, what happens when deep and surface acting become part of a day’s work, part of what we sell to an employer in return for a day’s wage? What happens when our feelings are processed like raw ore? A lot of people who deal with others, especially when dealing with customers, engage in some acting. If a worker pretends he or she is feeling really up, sometimes they actually get into it. The customer will then respond to the individual as though he or she were really friendly, and then more of the employee responds back [surface acting]. Sometimes one will purposely take some deep breathes. Try to relax one’s neck muscles [deep acting with the body]. One may just talk to one’s self: “Watch it. Do not let him get to you. Do not let him get to you. Do not let him get to you.” And then one will talk to one’s partner and she will say the same thing to one. After a while, the anger foes away [deep acting, self-[prompting]. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

One has to try to remember if a customer is drinking too much, he or she is probably scared of something. It might help to think to yourself, “he’s a little child.” Really, that is what he is. And when you see him that way, you will not get mad that the customer is yelling at you. He is like a child yelling at you. [deep acting, Method acting]. Surface and deep acting in a commercial setting, unlike acting in a dramatic, private, or therapeutic context, make one’s face and one’s feelings take on the properties of a resource. However, it is not a resource to be used for the purpose of art, as in drama, or for the purposes of self-discovery, as in therapy, or for the pursuit of fulfillment, as in everyday life. It is a resource to be used to make money. Outside of Stanislavski’s parlor, out there in the American marketplace, the actor may wake up to find oneself actually operated upon. In spite of—or perhaps because of—the fact that instinctivists and behaviorists share certain similarities in their respective pictures of humans and their philosophical orientation, they have fought each other with a remarkable fanaticism. Nature or nurture, instinct or environment became flags around which each side rallied, refusing to see any common ground. In recent years there has been a growing tendency to overcome the sharp alternatives of the instinctivist-behaviorist war. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

One solution to the instinctivist-behaviorist war is to change the terminology; some tended to reserve the term “instinct” for the lower animals and to speak instead of “organic drives” when discussing human motivations. In this way some developed such formulations as “most of Human’s behavior is learned, whereas mist of a bird’s behavior is not learned.” This latter formulation is characteristic of the new trend to replace the old “either/or” by a “more-or-less” formulation, thus taking account of gradual change in the weight of the respective factors. The model for this view is a continuum, on the one end of which is (almost) complete innate determination, on the other end (almost) complete learning. Perhaps a more serious weakness in the present psychological handling of instinct is possessed in the assumption that a two-class system is adequate for the classification of complex behavior. The implication that all behavior must be determined by learning or by heredity, neither of which is more than partially understood, is entirely unjustified. The final form of any response is affected by a multiplicity of variables, only two of which are genetical and experiential factors. It is to the identification and analysis of all these factors that psychology should address itself. When this task is properly conceived and executed there will be no need nor reason for ambiguous concepts of instinctive behavior. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Because learning plays a more important role in the behavior of higher than in the behavior of lower forms, the natively determined behavior pattern of higher forms become much more extensively modified by experience than those of lower forms. It is through such modification that the animal may become adjusted to different environments and escape from the narrow bounds the optimum condition imposes. Higher forms are therefore less dependent upon specific external environmental conditions for survival than are lower forms. Because of the interaction of acquired and innate factors in behavior it is impossible to classify many behavior patterns. Each type of behavior must be separately investigated. Yet, there are more important problems from the standpoint of this study and that is the difference between organic drives (food, fight, flight, sexuality—formerly called instincts), whose function it is to guarantee the survival of the individual and the species, and nonorganic drives (character-rooted passions), which are not phylogenetically programmed and are not common to all beings: the desire for love and freedom; destructiveness, narcissism, sadism, masochism. Often these nonorganized drives that form being’s second nature are confused with organic drives. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

A case and point is the sexual drive. It is a psychoanalytically well-established observation that often the intensity of what is subjectively felt as sexual desire (including its corresponding physiological manifestations) is due to nonsexual passions such as narcissism, sadism, masochism, the wish for power, and even anxiety, loneliness, and boredom. For a narcissistic male, for instance, the sight of a woman may be sexually exciting because he is excited by the possibility of proving to himself how attractive he is. Or a sadistic person may be sexually excited by the chance to conquer a woman (or as the case may be, a man) and to control her or him. Many people are bound for years to each other emotionally just by this motive, especially when the sadism of one fits the masochism of the other. It is rather well known that fame, power, and wealthy makes is possessor sexually attractive if certain physical conditions are present. In all these instances, the physical desire is mobilized by nonsexual passions which thus find their satisfaction. Indeed, it is anybody’s guess how many children owe their existence to vanity, sadism, and masochism, rather than to genuine physical attraction, not to speak of love. However, people, especially men, prefer to think that they are “oversexed” rather than that they are “overvain.” The same phenomenon has been clinically studied minutely in cases of compulsive eating. This symptom is not motivated by physiological but by psychic hunger, engendered by the feeling of being depressed, anxious, empty. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Therefore, destructiveness and cruelty are not instinctual drives, but passions rooted in the total existence of humans. They are one of the ways to make sense of life; they are not and could not be present in the animal, because they are by their very natures rooted in the human condition. The main error many instinctivists have made is that they have confused the two kinds of drives, those rooted in instinct, and those rooted in character. A sadistic person who waits for the occasion, as it were, to express one’s sadism, looks as if he or she fitted the hydraulic model of a dammed-up instinct. However, only people with a sadistic character wait for the opportunity to behave sadistically, just as people with a loving character wait for the right opportunity to express their love. imagine an absolutely material World, containing only physical and chemical fact, and existing from eternity without a God, without even an interested spectator: would there by any sense in saying of that World that one of its states is better than another? Or if there were two Worlds possible, would there be any rhyme or reason in calling one good and the other bad—good or bad absolutely, I mean, and apart from the fact that one might relate itself better than the other to the philosopher’s private interests? However, we must leave these private interests out of the account, for the philosopher is a mental fact, and we are asking whether goods and evils and obligations exist in physical facts per se. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Surely there is no status for good and evil to exist in, in a purely insentient World. How can one physical fact, considered simply as a physical fact, be better than another? Betterness is not a physical relation. It its mere material capacity, a thing can no more be good or bad than it can be pleasant of painful. Good for what? Good for the production of another physical fact, do you say? But what in a purely physical Universe demands the production of that other fact? Physical facts simple are or are not; and neither when present or absent, can they be supposed to make demands. If they do, they can only do so by having desires; and then they have ceased to be purely physical facts, and have become facts of conscious sensibility. Goodness, badness, and obligation must be realized somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic nature of things can realize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no World composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a World to which ethical propositions apply. The moment one sentient being, however, is made a part of the Universe, there is a chance for goods and evils really to exist. Moral relations now have their status, in that being’s consciousness. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

So far as one feels anything to be good, one makes it good. It is good, for one; and being good for one, is absolutely good, for one is the sole creator of values in that Universe, and outside of one’s opinion, things have no moral character at all. In such a Universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise the question of whether the solitary thinker’s judgments of good and ill are true or not. Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to which one must confirm; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity, subject to no higher judge. Let us call the supposed Universe which one inhabits a moral solitude. In such a moral solitude it is clear that there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the god-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of one’s own several ideals with one another. Some of these will no doubt be more pungent and appealing than the rest, their goodness will have a profounder, more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt one with more obstinate regrets if violated. So the thinker will have to order one’s life with them as its chief determinants, or else remain inwardly discordant and unhappy. Into whatever equilibrium one may settle, though, and however one may straighten out one’s system, it will be a right system; for beyond the facts of one’s own subjectivity there is nothing moral in the World. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The enlightened being can condemn nobody, can regard none as outside one’s range of compassion, and can find a place in one’s heart for the worst sinner. One knows that duality is but a dream and discovers oneself anew in all sentient creatures. One knows that the World’s woe arises out of its false and fictitious sense of separateness. One receives too many confidences ever to be surprised by any of them, too many confessions ever to be shocked. However, even if one had never heard or read a single one, one would receive them just as calmly. For one’s compassions and insight, one’s tolerance and realism embrace the whole range of human feeling or human behavior. One is always oneself, without pose, without pretense, and without self-consciousness. It is not the studied poise of good breeding but a natural poise upwelling from within. One’s uniqueness extends through body, feelings, thoughts, character, outlook—it is total. The ordinary being see only one’s personal objective, but the illumined being sees simultaneously both the objective and the person pursuing it. One’s silence bravely takes its stand on the fact that truth is a reality, is a power, is invincible. One knows the proper value to stamp on fame, position, and wealth, and the proper place to assign them. One neither rejects them with harsh ascetic scorn nor seeks them with hard self-centered ambition. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The strength with which he has conquered both oneself and life will be evident to those who are sensitive to more than merely commonplace things. In every affair one knows where one stands, but more in the sense than one listens and obeys the higher guidance than in any other. Blessed be the Lord God, Who cometh in the Name of the Lord, and hath dawned upon us; Whose Coming hath redeemed us, Whose Nativity hath enlightened us; Who by His Coming hath sought out the lost, and illuminated those who sat in darkness. Grant, therefore, O Father Almighty, that we celebrating with pious devotion the day of his Nativity, may find the day of judgement a day of mercy; that as we have known His benignity as our Redeemer, we may feel His gentle tenderness as out Judge. We give Thee thanks, O Lord our God, and bless Thee from day to day, Who hast been pleased to bring us to this Thy holy solemnity. Vouchsafe us, with Thy faithful people, in peace and quietness through many succeeding years to welcome Christ, through Thy mercy. “And they did pray unto the Lord their God continually, insomuch that the Lord did bless them, according to his word, so that they did wax strong and prosper in the land,” reports Alma 62.51. One learns from within, intuitively, much more than from without, the full teaching to which other beings or their books have led them. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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The Leaves of the Tree of Life are for the Healing of the Nations!

December 13, 2019 1:50 am

More full of visions than a high romance? What, but thee Sleep? Soft closers of our eyes! Low murmurer of tender lullabies! Light hover around our happy pillows! Wreather of poppy bubs, and weeping willows! Silent entangler of beauty’s tresses! Most happy listener! when the morning blesses thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes that glance so brightly at the new Sun-rise. But what is higher beyond thought than thee? Fresher than berries of a mountain tree? More strange, more beautiful, more smooth, more regal, than wings of swans, than doves, than dim-seen eagle? What is it? And to what shall I compare it? It has a glory, and naught else can share it: The though therefore is awful, sweet, and holy, chasing away all Worldliness and folly; coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder, or the low rumblings Earth’s regions under; and sometimes like a gentle whispering of all the secrets of some wond’rous thing that breathers about us in the vacant air; so that we look around with prying stare, perhaps to see shapes of light, aerial limning, and catch soft floating from a faint-heard hymning; to see the laurel wreath, on high suspended, that is to crown our name wen life is ended. Sometimes it gives a glory to the voice, and from the heart up-springs, rejoice! rejoice! Sounds which will reach the Framer of all things, and die away in ardent mutterings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

No one who once the glorious Sun has seen, and all the clouds, and felt one’s bosom clean for one’s great Maker’s presence, but must know what’tis I mean, and feel one’s being glow: Therefore no insult I give one’s spirit by telling what one sees from native merit. The principal faculties of the brain use the ministry and help of this spirit; it is their vehicle. The fountain of all the spirits is in the heart. The spirit is the most universal instrument of the soul. Spirit is not only the soul’s instrument; it is the mean, a sacred band of unite, between soul and body. Spirit is a most subtle vapour, which is expressed from the blood, and the instrument of the soul, to perform all one’s actions; a common tie or medium betwixt the body and soul, as some will have it. I am sure there is a common Spirit that plays within us, yet makes no part of us: and that is the Spirit of God, the fire and scintillation of that noble and mighty Essence, which is the life and virtue of the Sun. Conceive light invisible, and that is spirit. The spirits are minute, imperceptible substances, breathlike and flamelike, quite separate from inert particles of matter. They move so much as to seem never at rest. They help to account for natural movement and change, for they come into being and pass away. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

To maintain itself, nonvital spirit feeds on adjacent particles of matter, the evidence of its activity being illustrated by rust in metals, and the shrinkage of flesh and the slowing down of bodily organs in human beings. In all animate life, the living spirit is he efficient cause and vehicle of motion. Although movements of the body that were observable and local cold be explained in part nu sensory action, the initiation and persistence of them could better be accounted for by assuming a pervasive, dynamic, spirit-substance than some mysterious force or soul. One does not go far in effect in either explaining nature or in examining her if at every point of difficulty one calls upon a vague force, invents an entity, or devises a special principle to fit the case. Rather, one looks for the simplest thing, the single principle, that will account systematically for the largest number of pehnomena. Now, we will assume a spirit and inquire by what efforts a spirit so small and tender can put in motion bodies so gross and hard. Spirit in the human being is a substance so responsive to the two sources of knowledge that it reverberates to each—to God’s revelations and to human’s observations of nature, the informations of revelation and of sense differ no doubt in matter and manner of entrance and conveyance to us; yet the human spirit is one and the same; and it is but as if different liquors were poured through different funnels into one and the same vessel. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The human spirit responds both to divine sources of stimulation and to natural things. This is the kind of spirit human use when they exercise the faculties of one’s soul—one’s understanding, reason, imagination, memory, appetite, and will. As the instrument of human’s faculties it is both efficient cause and vehicle without which there is no human behavior. The spirit is an extremely tenuous substance continuous with itself throughout the body. It is capable of being dilated by heat and cold—these being two qualities of matter—and responds instantly to movement and caused movement. The spirit is not only endowed with power, not just of motion, but of reason, imagination, sense, memory, and desire. One will not have to think out the needed reaction, for it will flow naturally and spontaneously out of one’s inner being. The enlightened individual’s consciousness remains permanently serene and equable, at the same level whatever conditions prevail. Compassion—a quality so real and vibrant in the Italians but sensibly practical in the English and Americas, so infrequent in the French but present in the Indians—is natural, quiet, and devoid of sentimentality in the enlightened individual. One may still have one’s hygienic reactions, one’s aesthetic preferences, one’s individual tastes. One may still retain human aversions to dirty bodies, attractions to refined habits. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Enlightenment has not turned one into an indifferent robot or a frozen creature or a zombie deprived of feeling. However, one’s personal discrimination is calmly practiced: behind it there is an impersonal detachment. There is something which is always kept in reserve, a part of oneself is enclosed and which keeps other beings at a distance, however cordial is one’s outer self. This enables one to keep always calm, whatever the outer provocations may be, to hold to an intense inner stillness. One does not hope for anything nor wish for any special piece of good fortune—not because one is too pessimistic about life, but because one is so serene that one has stopped looking for something to come to one from outside that would bring happiness, stopped holding on to others, and stopped dreaming. THIS is reality; what the World can give is a dream. When the hour comes to desert the body, one will be ready for the fated event, without that desperate struggle to hold onto a form which has served its purpose seen too often in the unenlightened. Such is one’s freedom from common ego-obsession and such the stretch of one’s compassion, that one makes whomever one talks with feel that one is genuinely and deeply interested in his or her particular affairs. There is a friendliness in one’s look, goodwill in one’s face, that make acquaintance easy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

A being can take from the printed words what one is unable to hear from the spoken word. The truth-seeker will be wise to make use of such outward helps as appeal to one. They may be the written word, the printed book, the molded statuette, the pictorial representation, or the human photograph—always provided they are referable to a genuinely inspired source. One should study the words and works, the lives and examples of practising mystics, and follow in their footsteps. Good books are not to be disdained, despite contemptuous references by fanatical mystics or ill-balances ascetics. Negatively, they will warn one against misleading elements likely to cause a deviation from one’s correct course. Positively, they will guide one where no personal guide is available. However, one must beware of imaging that the pleasures one derives from spiritual reading is any sign that ne is making progress in spiritual living. It is easier to read lofty thoughts than to think them out for oneself, and to live them is the most difficult of all. Books, too, serve as guides if they are properly used, that is, if their limitations are recognized and if their authors’ limitations are acknowledged. In the first case it is the intellect’s own inability to transcend thought that stops it from realizing the truth. In the second case it is the evolutionary status of the being’s ego, and the accuracy of one’s attitudes—themselves victims or controllers of one’s emotions, passions—which matter. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

For if one’s mind cannot register the impact of truth, because of the blockage set up partially or even all around one, the author’s work will reflect one’s ignorance. One cannot teach what one does not know; one’s own mental obscurity can lead only to the reader’s obscurity. Yet such is the deceptiveness of thought, that a wrong or false idea maybe received and held in the mind under the belief that it is right or true one. The writings of these Masters help both the moral nature and the intellectual mind of the responsive and sensitive, who are excited to the same endeavour, exhilarated to the same level, and urged to realize the same ideas. These stand out from all other writings because they contain vivid inspiration and true thought. The very fine writings of philosophers and mystics of all times may bring into one’s life some emotional inspirational and intellectual guidance, even, possibly, stimulating one’s power of will. Through the lone, inavoidable years of struggle on the Quest, they can, to that extent, act the part of a teacher or guide. However, it must be remembered that some are infinitely more worthwhile than others, and it is essential for one to be able to discriminate between what is true and helpful and what is false worthless. Now let us look at quite a different form of enslavement and liberation brought about by our finitude in this World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

In contrast to much of what has been said and much of what I myself have said against technology, I want to speak for the saving power of the technical control of nature. This is a bold statement to make in a period when such control has reached a peak and, at the same time, its injurious and destructive aspects have become more manifest than ever. Every technical invention elevates humans above their terrestrial stage, liberating one from much drudgery, conquering the narrow limits of one’s movements in time and space, saving one from innumerable smaller and greater evils to which one is subject as a part of nature, for instance, unnecessary pain and unnecessary death. These technical innovations have been broken in body and mind by being suddenly deprived of them. We know the destructive possibilities in technology; we know that it can annihilate all life on Earth and bring history to an end. We also know that it can keep human’s spirit away from salvation in a deeper and more lasting sense. We know that it can transform beings themselves into a thing and a tool. Nevertheless, in the great feat of technical control we have a break-though of the eternal into the temporal; they cannot be ignored when we speak of saving power and salvation. In the ancient World, great political leaders were called saviors. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

The reason the ancient political leaders were called saviours is because they liberated nations, and groups within them from misery, enslavement, and war. This is another kind of healing, reminiscent of the words of the last book of the Bible, which say in poetic language that the leaves of the tree of life are for the healing of the nations. How can nations be healed? One may say: They can be liberated from external conquers or internal oppressors. However, can they be healed? Can they be saved? The prophets give the answer: If there is a small minority, a group of people who represent what the nation is called to be, Nations are saved. They may be defeated, but their spirit will be a power of resistance against the evil spirits who are detrimental to the nation. The question of saving power in the nation is the question of whether there is a minority, even a small one, which is willing to resist the anxiety produced by propaganda, the conformity enforced by threat, the hatred stimulated by ignorance. The future of this country and its spiritual values is not dependent as much on atomic defense as on the influence such groups will have on the spirit in which the nation will thin and act. And this is true of humankind as a whole. Its future will be dependent on a saving group, embodied in one nation or crossing through all nations. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

There is saving power in humankind, but there is also the hidden will to self-destruction. It depends on every one of us which side will prevail. There is no divine promise that humanity will survive this or the next year. However, it may depend on the saving power effective in your or me, whether it will survive. (It my depend on the amount of healing and liberating grace which works through any of us with respect to social justice, racial equality, and political wisdom.) Unless many of us say to ourselves: Through the saving power working in me, humankind may be saved or lost—it will be lost. However, in order to be the bearers of saving power, we must be saved ourselves; the wall separating us from eternal life must be broken through. And here is one thing which strengthens the wall and keeps us sick and enslaved. It is our estrangement and guilt which are the impediments which keep us from reaching eternal life here and now. The judgment against us which we confirm in our conscience is the sickness unto death, the despair of life, from which we must be healed in order to say yes to life. Healed life is new life, delivered from the bondage of the evil one. Here the last two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer become one petition: forgive our trespasses, and deliver us from the evil one—this is one and the same thing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

And if we call Jesus, the Christ, our saviour, then we mean that in him we see the power which heals up by accepting us and which there is reconciliation with ourselves, with our World, and with the divine Ground of our World and ourselves. And now the last question: Who shall be saved, liberated, healed? The fourth gospel says: The World! The reunion with the eternal from which we come, from which we are separated, to which we shall return, is promised to everything that is. We are saved not as individual, but in unity with all others and with the Universe. Our own liberation does not leave the enslaved ones alone, our own healing is a part of the great healing of the World. Therefore, two other petition of the Lord’s Prayer also ask the same: Save us from the evil one, and Thy Kingdom come! This Kingdom is His creation, liberated and healed. When we look from time and eternity, this is what we hope for. Deliver us—heal us—that is the cry of everything that is; of each of us in unity with all humankind and in unity with the whole Universe. The divine answer is: I shall return to me what is separated from me because it belongs to me. I am liberating you today as I did before and will do in the future. Today, when you hear these words, “I am liberating you, I am healing you,” do not resist! #Randolphharris 11 of 16

Understanding is the basis of care. What you would take care of you must first understand, whether it be a petunia or a nation. If you would care for your spiritual core—your heart or will—you must understand it. That is, you must understand your spirit. If you would form your hear in godliness or assist others in that process, you must understand what the heart is and what it does, and especially its place in the overall system of human life. Some years ago The Reader’s Digest ran, at intervals, helpful articles on the various parts of the body: the ear, the lungs, the foot, the stomach, and so forth. The aim was to put readers in better position to care for their physical healthy. The titles were always similar: “Hi, I’m Joe’s Liver” (or lung, or foot, and so on). The properties and structure of the liver or other organ would be described, and its role in the body as a whole explained. Then there would be some discussion of how to keep that particular body part in good condition and to assist it in its function. Now we might have titled this essay, “Hi, I’m Joe’s Heart”—in the spiritual sense of “heart.” Its aim is to explain the nature of the heart (spirit, or will) and its function in the person as a whole. In order to do this we will take a look at the whole person and distinguish the various aspects, including the heart. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

This is not an easy task under any circumstances, but it is made triply difficult by the fact that the nature of the person is, today, a battlefield of conflicting academic, scientific, artistic, religious, legal, and political viewpoints. In our culture, it is the academic that governs the idea systems of our World and opposes traditional views of human nature—specifically, the Judeo-Christian or biblical understanding of human life. Today, you will hear many presumably learned people say that there is no such thing as human nature, or that human beings do not have a nature. Now, there is a long historical development back of this view, which we cannot deal with here, and it is not entirely without an important point. However, that point is mis-made in the statement that human beings do not have a nature. It then becomes a part of unchecked political and moral rage against identity that characterizes modern life. This is a rage predicated upon the idea that identity restricts freedom. If ai m a human being, as opposed to, say, a brussels sprout or a zebra, that places a restriction upon what I can do, what I ought to do, or what should be done to me. Now, this embattled state of human nature tells us at least two things: First, it tells us that the issue of human nature is of great importance—to important for us to leave alone. If we are to have anything useful to say about spiritual formation and about the spiritual life that Jesus brings, we must deal with it. #RandolphHarrs 13 of 16

Otherwise, what we say will have no relation to the concrete existence of real human beings, and this, unfortunately, is all too often the case in speaking of the spiritual. Second, it tells us that the confusion now publicly prevailing over the makeup of the human being may not be due to its inherent obscurity. Rather, it may be due to the fact that it is a field where strongly armed prejudices—assumptions about what must be the case, “do not bother me with facts”—prevent even well-intended people from seeing what, at least in basic outline is fairly obvious, simple, and straightforward. We especially have in mind opinions to the effect that a human being is purely physical, just a terrestrial being—basically, just as the human brain. Or the opinion that human beings are, as such, good, or not to be forced to do anything that do not want to do. Or the opinion that human beings do not actually have a nature and that all classifications of them—male/female, African/European, and so on—are social constructions with no reality apart from the judgements and motivations of social groups or cultures. At present, governmental and social institutions are heavily invested in such opinions favoring the social construction of the human being. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

This current state of affairs may prevent otherwise thoughtful people from seeing the value of what has traditionally been regarded as the best of common sense about life and of what has been preserved in the wisdom traditions of most cultures—especially in two of the greatest World sources of wisdom about the human self, the Judeo-Christian and the Greek, the biblical and the classical. Now, when we set aside contemporary prejudices and carefully examine these two great sources, I believe it will become clear that heart, spirit, and will (or their equivalents) are words that refer to one and the same thing, the same fundamental component of the person. However, they do so under different aspects. “Will” refers to the component’s power to initiate, to create, to bring about what did not exist before. “Spirit” refers to its fundamental nature as distinct and independent from physical reality. And “heart” refers to its position in the human being, as the center or core to which every other component of the self owes its proper functioning. However, it is the same dimension of the human being that has all these features. Merciful and most loving God, by Whose will and bounty Jesus Christ our Lord humbled Himself for this—that He might exalt the whole race of humans; and descended to the depths for the purpose of lifting up the lowly; and was born, God-Man, by the virgin, for this cause—that He might restore in humans the lost celestial image; grant that Thy people may cleave unto Thee, that as Thou hast redeemed them by Thy bounty, they may ever please Thee by devoted service. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

These spiritual subjects are becoming more widely known and more studied than they were a half century ago. There has been quite a follow of literature, original works, commentaries, and translations in our time making both mystical and philosophic ideas more available. It is not possible for most earnest seekers living in the free countries to come into possession of teaching. Be present, O Lord, to our supplications; and let Thy people, who were framed by Thy making and restore by Thy power, be also saved by Thy continual operation, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that as we are bathed in the new light of Thine Incarnate Word, that which shines by faith in our minds may blaze out likewise in our actions; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant to us, Almighty God, that as Thy Salvation, wondrous with a new and Heavenly light, went forth in this World to redeem life on Earth, so it may ever beams forth in the renewal of our hearts; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. “Remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if people build they cannot fall,” report Helaman 5.12. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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I Have Always Imagined that Heaven Will be Some Kind of Suburban Ranch!

December 12, 2019 3:07 am

It seems to me that the soul stands, above all, for the enlightened and rational notion that human beings are improved by the acquisition of knowledge and information and that no desire should be placed in it way, for the soul stores the energy that fuels life. It opens up the windows to the World and inspires us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. A belief in God can change lives for the better. Though the increasing complexity of the World, with burdensome social issues and shifting economic demands makes the work more difficult than ever before, for those like you who choose to hold steadfast in your faith and dedicates yourself to doing it well, the rewards make the journey worthwhile. You quietly get the job done, and you do it with incredible dedication, perseverance, and dignity in an environment of steadily diminishing resources and escalating criticism of humanity. Why do you keep trying? I believe the answer is very simple. You love the community. You want to help give others the best possible opportunity at life. The task of the enlightened is to balance the difficult juggling act of becoming vitally, vigorously, creatively, energetically, and inspiringly successful. One is wide enough in one’s outlook to look a contradictory ideas and things with equal calm. For they all melt in the Pure Mind. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

It should already be obvious that sacrifice and scapegoating are taking immense areas in human relations; when we think in these terms, we already feel quickened in our thoughts and our pulse—we know we are onto something big. I have lingered on guilt, sacrifice, heroism, and immortality because they are the key concepts for the science of humans in society that is emerging in our time. And the keys works for these concepts have already been written, which is good news in the life of any aspiring science; they only rub is that the scientific community itself has not realized this good news, and so we have been painfully slow in forging an agreed science of humans. The application of the ideas of guilt and sacrifice to modern sociology has been done largely by a few beings—notably Kenneth Burke and Hugh Dalziel Duncan. Let us dwell on this critical chapter in the evolution of an authentic science of beings. One can recognize that guilt and expiation are fundamental categories of sociological explanation, and it is reasonable to propose a simple formula: guilt must be canceled in society, and it is absolved by “victimage.” So universal and regular is the dynamic that one many wonder whether human society could possibly cohere without symbolic victims which the individual members of the group share in common. We can witness the civic enactment of redemption through the sacrificial victim, as the center of human’s social motivation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

We are led to the central idea of victimage and redemption through Greek tragedy and Christianity; we see that this fundamentally religious notion is a basic characteristic of any social order. Again we are brought back to the idea that all culture is in essence sacred—supernatural. The miraculousness of creation is after all magnified in social life; it is contained in person and given color, form, drama. The natural mystery of birth, growth, consciousness, and death is taken over by society; and this interweaving of social form and natural terror becomes an inextricable mystification; the individual can only gape in awe and guilt. This religious guilt, then, is also a characteristic of so-called secular societies; and anyone who would lead a society must provide for some form of sacred absolution, regardless of the particular historical disguise that this absolution may wear. Otherwise society is not possible. Above all Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Obama understood this and acted on it. If there is one thing that the tragic wars of our time have taught us, it is that the enemy has a ritual role to play, by means of which evil is redeemed. All wars are conducted as holy wars in a double sense then—as a revelation of fate, a testing of divine favor, and as a means of purging evil from the World at the same time. This explains why we are dedicated to war precisely in its most horrifying aspects: it is a passion of human purgation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Whoever is dissatisfied with oneself is always ready to revenge oneself therefore; we others will be their victims. However, the irony is that beings are always dissatisfied and guilty in small and large ways, and this is what drives them to a search for purity where all dissatisfaction can come to a head and be wiped away. Beings try to qualify for eternalization by being clean and by cleansing the World around them of the evil, the dirty; in this way they show that they are on the side of purity, even if they themselves are impure. The striving for perfection reflects being’s effort to get some human grip on one’s eligibility for immortality. And one can only know if one is good if the authorities tell one so; this is why it is so vital for one emotionally to know whether one is liked or disliked, why one will do anything the group wants in order to meet its standards of “good”: one’s eternal life depends on it. Good and bad relate to strength and weakness, to self-perpetuation, to indefinite duration. And so we can understand that all ideology is about one’s qualification for eternity; and so are all disputes about who really is dirty. The target of one’s righteous hatred is always called “dirt”; in our day the short-hairs call the long-hairs “filthy” and are called in turn “pigs.” Since everyone feels dissatisfied with oneself (dirty), victimage is a universal human need. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

And the highest heroism is the stamping out of those who are tainted. The logic is terrifying. The psychoanalytic group of guilt, anality, and sadism is translatable in this way to the highest levels of human striving and to the age-old problem of good and evil. From which we have to conclude that humans have been the midwives of horror on this planet because this horror alone gave them peace of mind, made them “right” with the World. No wonder Nietzsche would talk about “the disease of the World called humans.” It seems perverse when we put it so blatantly, yet here is a being who needs the spectacle of death in order to pen oneself to love. As humans wound and kill their enemy in the field and slaughter their women and children in their homes, our love for each other deepens. We become comrades in arms; our hatred of each other is being purged in the sufferings of our enemy. And even more relentlessly: We need to socialize in hate and death, as well as in joy and love. We do not know how to have friends without, at the same time, creating victims whom we must wound, torture, and kill. Our love rests on hate. If we talk again and shockingly about human baseness, it is not out of cynicism; it is only to better get some kind of factual purchase on our fate. However, it is only an illusion that we have to fear; and we have to take a full look at the worst in order to begin to get rid of illusions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Realism, even brutal, is not cynicism. We cannot become humane until we understand our need to visit suffering and death on others. The sociology of our time must begin in [such an] anguished awareness. From the point of view of such a sociology, the great scientific problems of our time have been the successful and grand social cohesions, especially of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Today we still gape in unbelief that the holocaust was possible in our civilized World, refusing to see how true it was to human’s nature and to their ambitions to transcend that nature. Hitler’s rise to power was based on one’s understanding of what people wanted and needed most of all, and so one promised them, above everything else, heroic victory over evil; and one gave them the living possibility of ridding themselves temporarily of their real guilt. As many die-hard rightists in the United States of America today realize better than anyone else, the tragedy of the lack of affordable housing and homelessness had loaded the Americans with a huge burden of unresolvable guilt and it as not been an easy truth to bare. The nation that represents victory and immortality or it has no mandate to exist. It must give tangible, straightforward victories of its credit is dissipated in the hearts of all its citizens. Yet, there is no immortality without guiltless victory. On these matters, rightists have always been a candid barometer of basic human urges. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

It took Stalin’s purge trials to show us that the highest humanistic ideals of socialist revolutionaries also have to be played out in a religious drama of victimage and redemption—if one is t have a pure and cohesive socialists society at all. The Russians exiled religious expiation but could not exile their own human nature, and so they had to conjure up a secular caricature of religious expiation. And they are still doing it: the magician-priests who give absolution to the clean communist masses now wear the white coats of hospital psychiatrist who transform dirty dissident victims with the latest techniques of “secular” science. It is grotesque, but we are warned always to watch for the “secular equivalents” of the theological formula of victimage and redemption; the scapegoat is not a “necessary illusion of savages, children, and the masses,” but now an achievement of the most advanced socialist society. China is reliving the idea of the primitive group soul which is a sacred fount of regeneration on which the whole community can draw so long as it remains pure. If one imagines these analogies far-fetched, one see how firmly they rest on a now well-founded tradition of social and psychological analysis. Persons who have a particular stigma tend to have similar learning experiences regarding their plight, and similar changes in conception of self—a similar moral career that is both cause and effect of commitment to a similar sequence of personal adjustments. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

One phase of this socialization process is that through which the stigmatized person learns and incorporates the standpoint of the normal, acquiring thereby the identity beliefs of the wider society and a general idea of what it would be like to possess a particular stigma. Another phase is that through which one learns that one possesses a particular stigma and, this time in detail, the consequences of possessing it. The timing and interplay of these two initial phases of the moral career from important patterns, establishing the foundation for later development, and providing a means of distinguishing among the moral careers available to the stigmatized. Four such patterns may be mentioned. One pattern involves those with an inborn stigma who become socialized into their disadvantageous situation even while they are learning and incorporating the standards against which they fall short. For example, an orphan learns that children naturally and normally have parents, even while one is learning what it means not to have any. After spending the first sixteen years of one’s life in the institution, one can still feel that one naturally knows how to be a father to his son. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

A second pattern derives from the capacity of a family, and to a much lesser extent a local neighborhood, to constitute itself a protective capsule for its young. Within such a capsule a congenitally stigmatized child can be carefully sustained by means of information control. Self-belittling definition of one are prevented from entering the charmed circle, while broad access is given to other conceptions held in the wider society, ones that lead the encapsulated child to see oneself as a fully qualified ordinary human being, of normal identity in terms of such basic matters as age and gender. The point in the protected individual’s life when the domestic circle can no longer protect one will vary by social class, place of residence, and type of stigma, but in each case will give rise to a moral experience when it occurs. Thus, public school entrance is often reported as the occasion of stigma learning, the experience sometimes coming very precipitously on the first day of school, with taunts, teasing, ostracism, and fights. Interestingly, the more the child is disabled the more likely one is to be sent to a special school for persons of his or her kind, and the more abruptly one will have to face the view which the public at large takes of one. One will be told that one will have an easier time of it among one’s own, and this learn that the own one thought he or she possessed was the wrong one, and that this lesser own is really his or hers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

It should be added that where the infantilely stigmatized manages to get through one’s early school years with some illusions left, the onset of dating or job-getting will often introduce the moment of truth. In some cases, merely an increased likelihood of incidental disclosure is involved. “I think the first realization of my situation, and the first intense grief resulting from this realization, came one day, very casually, when a group of us in our early teens had gone to the beach for the day. I was lying on the sand, and I guess the fellows and girls thought I was asleep. One of the fellows said, ‘I like Domenica very much, but I would never go out with a blind girl.’ I cannot think of any prejudice which so completely rejects you.” In other cases, something close to a systematic exposure is involved, as a cerebral palsy victim suggests: “With one extremely painful exception, as long as I was in the protective custody of family life or college schedules and lived without exercising my rights as an adult citizen, the forces of society were kindly and unruffling. It was after college, business school, and innumerable stretches as a volunteer worker on community projects that I was often bogged down by the medieval prejudices and superstitions of the business World. Looking for a job was like standing before a firing squad. Employers were shocked that I had the gall to apply for a job.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

A third pattern of socialization is illustrated by one who becomes stigmatized late in life, or learns late in life that one has always been discreditable—the first involving no radical reorganization of one’s view of one’s past, the second involving this factor. Such an individual has thoroughly learned about the normal and the stigmatized long before one must see oneself as deficient. Presumably one will have a special problem in reidentifying oneself, and a special likelihood of developing disapproval of self: “When I smelled the odor on the bus or subway before the colostomy I used to feel very annoyed. I would think that the people were awful, that they did not take a bath or that they should have gone to the bathroom before traveling. I used to think that they might have odors from what they ate. I used to be terribly annoyed; to me it seemed that they were filthy, dirty. Of course, at least opportunity I used to change my seat and if I could not it used to go against my grain. So naturally, I believed the young people feel the same way about me if I smell.” While there are certainly cases of individuals discovering only in adult life that they belong to a stigmatized tribal group or that their parents have a contagious moral blemish, the usual case here is that of physical handicaps that strike late in life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

“But suddenly I woke up one morning, and found that I could not stand. I had had polio, and polio was as simple as that. I was like a very young child who had been dropped into a big, black hole, and the only thing I was certain of was that I could not get out unless someone helped me. The education, the lectures, and the parental training which I had received for twenty-four years did not seem to make me the person who could do anything for me now. I was like everyone else—normal, quarrelsome, gay, full of plans, and all of a sudden something happened! Something happened and I became a stranger. I was a greater stranger to myself than to anyone. Even my dreams did not know me. They did not know what they ought to let me do—and when I went to dances or to parties in them, there was always an odd provision or limitation—bot spoken of or mentioned, but there just the same. I suddenly had the very confusing mental and emotional conflict of a lady leading a double life. It was unreal and it puzzled me, and I could not help dwelling on it.” Here the medical profession is likely to have the special job of informing the infirm who one is going to have to be. A fourth pattern is illustrated by those who are initially socialized in an alien community, whether inside or outside the geographical boundaries of the normal society, and who then must learn a second way of being that is felt by those around them to be the real and valid one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

It should be added that when an individual acquires a new stigmatized self late in life, the uneasiness one feels about new associates may slowly give way to uneasiness felt concerning old ones. Post-stigma acquaintances may see one simply as a faulted person; pre-stigma acquaintances, being attached to a conception of what one once was, may be unable to treat one either with formal tact or with familiar full acceptance. “My task [as a blind writer interviewing prospective clients for his literary product] was to put the men I had come to see at their ease—the reverse of the usual situation. Curiously, I found it much easier to do with me I had never met before. Perhaps this was because with strangers there was no body of reminiscences to cover before business could be gotten down to and so there was no unpleasant contrast with the present.” Regardless of which general pattern the moral career of the stigmatized individual illustrates, the phase of experience during which one learns that one possesses a stigma will be especially interesting, for at this time one is likely to be thrown into a new relationship to others who possess the stigma too. In some cases, the only contact the individual will have with one’s own is a fleeting one, but sufficient nonetheless to show one that others like oneself exist. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

“When Tommy came to the clinic for the first time, there were two other little boys there, each with a congenital absence of an ear. When Tommy saw them, one’s right hand went slowly to one’s own defective ear, and he turned with wide eyes to his father and said, ‘There is another boy with an ear like mine.’” In the case of the individual who has recently become physically disabled, fellow-sufferers more advanced than oneself in dealing with the failing are likely to make one a special series of visits to welcome one to the club and to instruct one in how to manage oneself physically and psychically: “Almost my first awareness that there are mechanics of adjustment came to me with the comparison of two fellow patients I had at the Eye and Ear Infirmary. They used to visit me as I lay abed and I came to know them fairly well. Both had been blind for seven years. They were about the same age—a little past thirty—and both had college educations.” When we interact with other people, there is generally an authentic way, where one has been genuine in one’s transactions with people and true to one’s projects; and the counterfeit way, which seems to be the common, or all-American, way. And we can speak of the involved way—as in the case of one deeply committed to various projects—and the detached, uninvolved way. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

There is the personal way of the person of the being who enters into dialogue with one’s fellows; and there is the anonymous way of the one who neither knows, nor is ever known by, any single human being. All these ways are possible, and each can be viewed as a response to an invitation, a response that yields consequences for well or ill. A neurotic person, for example, may be seen as one who has chosen a rigid, encapsulated existence. It is safe, but it happens also to be suffocating. One chose to be this way, not only to feel safe, but also to hang on to the love of one’s parents or spouse. However, one pays a price for one’s choice. Of a sexually impotent person, we may say his mother invited him by word or gesture to follow the eunuchoid way. He accepted the invitations, and was rewarded with his mother’s approval. Some reward! Some price! But one must pay for everything in this World. If a person’s present being is the outcome of one’s acceptance of an invitation to be in some way, we can ask, “What do we know about invitation? Under what conditions is an invitation accepted or declined? Who extends the effective invitations? And who are the ones who respond to them?” We actually know a great deal about invitation, though the knowledge appears under other rubrics. We know a great deal about the psychology of suggestion, or persuasion, of hypnosis, and of leadership. Anything written under those headings seems to be relevant to a psychology of invitation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

A good psychotherapist or a good nurse, teacher, leader, or hypnotist—even a good sales person—all these are experts at extending invitations or challenges that will be accepted. An invitation to someone carries with it the implication that the other has the power to carry it out. It is a form of the attribution of power. The successful inviters invite others to change some aspects of their being. They invite a person to change one’s ways of valuing, construing, striving, behaving, or buying; and the person accepts the invitation. The therapist invites one’s pupil to abandon ignorance, one’s present ways of thinking and believing, and to expose oneself to new experiences. The leader invites or challenges one’s follower to carry out a mission that the follower never imagined one could accomplish. The hypnotist invites one’s subject to recover previously inaccessible memories, and the subject does. The nurse or doctor invited a patient to take a pill or an operation, and the patient does. Therefore, remember the teachers who see something special in you and make a connection, those who plant those cherished memories and good feelings that continue to live within you wherever you are or whatever you have become. The Spirit of God now calls his people to live from an adequate basis for character transformation, resulting in obedience to and abundance in Christ. This really is something different. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The present moment is not an occasion to keep on doing the same things Christians have been doing in the recent past—except now really meaning it. It is time to change our focus, individually and in our Christian groupings. If we as Christ’s people genuinely enter Christ’s Way of the Heart, individuals will find a sure path toward becoming the persons they were meant to be: thoroughly good and godly persons, yet purged of arrogance, insensitivity, and self-sufficiency. Christian assemblies will become what they have been in many periods of the past and what the World desperately calls for today: incomparable schools of life-life that is eternal in quality now, as well as unending in quantity. This is possible because the spirit and inner being of the human, as well as the process of its renovation in Christ, is an orderly realm where, even in the disorder of its brokenness, God has provided a methodical path of recovery. Grace does not rule out method, nor method grace. Grace thrives on method and method on grace. Spiritual formation in Christ is therefore not a mysterious, irrational—possibly hysterical—process: something that strikes like lightening, whenever and wherever it will, if at all. Or something that is magically conferred upon us as we dwell in the midst of curious rituals and antique practices. Spiritual experiences do not constitute spiritual formation, tough they could be a meaningful part therefor and sometimes are. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

This, I freely admit, is contrary to a view of grace as passivity that is widely held now. However, the God-ordained order of the soul under grace must be discovered, respected, and cooperated with, if its God-intended results for spiritual growth are to be attained. Spiritual formation is something we human beings can and must undertake—as individuals and in fellowship with other apprentices of Jesus. While I is simultaneously a profound manifestation of God’s gracious action through his Word and Spirit, it is also something we are responsible for before God and can set about achieving in a sensible, systematic manner. Grant, we beseech Thee, O our God that Thy family, which has been saved by the Nativity of Thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ, may also quietly repose on Him as a perpetual Redeemer, Who with Thee gives correct teachings about the quest and necessary warnings about its pitfalls, and teaches us how to live life with proper care and respect. Almighty and everlasting God, Who by Thine Only-begotten Son hast made us to be a new creation for Thyself, preserve the works of Thy mercy, and cleanse us from all our ancient stains; that by the assistance of Thy grace we may be found in His form, in Whom in our substance dwells with Thee, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. “We know that they are blessed, for they have gone to dwell with their God,” Alma 24.22. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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A Great Soul Contains the Diary of the Human Race and Changes Lives for the Better!

December 11, 2019 3:18 am

It must have been midnight when I awoke. I do not recall the face of the clock; only the feeling of deep night, and that it was spring and that I wanted walk outside and talk to the Moon and Stars for a while. Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, perhaps we would endure our sadness with greater confidence than our joys, for they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown. People learn to listen to silence. We can hear the infinite number of sounds we never hear at all—the unending crystalline sounds of the cockatiels, a breeze blowing lightly through the golden hay, a thrush singing in the low bushes beyond the meadow. And we suddenly realize that this is something—the World of silence is populated by a myriad of creatures and a myriad of sounds. European existentialists, finally, succinctly characterize presence as dasein, which means, literally, to “be there.” Hell is other people. From the beginning humans have served the appetites of one another in the most varying ways, but these were always reducible to a single theme: the need for fuel for one’s own aggrandizement and immunity. Human use one another to assure their personal victory over death. The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed. No wonder people are addicted to war. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

When it comes to enemies and strangers, the ego can consign them to the limbo of death without even a second thought. Because they deny that they want control over their environment, others beings, and also deny their wish for immortality, modern beings live in illusion; and it is precisely because of this illusion that humankind cannot get control over social evils like war. This is what makes war irrational: each person has the same hidden problem, and as antagonists obsessively work their cross purposes, the result is truly demonic; the film Queen of the Damned summed this up beautifully. Not only enemies but even friends and loved ones are fair fuel for our own perpetuation. In our unconscious we daily and hourly deport all who stand in our way, all who have offended or injured us, if pressured, would be unwilling to sacrifice someone else in our place. The exception to this is of course the hero. We admire him or her precisely because he or she is willing to give one’s life for others instead of taking theirs for his or hers. Heroism is an unusual reversal of routine values, and it is another thing that makes war so uplifting, as humankind has long known: war is a ritual for the emergence of heroes, and so for the transmutation of common, selfish values. In war beings live their own ennoblement. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

However, what we are reluctant to admit is that the admiration of the hero is a vicarious catharsis of our own fears, fears that are deeply hidden; and this is what plunges us into uncritical hero worship: what the hero does seem so superlative to us. Thus from another point of view we see that it is true that beings are enslaved by their own illusions based on their repressions. The logic of scapegoating, then, is based on terrestrial narcissism and hidden fear. If luck is when the arrow hits the fellow next to you, then scapegoating is pushing the fellow into its path—with special alacrity if one is a stranger to you. A particularly pungent phrasing of the logic of scapegoating one’s own death is as though the sacrifice were to say to God after appraising how nature feeds voraciously of life, “If this is what you want, here, take it!—but leave me alone. If anyone still think that this is merely cleaver phrasing in the minds of alienated intellectuals trying to make private sense out of the evil of their World, let one consult the daily papers. Almost every year there is a recorded sacrifice of human life in remote areas of Chile to appease the Earthquake gods. There have been fifteen recent officially reported cases of human sacrifice in India—one being that of a four-year-old boy sacrificed to appease a Hindu goddess, and another involving a west Indian immigrant couple in England who sacrificed their 16-year-old son, following prayer and meditation, to ward off the death of the mother. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

In the narcissism of Earthly bodies, where each is imprisoned fatally in one’s own finite integument, everyone is alien to oneself and subject to the status of scapegoat for one’s own life. The logic of ending the lives of others in order to affirm our own life unlocks much that puzzles us in history, much that with out modern minds we seem unable to comprehend, such as the Roman arena games. If the terminating of a captive affirms the power of your life, how much does the actual massive staging of life-and-death struggles affirm a whole society? The continual grinding sacrifice of animal and human life in the arenas was all of a piece with the repressions of a society that was dedicated to war and that lived in the teeth of death. It was a perfect pastime to work off anxieties and show the ultimate personal control of death: the thumbs up or thumbs down on the gladiators. The more death you saw unfold before your eyes and the more you thrust your thumbs downward, the more you bought off your own life. And why was the crucifixion such a favorite form of execution? Because, I think, it was actually a controlled display of dying; the small seat on the cross held the body up so that dying would be prolonged. The longer people looked at the death of someone else, the more pleasure they could have in sensing the security and good fortune of their own survival. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The whole meaning of a victory celebration is that we experience the power of our lives and the visible decrease of the enemy: it is a sort of staging of the whole meaning of war, the demonstration of the essence of it—which is why the public display, humiliation, and execution of prisoners is so important. They are weak and die: we are strong and live. The Roman arena games were, in this sense, a continued staging of victory even in the absence of war; each civilian experienced the same power that one otherwise had to earn in war. If we are repulsed by the bloodthirstiness of those games, it is because we choose to banish from our consciousness what true excitement is. For beings, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as one survives transfixed with rapture. Today only those such as racing-car drivers and sports parachutists can stage these kinds of dramas in civilian life. It seems that the Nazis really began to dedicated themselves to their large-scale sacrifices of life after 1941 when they were beginning to lose and suspected at some dim level of awareness that they might. They hastened the infamous final solution of the Jewish people toward the closing days of their power, and executed their own political prisoners—like Dietrich Bonhoeffer—literally moments before the end. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Retreating Germans in Russian and Italy were especially apt to kill with no apparent motive, just to leave a heap of bodies. It is obvious they were offering last-minute hostages to death, stubbornly affirming in a blind, organismic way, “I will not die, you will—see?” It seems that they wanted some kind of victory over evil, and when it could not be the Russians, then it would be the Jews and even other Germans; any substitute scapegoat would have to do. In the recent Bengali revolt, the Western Pakistanis often killed anyone they saw, and when they did not see anyone, they would throw grenades into houses; they piled up a toll of over 3 million despised Bengalis. It is obvious that beings kill to cleanse the Earth of one’s the perceive as tainted ones, and that is what victory means and how it commemorates one’s life and power: humans are bloodthirsty to ward off the flow of their own blood. And it seems further, out of the war experiences of recent times, when humans see that they are trapped and excluded from longer Earthly duration, one says, “If I cannot have it, then neither can you.” Other things that we have found to understand have been hatreds and feuds between tribes and families, and continual butchery practiced for what seemed petty, prideful motives of personal honor and revenge. However, the idea of sacrifice as self-preservation explains these very directly. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

The characteristic of primitives and of family groups was that they represented a sort of soul pool of immortality-substance. If you depleted this pool by one member, you yourself became more mortal. It is my opinion that this ideology offers a basis for understanding both the bitter hatreds and feuds between North American Indian tribes, and the feuds or vendettas currently practiced in many European countries. Whether it was the theft of women under exogamy, of the murder of male members of the tribe, it was always a matter of avenging serious offenses upon the spiritual economy of the community which, being robbed of one of its symbols of spiritual revenue, sought to cancel or at least avenge the shortages created in the immortality account. This kind of action is natural to primitives especially, who believe in the balance of nature and are careful not to overly deplete the store of life-stuff. Revenge of equals the freeing of life-stuff into the common reservoir from which it can then be reassigned. The primitive notion of life-stuff right up to modern society is a motive for genocidal war and even the everyday secular process of justice: the guilty one is punished in order to return one’s life-stuff to the community. I do not know how much of a burden of explanation we would want to put on the pool of life-stuff in modern, secular society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

For one thing, most people no longer believe in the balance of nature, they think that just curbing greenhouse gases, and electric cars are the solution to everything, but watering the trees in the forest, building more reservoirs, and desalinating water would be more effective. Yet, they are not a balancing economical force. Meaning politicians are pushing electric cars to get people off fossil fuels and make other car producers the big manufactures. Curbing greenhouses gases would help, but by planting trees, and grass is another way to do this. Furthermore, some electricity comes from coal, and many cities are already having problems providing electricity to communities and it is hard to find charging stations. Another issue is, we do not often grant to others the same life quality that we have. However, whether or not we believe in a steady pool of life-stuff, numbers are important to humans: if we buy off our own death with that of others, we want to buy it off at a good price. In wartime, we mourn our dead without undue depression because we are able to celebrate an equal if not greater number of deaths in the ranks of the enemy. This explains the obsessive nature of body counting of the enemy as well as the universal tendency to exaggerate one’s losses and minimize those of one’s own side. When their own lives are at stake is only when people can lie so blatantly and eagerly. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

The exaggerations expressed by people whose lives are in danger always seem silly to outsiders to the conflict precisely because their lives are not involved. We now have to believe that all warfare and revolutionary struggle are simply a development of feuding and vendettas, where the basic thing at stake is a dramatization of development of nationalism in our time—the fantastic bitterness between nations, the unquestioned loyalty to one’s own, the consuming wars fought in the nae of the fatherland or the motherland—unless we saw it in this light. Our nation and its allies represent those who qualify for eternal survival; we are the chose people. From the time when the Athenians exterminated the Melians because they would not ally with them in war to the modern extermination of the Africans, they dynamic has been the same: all those who join together under one banner are alike and so qualify for the privilege of immortality; all those who are different and outside that banner are excluded from the blessings of eternity. The vicious sadism of war is not only a testing of God’s favor to our side, it is also a proof that the enemy is mortal: “Look how we kill him.” Cruelty can arise from the aesthetic outrage we sometimes feel in the presence of strange individuals who seem to be making out all right. Have they found some secret passage to eternal life? It cannot be. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

If those unusual individuals with the unique fashion and behavior are acceptable, then what about my claim to superiority? Can someone like that be my equal in God’s eyes? Does he, that one, dare hope to live forever too—and perhaps crowd me out? I do not like it. All I know is, if he is right, I am wrong. So different and funny-looking. I think he is trying to fool the gods with his sly ways. Let us show him up. He is not very strong. For start, see what he will do when I out shine him. Sadism naturally absorbs the fear of death because by actively manipulating and hating people keep their organism absorbed in the outside World; this keeps self-reflection and the fear of death in a state of low tension. When people hold the fate of others in their hands, they feel they are masters over life and death. As long as they continue shooting, they think more of killing than of being killed. Or, as a wise gangster one put it in a movie, “When killers stop killing, they get killed.” This is already the essence of a theory of sadism. However, more than that it is the clinical proof of the natural wisdom of tyrannical leaders from the time of the divine kingship up to the present day. In times of peace, without an external enemy, the fear that feeds war tends to find its outlet within the society, in the hatred between classes and races, in the everyday violence of crime, of automobile accidents, and even the self-violence of suicide. War sucks much of this up into one fulcrum and shoots it outward to make an unknown enemy pay for our internal sins. How rotational this irrationality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

To teach is to transform by informing, to develop a zest for lifelong learning, to help pupil become students—mature independent learners, architects of an exciting, challenging future. Teaching at its best is a kind of communion, a meeting and a merging of the minds. The library is not only there as a socially owned and governed institution, a true people’s information service; it is staffed by men and women who maintain high respect for intellectual values. Because they are also the traditional keeps of the books, the librarians have a healthy sense of the hierarchical relationship between data and ideas, facts and knowledge. The enlightened individual is no propagandist, never aggressively intrudes one’s views in conversation nor forces one’s conclusions on others in an argumentative manner. One accepts people as they mentally are. One enters the inner stillness as a learner, as one who is sensitive to the Interior. Word and capable of responding to it. Such response is as far beyond the guidance of the good religious being by a moral conscience as that in turn is beyond the primitive being’s instincts, appetites, and desires. If in some ways one is as human as everyone else, in other ways one is unlike other beings. This is inevitable because one has gone ahead and surpassed one’s fellows. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Insofar as one is aware of other beings and of the objects which surround one, one expresses the Mind which is the Real. And insofar as one may be either lifted at times out of one’s little ego, or endowed with insight which sees beyond that ego, does one express it further still. The intellectual argues where the enlightened beings announces. It is the difference between arguing from theory and announcing from experience. To live in lonely contemplation of the secrets deep down in the heart, to place all ambitions and restless desires on a funeral pyre and burn them up in a heap—these things demand the highest courage possible to a being. Those who would denominate one who has achieved them as a coward, because one does not run with the crowd who fight for pelf and self, make a ghastly mistake. One will bear witness in thought and speech to the joy of this awakened consciousness. If a being deserts blood relation, it is only to take on spiritual ones. If one leaves one’s Earthly house, it is only to enter the monastery, a spiritual one. If one forsakes the society of wife and children, it is only to enjoy that of teacher and students. Thus absolute escape is a mirage and cannot be found. The kind of quality of one’s bounds can be changed and transformed but not really served. The only attainable freedom lies deep within. It is invisible and mental. This is what the enlightened being enjoys. One may be weighted with business responsibilities and surrounded by a family, but in one’s heart nothing holds. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Is there then no real need of a master? The answer is “No!” for some people, but “Yes!” for most people. One is needed to wake up the sleeper by telling one the highest truth from the very first time, and then descend by degrees to the stages while still holding on to the truth. The master serves only by showing a seeking person one’s real self, one’s soul: or holding a mirror up to one. This can be called, also, giving one a glimpse, or, more truthfully, being used by God as a vehicle to do so. One who is working under the guidance of a master is not exempt from making mistakes, but one will make fewer and expose them sooner and correct them quicker than one who is not. I write all this in no sneering nor disparaging manner, but rather as one who understands sympathetically the need of most beginners and many intermediates to find guidance outside themselves for the all-sufficient reason that they cannot find it inside. Indeed it is because I have been a disciple that I myself know why others become one, and can approve of their actions. However, that experience is also why I know the limitations and disservices of a discipleship. To say that no teacher is necessary is to set oneself up as a teacher by that very statement. Self-instruction cannot be as correct and efficacious as instruction by an expert, a specialist, or a fully experienced person who can also communicate adequately as a teacher. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

It is an absolute necessity that whoever seeks to realize the spiritual Truth must seek out a guru. This injunction has hypnotized readers and hearers. We thank our teachers for exemplifying the best of the education profession. Teachers give the students hope and the means to fulfill their aspirations as they guide, nourish, encourage, discipline and love their students. The young and mature minds that teacher mold are our leaders of today and tomorrow. They are making a difference in preparing them for the challenges to come by encouraging them to make a lifelong commitment to learning. The master teacher that lurks within each of us is likelier to burst forth within the intellectual atmosphere that collegiality can create. We need to build up an intimate inner relationship with a being whose compassion is wide enough to understand us and whose power is developed enough to help us. It does not matter that one is in the afterlife. Those who know only a single mode of living, that of the extrovert, or a single mode of thinking, that which is sense-based, need to expose themselves for sufficient time to the influence of a spiritual master before they can begin to become even dimly aware that they have a soul. However, since a fully evolved master is hard to find, something else must act as one’s next best substitute. This must necessarily be an inspired writing produced by such a being. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

The truth is that nearly all aspirants need the help of expert human guides and printed books when they are actively seeking the Spirit, and of printed books at least when they are merely beginning to seek. It has long been clear to me that teaching is at once the most difficult and the most honorable of professions. We have all been touched by example, guidance, and motivation of a teacher whose often-reluctant pupil we were. We can recall a moment of insight or truth when caught in the act of learning. None of us may owe larger debts for whatever we may have become, for whatever we may have become, for whatever we may have been able to accomplish, than we owe to teachers in our past lives whose total devotion to young people and their discipline has been their chief reward and the reason we honor teachers. It is not essential to find a teacher in the flesh—one may be in print. A book may become a quite effective teacher and guide. The closest we will ever come to an orderly Universe is a good library. Information is a basic human right and the fundamental foundation for the formation of a republic institution. My childhood library was small enough not to be intimidating. And yet I felt the whole World was contained in those two rooms. I could walk any aisle and smell wisdom. However, the death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

In the absence of an enlightened individual’s personal society, one may have recourse to the best substitute—a enlightened being’s printed writings. Inspired texts, portions of scriptures, great being’s writings and sayings offer guidance on the course of action to be followed, the ethical considerations to be heeded, the decisions to be made under certain pressures, crises, or confrontations—decisions whose consequences are often quite grave. Who can price the value of such readings at such times? Spiritual formation is, in practice, the way of rest for the weary and overloaded, of the easy yoke and the light burden of cleaning the inside of the cup of the dish, of the good tree that cannot bear bad fruit. And it is the path along which God’s commandments are found to be not heavy, not burdensome. It is the way of those learning as disciples or apprentices of Jesus to do all things that I have commanded you, within the context of this I have been given say over everything in Heaven and Earth and look, I am with you every minute. However—I emphasize, because it is so important—the primary learning here is not about how to act, just as the primary wrongness or problem in human life is not what we do. Often what human beings do is so horrible that we can be excused, perhaps, for thinking that all that matters is stopping it. However, this is an evasion of the real horror: the heart from which the terrible actions come. In both cases, it is who we are in our thoughts, feelings, dispositions, and choices—in the inner life—that counts. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Profound transformations there is the only thing that can definitely conquer outward evil. It is very hard to keep this straight. Failure to do so is a primary cause of failure to grow spiritually. Love, we hear, is patient and kind. Then we mistakenly try to be loving by acting patiently and kindly—and quickly fail. We should always do the best we can in action, of course; but little progress is to be made in that arena until we advance in love itself—the genuine inner readiness and longing to secure the good of others. Until we make significant progress there, our patience and kindness will be shallow and short-lived at best. It is love itself—not loving behavior, or even the wish for intent to love—that has the power to always protect, always true, always hope, put up with anything, and never quit. Merely trying to act lovingly will lead to despair and to the defeat of love. It will make us angry and hopeless. However, taking love itself—God’s kind of love—into the depths of our being though spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will be surprising even to ourselves, at first. And this love will then become a constant source of joy and refreshment to ourselves and others. Indeed it will be, according to promise, a well of water springing up to eternal life—not an additional burden to carry through life, as acting lovingly surely would be. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The invitation to become healed—psychotherapy begins when a person cannot live one’s life further in the ways one has, and consults with somebody who intends to help one. The fact that a person would arrive at such an impasse should provoke wonder, since all of us are gifted with intelligence that could guide us out of existential cul-de-sac. However, people arrive at this point, and there are those who would be of help. How does the sufferer reach one’s stalemate? I believe one chooses it. I agree with the existentialist thinkers that every person chooses one’s ways of being in the World. However, I would go further and assert that people choose their ways of being for somebody. A being chooses one’s way of being for oneself, or for somebody else. One’s choices, naturally, yield consequences. The way a person has chosen to exist was selected from possible alternative ways. It was selected because it seemed to be a way to fulfill or preserve values. These values include, for example, survival, identity, status, the love of another person, money and so forth. If we look now at some particular being’s present condition, whether one be sick or well, we can ask, “Of what way of being is this condition an outcome? At whose invitation did the fellow choose this way of being and not some other? One’s own? One’s mother’s One’s teacher’s? And we can ask further, “What values were fulfilled, and which sacrificed, when the fellow chose and followed this way?” #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Some people are skeptical of a natural spirit and some writers deny its being. However, Christopher Columbus has established it by argument, and believed that it was produced in the liver and feed the nourishing soule, which is seated in every part of the body. The spirit is supplied by the blood. The spirit whilest is shines in brightness and spreads itself though all the Theatre of the body, as the Sun over the Earth, it blesses all parties with joy and loyalty and dyes them with a rosy color; but the contrary when it is retracted, intercepted or extinguished, all things become horrid, wane, and pale, and finally do utterly perish. So wonderful are the powers of the soul. “Suffer not yourself to be led away by any vain or foolish thing; suffer not the devil to lead away your heart again after those wicked harlots. Behold, O my son, how great iniquity ye brought upon the Zoramites; for when they saw your conduct they would not believe my words. And now the Spirit of the Lord doth say unto me: Command thy children to do good, least they lead away the hearts of many people to destruction; therefore I command you, my son, in the fear of God, that ye refrain from your iniquities. That ye turn to the Lord with all your mind, might, and strength; that ye lead away the hearts of no more to do wickedly; but rather return unto them, and acknowledge your faults and that wrong which ye have done,” Alma 39.11-13. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The enlightened does not wish to be regarded as other than one is; not for one the canonization of a saint or the adoration of a god. Insight, and its application to human living, is the final fulfilment for all of us, shall be our natural condition. Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that the new Birth of Thine Only-begotten Son in the flesh may set free those whom the old bondage detains under the yoke of sin; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord this compensating principle acts as a control and balance. He is not ruled by the reaction, as others are, nor blinded by it to an egoistic judgement. Christ looks out dispassionately upon the course of human life—which includes one’s own life—as if one were not personally involved in it, yet he does whatever ought to be done as if he were. Grant, we beseech Thee, O our God, that Thy family, which has been saved by the Nativity of Thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ, may also quietly repose on Him as a perpetual Redeemer, Who with we shall cling steadyfastly throughout our lives to the writings of our illumined master, returning to him again and again in prayer. His works are the truest of all, pure gold and not alloys. There are also wise beings whose thought goes deep and they understand clearly that our spiritual life is our way to salvation. Their record exists, their sayings and writings also. Their study is worthwhile, their precepts can be put to the test in practical everyday living. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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

December 10, 2019 2:59 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 9, 2019 6:40 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is not generally recognized that the question, “Am I a Christian?” can no longer be answered in any significant manner by citing denominational, ethnic, or national names or symbols. There are now 33,800 different Christian denominations on Earth. Clearly, an adequate answer must go deeper than our religious associations. It must refer to what we are in our heart—before God, in the depths of our being, always the focal point of Christian spiritual formation. Such an answer has always been required “before God.” Who can deny it? However, that has not always been recognized and given adequate emphasis among us—especially not in the recent past—although we are increasingly doing so today. This change is an extremely good thing and a highly promising departure from the recent past of Christians Worldwide. “Behold, my heart cries: Wo unto this people. Come out in judgement, O God, and hide their sins, and wickedness, and abominations from before thy face!” reports Moroni 9.15. O God, Who makest us glad with the yearly expectation of our redemption, grant that as we joyfully receive Thine Only-begotten Son as our Redeemer, we may also see Him without fear when He cometh as our Judge. Our Lord’s realization of the truth does not weigh down on him. He finds it natural and does not feel it to be exceptional, although do others. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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There is One Place Where I Can Find Out Who I am and What I am Going to Become—And that is the Soul!

December 8, 2019 5:09 am

The cockatiels were singing a celestial melody in the early afternoon. Their rhythmic ditty mingled with the soft sweetness of the just-blooming Winter Jasmine, Snowdrops, and the air so crisp and cool you could snap it with your fingers. The lush shade of the evergreen trees was offset by the autumnal flashed of red, orange and yellow. Meghan breathed in the air that was full of the promise of the coming Winter. In the single matter of learning prayer alone one will encounter all sorts of obstacles within oneself and difficulties without. If one places oneself under the training of an expert preceptor, whose long experience in this matter and natural gift for guiding others makes one’s advice mentally enlightening and practically useful, the hardships will be much more easily and quickly overcome. The beginner cannot take one’s lessons from the skies. Even if only to impart the right atmosphere and inculcate the right ideas, one has to find a teacher. When they need to speak, you listen; when they need to listen, you speak; when they need to question, you answer; and when they need to answer, you question. Knowing when is just a part of what makes one a great teacher. Teachers inspire dreams, shape lives, and give us hope for the future. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The use of a teacher is, firstly, suggestive. One’s influence is a definite assistance to incline us to travel along the proper path. It is, secondly, protective, for under one’s constant guidance we learn to be weary of pitfalls. More people need to spend as much time looking into their soul, as they spend on social media. When the lights go out in our brains, the Dark Ages are coming again! The illuminate stands on the very apex of the pyramid of knowledge. That is why one can understand the position of all others and sympathize with them, too. The being of the instinctivists lives the past of the species, as the being of the behaviorists lives the present of one’s social system. The former is a machine that can only produce social patterns of the present. Instinctivism and behaviorism have one basic premise in common: that beings have no psyche with its own structure and its own laws. For instinctivism, the same sense holds true. Some psychologist may criticize others dealing with humans (Humanpsychologen) who claim that anything psychic can only be explained psychologically, for instance, on the basis of psychological premises. (The “only” is a slight distortion of their position of the sake of a better argument). #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

On the contrary, if there is an area where we certainly cannot find the explanation for psychic events and experiences, it is the area of the psyche itself; this is so for the same reason that we cannot find an explanation for digestion in the digestive processes, but in those special ecological exposed a number of organisms to selective pressures which made them assimilate not only inorganic foodstuffs, but also those of an organic nature. In the same way psychical processes are also achievements which have come about as a result of selective pressures of life—and species—preserving value. Their explanation is in every sense pre-psychological. Put in simpler language, it is maintained that one can explain psychological data by the evolutionary process alone. The crucial point here is what is meant by “explain.” If, for instance, one wants to know how the effect of fear is possible as the result of the evolution of the brain from the lowest to the highest animals, then this is a task for those scientists who investigate the evolution of the brain. However, if one wants to explain why a person is frightened, the data on evolution will not contribute much to the answer: the explanation must be essentially a psychological one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Perhaps the person is threatened by a stronger enemy, or is coping with one’s own repressed aggression, or suffers from a sense of powerlessness, or a paranoid element in one makes one feel persecuted, or—many other factors that alone or in combination may explain one’s fright. To want to explain the fright of a particular person by evolutionary process is plainly futile. There is a premise that the only approach to the study of human phenomena is the evolutionary one, means that we understand the psychical process in a being exclusively by knowing how, in the process of evolution, one became what one is. Similarly, it is suggested that digestive processes are to be explained in terms of conditions as they existed hundreds of millions of years ago. If the physician was concerned with the evolution of digestion, rather than with the causes of the particular symptom in this particular patient, could a physician dealing with disturbances of the digestive tract help one’s patient? For some, evolution becomes the only science, and absorbs all other sciences dealing with humans. It seems that if humans understand the evolutionary process which made them become what they are now, humans understand themselves only and sufficiently. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

In spite of the great differences between instinctivistic and behavioristic theory, they have a common basic orientation. They both exclude the person, the behaving being, from their field of vision. Whether beings are the product of conditioning, or the product of terrestrial evolution, one is exclusively determined by conditions outside oneself; of has no part in one’s own life, no responsibility, and not even a trace of freedom. Humans are puppets, controlled by strings—instinct or conditioning. However, this theory holds some weight with corrupt politicians, the TV News media, the evil wealthy, and corrupt fractions of law enforcement influences individuals to spy on their neighbors, act out, and set people they do not like up, in lieu of dropping criminal charges against the aggressor, and/or illegally giving the aggressor government benefits and cash payments to target certain innocent individuals. Essentially, these aggressors are no longer operating through their own will, they are now puppets and slaves controlled by a tyrannical faction of beings or an organization. At this level, sacrifice is an admission of the pitiful finitude and powerlessness of humans in the face of mysterium tremendum (a mystery before which humanity both trembles and is fascinated, is both repelled and attracted. Thus, God can appear both as wrathful or awe-inspiring, on the one hand, and as gracious and loveable, on the other) of the Universe, the immensity of what transcends one and negates one’s significance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

At this level sacrifice affirms reality, bows to it, and attempts to conciliate it. Sacrifice, then, is not an irrational aberration, but a basic human reflex of truth, a correct expiation of natural guilt. One basic motive of society is the symbolic expiation of guilt, which we see as a very complex phenomenon grounded in the truth of the human condition. Guilt is one of the serious motives of humans, not to be tossed off lightly. If we are to understand the happenings of history, these happenings have to be seen as resulting from the composite of human motives, not simply from the aberrations of power of the elusiveness of a dream. The new technology and the promise of abundance are the dream that keeps humankind mesmerized; oppressiveness of tyranny would not have been tolerated but for the beneficial goods that flowed out of the megamachines. However, people bear tyranny because of its rewards not only to their stomachs but also their souls. They support tyranny by willingly marching off to war not only because that reduces the frustration they feel at home toward authority, not only because it enables them to project their hatreds on the enemy, but also because it expiates their guilt. How else explain the parents that we read about during each war who, when told about the tragic death of their son or daughter, have expressed regret that they had not more to give? #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

This age-old essence of primitive gift giving; it chills us only by the nature of the sacrifice that they make so willingly and by the secondhand god to whom it is offered—the nation-state. However, it is not cynical or callous: in guilt one gives with a melting heart and with choking tears because one is guilty, one is transcended by the unspeakable majesty and superlativeness of the natural and cultural World, against which one feels realistically humbled; by giving one draws oneself into that power and merges one’s existence with it. Furthermore—and this takes us deeper into the problem—sacrifice and scapegoating are not technical tricks to overcome anxiety. The spilling of blood, because it is a life substance, may be a magical effort to grow crops. Of course. In one of its forms scapegoating is also magical in origin: a ritual is performed over a goat, by which all the tribe’s uncleanliness (sin) is transferred to the animal; it is then driven off or killed, leaving the village clean. It is the same way that Jesus was done and Queen Akasha in Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned. This act not only represented an arrangement of life but a real spiritual purge that qualifies one to triumph over death. I doubt that enslaved people were sacrificed at an upper-class feast of the Maya merely to give it a properly genteel elegance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

It is true that primitives have often spilled blood in order simply to gloat and strut over an enemy; but I think the motive is more elemental than merely to give to feasts a pleasant veneer. Humans spill blood because it makes their hearts glad and fills out their organisms with a sense of vital power; ceremoniously killing captives is a way of affirming power over life, and therefore over death. The sacrificer may seem nonchalant about it, but this is because beings like to experience their power effortlessly and smoothly, as though they were accustomed by nature to dispose of the strongest force she had to offer. (Detroit car makers who sell power and speed—with their business person’s realism about the truths of life—have long known this.) Also, consider gift giving, it relates not only to guilty but fundamentally to power. The sacrifice is a gift, a gift to the gods which is directed to the flow of power, to keeping the life force moving there where it has been blocked by sin. With the sacrifice humans feeds the gods to give them more power so that one may have more. The sacred food has the strength of life. The sacrifice of living things adds visible life power to the stream of life; the more living things sacrificed, the more extravagant release of power, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

When a king died, the ancient custom of sacrificing wives, enslaved people, and cavaliers was not only that they should continue to serve the master in the in the invisible World—that was a matter of course. What they achieved by suffering and dying together as living sacrifices was to bring extravagant new life into being. The sacrifice was a means for establishing a communion with the invisible World, making a circle on the flow of power, a bridge over which it could pass. So, for example, in the simple building sacrifice when one took possession of a piece of ground: the sacrifice expulsed the demonic spirits in the soil and released powers that literally purged the place and made building upon it safe. Now this idea of flux and flow of power may not be so hard for us to understand today—as we saw Aaliyah was killed in a plane crash on 25 August 2001, and the 9 September 2001, the twin towers were taken down and nearly 4,000 lives were immediately lost. Some believe it is evidence of a primitive culture in American practicing rituals. The Nazi experience is also a grim refresher course on the metaphysics of mass slaughter. Nazis were animated by a spiritual concept: they had a whole philosophy of blood and soil which contained the belief that death nourishes life. We recognize the familiar archaic idea that the sacrifice of life makes life flow more plentifully. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Because of this idea that death mystically replenishes life and the birth of insurance companies for people and other assets, it has required insurance companies to go a step further to prevent the loss of life by offering Kidnap and Ransom Insurance that also covers extortion. This is an effort to keep people from sacrificing innocent lives to collect a cash payout. These insurance companies offer for $2,000, for instance, $5 million in coverage to pay to have a person who is illegally detained released, pay their ransom or pay extortion demands. Furthermore, a death potlatch is what we discussed before when stated that people think death mystically replenishes life. Well, Dr. Karl Brandt, plenipotentiary in charge of all medical activities in the Reich, when asked about his attitude toward the killing of human beings in the course of medical experiments, replied, “Do you think that one can obtain any worthwhile fundamental results without a definite toll of lives? The same goes for technologic development. You cannot build a great bridge, a gigantic building—you cannot establish a speed record without deaths!” In similar vein, many SS men took a curious pride in the fact that even in peacetime they had many fatalities during “realistic” military training. Human bodies were encased in the concrete fortifications and bunkers, as though such bodies could give strength to inanimate matter. And a man was encased in the concrete of the original Bay Bride in Oakland, California USA, which was recently demolished. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The psychological question is for most disputants the only question. When your ordinary doctor of divinity has proved to one’s own satisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called “conscious” must be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when your popular-science enthusiast has proclaimed that “apriorism” (the doctrine that knowledge rests upon principles that are self-evident to reason or are presupposed by experience in general) is an exploded superstition, and that our moral judgments have gradually resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these persons thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said. The familiar pair of names, Intuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly used now to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, really refer to the psychological questions alone. The discussion of this question hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossible to enter upon it all within the limits of this paper. So many of our human ideals must have arisen from the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and reliefs from pain. Association with many remote pleasures will unquestionably make a thing significant of good ness in our minds; and the more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious will its source appear to be. However, it is surely impossible to explain all our sentiments and preferences in this simple way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The more minutely psychological studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are practically all that pure empiricism can admit. Take the love of stimulants; take bashfulness, acrophobia (the terror of high places), motion sickness syndrome, haemophobia (to faint at the sight of blood), the susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics—no one of these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility. They go with other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing in us for which some use may not be found. However, their origin is in incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whose original features arose with no reference to the perception of such discords and harmonies as these. Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this secondary and brain-born kind. They deal with directly felt fitness between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of habit and presumptions of utility. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The moment you get beyond the coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, The Decalogues (The Ten Commandments) and Poor Richard’s Almanacs (a collection of periodicals, which contain humor, information, and proverbial wisdom), you fall into schemes and positions which to the eye of common-sense are fantastic and overstrained. The sense for abstract justice which some person have is as eccentric a variation, from the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or for the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of others. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness, and so forth, are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing tastes better, and what is all that we can say. Experience of consequences may truly teach us what things are wicked, but what have consequences to do with what is mean and vulgar? If a being has shot his wife’s paramour, by reason of what subtile repugnancy in things is that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again? Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a World in which Messrs (plural of MR. for example, Mr. Hollingsworth, Mr. Toth, Mr. Wallace). #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Francois Marie Charles Fourier, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? To what, once more, but subtile brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests against the entire race-tradition of retributive justice? –I refer to Tolstoi with his ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his substitution of the punitive ideal. All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go as much beyond what can be ciphered out from the laws of association as the delicacies of sentiment possible between a pair of young lovers go beyond such precepts of the etiquette to be observed during engagement as are printed in manuals of social form. No! Purely inward forces are certainly at work here. All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Our ideals have certainly many sources. They are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained, and pains to be escaped. And for having s constantly perceived this psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school. Whether or not such applause must be extended to that school’s other characteristics will appear as we take up more questions. The vital spirit has a special affinity for the body; indeed, it abhors leaving the flesh, because it has no connaturals neat at hand. It may, perhaps, rush to the extremities of the body, to meet something that it loves, but it is loth to go forth. Novital spirits have two appetites. They desire to multiply. Unhappily finding nothing like: One drop of water moves towards another, and flame to flame; but much more does this appear in the escape of the spirit into the external air, because it is not carried to a particle like itself, but to a very World of connaturals…the going forth and escape of the spirit into the air is a double action arising partly from the appetite of the spirit, and partly from the appetite of the air; for the common air is a needy thing, and seizes everything with avidity, as spirits, odours, rays, sounds and the like. The vital spirit is held to exercise two functions that nonvital spirits do not reveal. First, it seems to play a controlling role in the governing the growth and decay of body parts and tissues. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The lifeless spirit maintains itself by feeding on adjacent parts. The amount and rate of its feeding determine the time span of its host’s existence. Since inanimate things exist far longer than animate beings, the vital spirit, present only in things living, is in part responsible for the body’s growth, sustenance, and corruption. It disturbs and restrains and intensifies and increases the processes involved in the consumption or depredation of the human body and the repair or refreshment thereof. In the most direct of ways, then, the vital spirit is vital. The vital spirit, in the second place, seems to be the efficient cause of all actions and functions undertaken by the body’s principal organs and members. Digestion is the function of the stomach, seeing that of the eye, and so on. The action in each case is properly that of the organ and member involved. They can be regarded as the material cause of the action. However, no action, no matter how specific to a member, would come if the vital spirit were not present: The actions or functions of the individual members follow the nature of the members themselves; as attraction, retention, digestion, assimilation, separation, excretion, perspiration, and even the sense itself, depend upon the properties of the several organs, as the stomach, liver, heart, spleen, gall, brain, eye, ear, and the rest. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

However, yet none of these actions would ever be set in motion without the vigour, presence, and heat of the vital spirit. Thus, the vital spirit is some sort of force-carrying, or force-bearing, substance without which no animal or human activity is possible. Perhaps the notion of “vehicle” fits here. If so, we are reminded of the efficient cause and that it is nothing else than the vehicle of form. So spiritual transformation, the renovation of the human heart, is an inescapable human problem with no human solution. It is something that can be learned from a survey of World history, World cultures, and past and present efforts to deal with human life by religion, education, law, and medicine. And when we take into consideration the many techniques that are taught in the various psychologies and competing spiritualities of our own day, this observation unfortunately stands firm. Genuine transformation of the whole person into the goodness and power seen in Jesus and his Father, God—the only transformation adequate to the human self-remains the necessary goal of human life. However, it is possessed beyond the reach of programs of inner transformation that draw merely on the human spirit—even when the human spirit is itself treated and ultimately divine. And spiritual formation has now presented itself as a hopeful possibility for responding to the crying, unmet need of the human soul. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The hope springs once again for a response to the need that is both deeply rooted in Christian traditions and powerfully relevant to circumstances of contemporary life. “And then shall ye know that I am an honest person, and that I am sent unto you from God,” reports Helaman 9.36. O, God, Who makest us glad with the yearly expectation of our redemption, grant that as we joyfully receive Thine Only-begotten Son as our Redeemer, we may also see Him without fears when He cometh as our Judge. Only through our Lord, who with Thee four things from which the Master is entirely free, we come to understand that God has no foregone conclusions, no arbitrary pre-determinations, no obstinacy, and no egoism. Grant, O merciful God, that for the reception of the transcendent mystery of Thy Son’s Nativity, the minds of believers may be prepared, and also the hearts of unbelievers subdued. Through the same Jesus Christ our Lord who is working for an infinite duration of time, peace will come. Therefore, we must be infinitely patient. O God, Who art pleased to save, by the Nativity of Thy Christ, the race of beings, which was mortally wounded in its chief, grant us this healing blessing. God we beseech Thee, that we may not cleave to the author of our perdition, but be transferred to the fellowship of our Redeemer, Who with Thee the plane of negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviour does not exist. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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These popular design feature clean lines of classical and early American architecture. The design elements include reflect the highest in moral and artistic merit. There are great technological advances for a nation of nesters with open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes. Cresleigh homes creates havens from the strain and bustle of the outside World. A number of these homes exist around the World and are seen as cozy retreats from the harsh clamor of daily life. Take a pictorial stroll through some of the glorious Cresleigh homes to learn about the architecture, furniture, and design that fascinates us all. Many of these houses are reminiscent of the Queen Anne era with, Eastlake, Stick and Shingle styles and the Arts and Crafts Movement. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/

It is the Work of the Enlightened to Show People What they Cannot See for themselves—their Own Higher Possibilities!

December 7, 2019 2:11 am

That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend, and a good soul. When I look into my soul, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it. Our neighborhoods represent the best and last frontier in our collaborative efforts to advocate for and improve the lives of our community members. It is within the structure of neighborhoods that our family develops, incorporates values, and even learn the skills necessary for responsible citizenship. If you thoroughly know anything of value, teach it to others. Healthier personalities have the ability to find and maintain relationships of love and friendships in the World. This ability insures that a healthier person will have access to relief from the existential loneliness in which we all live. It will be noted that I used the term “relief.” Loneliness is not a disease of which one can be cured; it is instead an inescapable fact of human existence. Less healthy personalities, cut off as they are from the fount of their real selves, find themselves terrible company. They cannot long tolerate solitude, and they run willy-nilly into busy-work, or superficial companionship with others. They do not, however, truly encounter another person and enter into dialogue with one. Hence, the feeling of loneliness, of not being known and understood, chronically nags at them like a stone in their shoe or a headache. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The healthier personality, because one is less self-concealing and has readier access to one’s own fantasy, feelings, and memories, is less afraid of solitude when this is one’s lot; and when one is with others, one can feel secure enough in one’s own worth that one can let encounter and dialogue happen. During the process of such dialogue, the shell which encapsulates one as a separate, isolated being ruptures; and one’s inner World expands to include the received World of experience of the other. When the dialogue ends, one has experienced oneself in the new dimensions evoked by the other person, and one has learned of the personal World of another—thus one has enlarged and changed. The less healthy personality defends oneself against being so affected and changed in one’s contact with others. One “rubs shells,” or clinks one’s character armor against that of the other person, but does not meet the other. There is no encounter. Just as a healthy personality dares to let oneself be the one he or she is, so does he respect, even cherish and defend, the “suchness,” the idiosyncrasy, of the other person in one’s World. One eschews sneaky efforts to manipulate the feelings, thoughts, and actions of the other; hence one truly experiences the other person as an other, as a source of being, different in some respect from oneself and similar to one in other ways. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The less healthy person dares neither to let oneself be, nor to trust the being when one is not trying to control the being. In one’s transactions, one seeks always to influence the other, if in no other modality than in the way in which one will be seen and experienced by the other. In the extreme instances of unhealthy personality, the individual actually (this can only be stated metaphorically) detaches one’s ego from one’s body and functions as a spectator and manipulator of one’s own depersonalized body as it transacts with the other person. This depersonalized body is then manipulated before the other, in the hope that the other’s experience of and responses toward this counterfeit person can thus be controlled: robots performing before others who are perceived as robots. However, when people make a profession of their stigma, the majority group leaders are obliged to have dealings with representatives of other categories, and so find themselves breaking out of the closed circle of their own kind. Instead of leaning on their crutch, they get to play golf with it, ceasing, in terms of social participation, to be representative of the people they represent. Also, those who professionally present the viewpoint of their category may introduce some systematic bias in the presentation simply because they are sufficiently involved in the problem to write about it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Although any particular stigma category is likely to have professionals who take different lines, and may even support publications which advocate different programs, there is uniform tacit agreement that the situation of the individual with this particular stigma is worth attention. Whether a writer takes a stigma very seriously or makes light of it, one must define it as something worth writing about. This minimal agreement, even when there are no others, helps to consolidate belief in the stigma as a basis for self-conception. Here again representatives are not representative, for representation can hardly come from those who give no attention to their stigma, or who are relatively unlettered. I do not mean to suggest here that professionals provide the stigmatized with the sole public source of reminder as to their situation in life; there are other reminders. Each time someone with a particular stigma makes a spectacle of oneself by breaking a law, winning a prize, or becoming a first of one’s kind, a local community make take gossipy note of this; these events can even make news in the mass media of the wider society. In any case, they who share the noted person’s stigma suddenly become accessible to the normal immediately around and become subject to a slight transfer of credit or discredit to themselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

By being now embraced by the masses, the situation of the stigmatized individual’s situation thus leads them easily into living in a World of publicized heroes and villains of their own stripe, their relation to this World being underlined by immediate associated, both normal and otherwise, who bring them news about how one of their kind has fared. When one considers one set of individuals, from whom the stigmatized person can expect some support, those who share one’s stigma and by virtue of this are defined and define themselves as one’s own kind. The second set are—to borrow a term once used by homosexuals—the “wise,” namely, persons who are not perceived as part of the dominate group but whose special situation some times has made them intimately privy to the secret life of the stigmatized individual and sympathetic with it, and who find themselves accorded a measure of acceptance, a measure of courtesy membership in the clan. Wise persons are the marginal beings before whom the individual with a fault need feel no shame nor exert self-control, knowing that in spite of one’s failing one will be seen as an ordinary other. An example may be cited from the World of a woman of the evening. Although she sneers at respectability, the lady, particularly, the woman of the evening, is supersensitive in polite society, taking refuge in her off hours with Bohemian artists, writers, actors and would-be intellectuals. There she may be accepted as an off-beat personality, without being a curiosity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Before taking the standpoint of those with a particular stigma, the person perceived as normal who is becoming wise may first have to pass through a heart-changing personal experience, of which there are many literary records. And after the sympathetic normal makes oneself available to the stigmatized, one often must wait their validation of one as a courtesy member. The self must not only be offered, it must be accepted. Sometimes, of course, the final step does seem to be initiated by the normal; the following is an example of this. “I do not know whether I can or not, but let me tell of an incident. I was once admitted to a group of African American boys of about my own age with whom I used to fish. When I first began to join them, they would carefully use a term of endearment in my presence. Gradually, as we went fishing more and more often, they began to joke with each other in front of me and call each other the more derogatory term of endearment. The change was in their utilization of the word when joking after the precious inability to use the word at all. One day when we were swimming, a boy shoved me with mock violence and I said to him, ‘Do not give me that (expletive) talk.’ He replied, ‘You bastard,’ with a big grin. From that time on, we could all use the term of endearment but the old categories had totally changed. Never, as long as I live, will I forget the way my stomach felt after I used the term of endearment without any reservation.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Heaven lies within and without us, it is true. But in most cases, only by the intervention of some authentic spiritual genius do we seem able to translate this into actuality for ourselves. Life is teaching us all the time but its voice needs a human being as a more direct medium, its lessons need human speech or writing to gain clearer utterance. If we never tried to seem a little better than we are, how could we improve or train ourselves from the outside inward? And the same impulse to show the World a better or idealized aspect of ourselves finds an organized expression in the various professions and classes, each of which has to some extent a cant or pose, which its members assume unconsciously, for the most part, but which has the effect of a conspiracy to work upon the credulity of the rest of the World. There is a cant not only of theology and of philanthropy, but also of law, medicine, teaching, even of science—perhaps especially of science, just now, since the more a particular kind of merit is recognized and admired, the more it is likely to be assumed to be worthy. Thus, when the individual presents oneself before others, one’s performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of the society, more so, in fact, than does one’s behavior as a whole. To the degree that a performance highlights the common official values of the society in which it occurs, we may look upon it, in the matter of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown, as a ceremony—as an expressive rejuvenation and reaffirmation of the moral values of the community. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Furthermore, in so far as the expressive bias of performances comes to be accepted as reality, then that which is accepted at the moment as reality will have some of the characteristics of a celebration. To stay in one’s room away from the place where the party is given, or away from where the practitioner attends one’s client, is to stay away from where reality is being performed. The World, in truth, is a wedding. One of the richest sources of data on the presentation of idealized performances is the literature on social mobility. In most societies there seems to be a major or general system of stratification, and in most stratified societies there is an idealization of the higher strata and some aspiration on the part of those in low places to move to higher ones. (One must be careful to appreciate that this involves not merely a desire for a prestigeful place but also a desire for a place close to the sacred center of the common values of the society.) Commonly we find that upward mobility involves the presentation of proper performances and that efforts to move upward and effort to keep from moving downward are expressed in terms of sacrifices made for the maintenance of front. Once the proper sign-equipment has been obtained and familiarity gained in the management of it, then this equipment can be used to embellish and illumine one’s daily performances with a favorable social style. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Perhaps the most important piece of sign-equipment associated with social class consist of the status symbols through which material wealth is expressed. American society is similar to others in this regard but seems to have been singled out as an extreme example of wealth-oriented class structure—perhaps because in America the license to employ symbols of wealth and financial capacity to do so are so widely distributed. Indian society, on the other hand, has sometimes been cited not only as one in which mobility occurs in terms of caste groups, not individuals, but also as one in which performances tend to establish favorable claims regarding non-material values. The caste system, for example, is far from a rigid system in which the position of each component is fixed for all time. Movement has always been possible, and especially so in the middle regions of the hierarchy. A low caste was able, in a generation or two, to rise to a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting vegetarianism and teetotalism, by Sanskritizing its ritual and pantheon. In short, it took over, as far as possible, the customs, rites, and beliefs of the Brahmins, and the adoption of the Brahminic way of life by a low caste seems to have been frequent, though theoretically forbidden. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The tendency of the lower castes to imitate the higher has been a powerful factor in the spread of Sanskritic ritual and customs, and in the achievement of a certain amount of cultural uniformity, not only throughout the caste scale but over the entire length and breadth of India. Nature herself is forever silently voicing these majestic truths and if we are unable to receive them from her lips, as we usually are, then we must receive them from a teacher’s lecture. We know that the mere reading of books and journals is not enough, and our essential conviction (as also the acknowledgment of the Old World since time immemorial) is that a personal guide who can instruct and inspire one to travel through the twilit jungle land which lies between ignorance and truth is indispensable. This missing element in many quests is the spiritual guide. One of the greatest helps to convert our timid thoughts and our trembling wishes into deeps is the inspiration received from a superior mind. Most beings find they need a concrete symbol to receiver their devotion and concentrate their aspiration. In short, they find they need a Spiritual Leader, be one historical and of the past, or contemporary and of the present. It is said that wisdom comes with experience. However, the enlightened who offer to impart it, whether in person or in writing, may save us some of the effort and suffering which accompany experience. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

In fact, of course, there are many Hindu circles whose members are much concerned with injecting an expression of wealth, luxury, and class status into the performance of their daily round and who think too little of ascetic purity to bother affecting it. Correspondingly, there have always been influential groups in America whose members has felt that some aspect of every performance ought to play down the expression of sheer wealth in order to foster the impression that standards regarding birth, culture, or moral earnestness are the ones that prevail. Every generation has to find its own way through these mysteries and to these truths anew, despite the heavy freight of recorded teachings and revelations which it receives from all the previous ones. This is why new prophets have always been needed to provide the very antiquated clues. Something or someone is needed to draw us from the ego to God. When one finds out that all one’s efforts at self-improvement are movements around a circle, that the ego does not really intend to give itself up in surrender to the soul and therefore only pretends to do so, one realizes that left to oneself one cannot succeed in really changing one’s inner centre of gravity. If one is to free oneself from such a hopeless position, help is needed from some outside source. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

It is not that teachers make a difference—they make the difference for the future. Students need to know that you care before they care what you know. The home environment is a most powerful factor in determining the level of growth achievement of individuals, people’s interest in learning, and the number of years of education the individual will receiver. It accounts for more of the person’s motivation in learning than does the educational curriculum or the quality of instruction in our education. The soul is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the presentation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them. The purposes of human evolution require the presence at all times through human history of some spiritually fulfilled individuals to act as guides or teachers. At no period has the race been left entirely without them, no matter how bleak, how savage, or how materialistic the period has been. While the dream is still continuing, one cannot help taking its scenes and figures as being quite real. However, if someone rings a bell until one awakens from the dreaming state, one will then see that both scenes and figures were mere figments of one’s own imagination. In a sense, the teacher of philosophy acts as this awakener did, except that one directs one’s efforts to the sense-deceived consciousness of everyday life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

It is not enough to set up a spiritual ideal for one to attain. One needs also the psychological help, the emotional and mental re-education which can remove large obstructions to that attainment. No seeker is so wise, so informed, so perfect, or so balanced as not to need the constructive criticism and expert counsel of a true spiritual guide. Such is the World today, with its tensions and greeds, its confusions and wrongs, its ignorance and evil-doing, that if anyone has a store of virtue and an awareness of divinity, people have need of them and hence of one. There is too little of the one and hardly any of the other among us. A being needs comfort and support in these times more than in ordinary times. Where can one best find them? By sitting humbly in intellectual discipleship under those who have been blessed by the higher power with the revelation of its own existence. One can absorb from them a certitude that the World is still ruled by higher laws and its history by higher purposes. “And because of your diligence and your faith and your patience with the word in nourishing it, that it may take root in you, behold, by and by ye shall pluck the fruit thereof, which is most precious, which is sweet, and which is above all that is sweet, and which is white above all that is white, yea, and pure above all that is pure; and ye shall feast upon this fruit even until ye are filled, that ye hunger not, neither shall ye thirst,” reports Alma 32.42. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Certainly we do not intend to deride any good thing, and we are thankful for whatever truly helps human beings in their desperate life upon the Earth. Nothing else would be compatible with the spirit of Jesus. The constant love of God is extended to every human being who ever lives, sometimes in places and postures that God himself would not prefer, but still with some good effect. However, whether or not a spirituality adequate to human need and producing genuine renovation of the heart can be a matter of mere human abilities is a question of fact. To be mistaken about it will have consequences of the most serious nature. In any case, we may be sure of this: the formation and, later, transformation of the inner life of humans, from which our outer existence flows, is an inescapable human problem. Spiritual formation, without regard to any specifically religious context or tradition, is the process by which the human spirit or will is given a definite form or character. It is a process that happens to everyone. The most despicable as well as the most admirable of persons have had a spiritual formation. Gangsters as well as saints ae the outcome of spiritual formation. Their spirits or hearts have been formed. We each can become a certain kind of person in the depts of our being, gaining a specific type of character. And that is the outcome of a process of spiritual formation as understood in general human terms that apply to everyone, whether they want it or not. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Fortunate of blessed are those who are able to find or are given a path of life that will form their spirit and inner World in a way that is truly strong and good and directed Godward. The shaping and reshaping of the inner life is, accordingly, a problem that has been around as long as humanity itself; and the earliest records of human thought bear eloquent witness to the human struggle to solve it—but with very limited success, one would have to say. True, some points in human history have shown more success in the elevation of the human spirit than others. However, the low points far exceed the high points, and the average is discouragingly low. Societies the World around are currently in desperate straits trying to produce people who are merely capable of coping with their life on Earth in a nondestructive manner. This is as true as of North American and Europe as it is of the rest of the World, though the struggle takes superficially different forms in various areas. In spiritual matters there really is no “Third World.” It is all Third World. When a child of God undertakes a public task or mission one will neither over nor under do one’s work. One will do exactly what is required. The enlightened being expressed self without selfishness, individuality without individualism. One possesses a sense of infinite leisure, a manner devoid of all haste, a willingness to achieve one’s ends little by little. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Although fully deserving it, one is too humble to demand and always too embarrassed when offered nay special reverence. One’s personality is one with one’s teaching: one’s life incarnates, practices, and actualizes it. One is content to let then attribute to others the help they are getting from one. One’s ego needs no gratitude and no recognition and would not know what to do with them if they came. One rejoices in their progress as the chief thing. What one gives one gives freely and asks for no requital. Since one’s life itself is not fixed but moves incessantly, one cannot congeal one’s thought into fixed doctrines that are strict and rigid or one’s character into fixed attitudes. One will put forth whatever wisdom indicates in any situation and to any question, not solely what the past indicates—which is what accumulated knowledge or a lined-up character really does. One’s mind is free, one’s policies always fresh. One is neither orthodox nor unorthodox. Naturally such a fluid standpoint will not find approval from the many who have to wear a partisan or fanatic label. The self-renounced illuminate sits beside the gleaming river of life and dips one’s pitcher like others into those troubled waters of passion or pain. Yet one wears an inscrutable smile which perhaps says: “I see all and know all. If I drink with you, it is to be you. If I remain with you, it is to help you. For paradoxically, I sit also at this river’s source.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

If someone knows what I do not yet know, if one has trodden father on this path, then it is well to learn from one if one will teach me. The instruction and criticism of a qualified living guide are worth having. However, owing to the rarity of such guides, many seekers are unable to find one. One should appreciate the value of finding a master worthy of being followed. The inner demand of the one will attract in time the outer meeting with the other. No maniac can sure oneself. We dare not leave the treatment of humanity’s mania entirely to humanity themselves. The help of sane outsiders is needed. However, it should be given indirectly and unobtrusively. If the more mature, older, and more experience nightingales find it necessary to give lessons in singing to the younger ones, why not the same situation among human beings? It is the greatest irony of human’s existence that in the end one will be saved from one’s meanness and misery not by those who shout the loudest but by the quietest, the most silent of one’s fellows. For the power and knowledge which one will gain from discipleship with them will be what one needs above all else—power over the baseness in oneself and knowledge f the divine World-Idea. “Then my brethren, ye shall reap the reward of your faith, and your diligence, and patience, and long-suffering, waiting for the tree to bring forth fruit unto you,” reports Alma 32.43. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

I must say I find the news very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to my library and read a book. The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of the soul is found when we open our hearts to God. O God, Who hast made this most sacred night to shine with the illumination of the True Light; grant, we beseech Thee, that as we have known the mystery of that Light upon Earth, we may also perfectly enjoy it in heaven; through the same as Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, O Merciful God, that He Who was born to be the Saviour of the World, as He is the Author of our divine birth, so may be Himself the Bestower of our immortality; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and everlasting God, Who hast willed that on the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, should depend the beginning and the completion of all religion; grant us, we beseech Thee, to be reckoned as a portion of Him, on Whom is built the whole salvation of humankind; Who with Thee. We beseech Thee, O Lord, bestow on Thy servants the increase of faith, hope, and charity; that as they glory in the Nativity of Thy Son our Lord, they may, by Thy governance, not feel the adversities of the World; and also that what they desire to celebrate in time, they may enjoy to all eternity; through the same as Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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For those Without Money, the Road to the Treasure House of the Imagination Begins in the Soul

December 6, 2019 1:59 am

To my thinking, great souls must have a clear head, a strong hand, and above all, a great heart; and I am inclined to think that many of us can achieve this. However, we often fear our greatness as well as our lowliness, and this is precisely the core dilemma, from the existential-integrative standpoint. The fears of both constriction and expansion (or their clinically useful synonyms, smallness and greatness) haunt the entire spectrum of existential freedoms. They are the keys, moreover, to a full existential restoration. The human psyche (consciousness) is characterized by a constrictive-expansive continuum, only degrees of which are conscious. For the purpose of our existential-integrative framework, we consider six positions along this continuum: the physiological, the environment, the cognitive, the psychosexual, the interpersonal, and the experiential (being). Whereas physiological, environmental, and cognitive positions along the continuum are dominated by conscious processing, psychosexual, interpersonal, and experiential modalities are accented by pre- and sub-conscious mediation. It is not necessary to be living always near a spiritual leader in a monastery as so many seem to think. Death is silent; education is noisy. Every person, regardless of the disguise, knows what he or she it not. One must learn what one can be. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

What is really necessary to meet one on this physical plane is to connection with your soul, even if just for five minutes a day. After that one’s help can be received inwardly and mentally. This is because the real knowledge is not in the body, but part of one’s inner being, the Mind behind the body, and it is that inner being with which the seeker must try to come into relation. Such a relation one builds up oneself by one’s own mental attitude, by one’s faith and devotion and obedience to the way that is show. Dread of the constrictive or expansive polarities promotes dysfunction, extremism, or polarization, the degree and frequency of which is generally proportional to the degree and frequency of one’s dread. Put another way, one will do everything one can, including becoming extreme and destructive oneself, to avoid he constrictive or expansive polarity that one dreads. The dread of physiological expansion (arousal), for example, can promote extreme or dysfunctional measures to constrict (tranquilize) oneself. The conditioned fear of enclosures (constriction) can foster excessive efforts to enlarge or expand one’s surroundings. The dread of catastrophic (expansive) cognitions can associate with narrow, regimented cognitions. The revulsion for a constricted puritanical upbringing can correlate with an indulgent, expansive adulthood. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

The horror of a directionless, rootless upbringing, on the other hand, can generate absolutist and fundamentalist tendencies later in life. The terror of being ontologically and cosmically dismissed (obliterated), finally, can lead to desperate psychophysiological efforts to manifest ontologically, to be all-important (which too often, tragically, leads back again to the impoverished position because aspirations of the former magnitude cannot be borne for long. Let us look at some psychiatric disorders and their associated dreads. When we consider hyperconstrictive dysfunctions and the dread of ultimate expansion (greatness, chaos), there are some things that stand out. With depression people usually dread assertion, stimulation, ambition, standing out, possibility. With dependency dreaded is autonomy, venturing out on one’s own, unmanageable responsibility. Anxiety produces certain dreads such as in dealing with potency and its associated risks, responsibilities, and strains. Also foolishness, spontaneity, and unpredictability. In cases of agoraphobia (fear of places and situations that might cause panic, helplessness, or embarrassment, which is an anxiety disorder that often develops after one or more panic attacks), what these people suffering with this condition tend to dread is open places, conflict and confusion. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

With obsessive-compulsiveness people dread experimentations, surprise, confusion and complexity, disarray, and recklessness. In cases of paranoia individuals usually dread trusting, reaching out, the confusion, complexity, and brutality of relationships. However, in cases dealing with people who suffer from depressant substance abuse, these individuals usually dread all of the symptoms associated with hyperconstrictive dysfunctions. When looking at hyperexpansive dysfunctions and the dread of ultimate constriction (smallness, and obliteration), those who are dealing with mania (extremely elevated and excitable mood usually associated with bipolar disorder), these individuals dread confinement, limitation, delay of impulses, devitalization. In case of anti-social personality disorder, people usually dread vulnerability, weakness, and victimization. When individual suffer from hysteria, and they have a dread of rejection and insignificance. Those dealing with narcissism typically dread inadequacy, unworthiness, and impotence. In people experiencing impulsiveness, many tend to dread regimentation, routine, and emptiness. Seen in some suffering from claustrophobia, many dread entrapment, tight or closed places. Yet, in people dealing with stimulant abuse, they are frequently noted to dread all of the conditions associated with each hyperexpansive dysfunction. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Increasing our understanding of mental illness helps us reach out with love and compassion to those who are suffering. Some hyerconstrictive/expansion blends of dysfunctions and the dead experienced are important to consider. People who are passive-aggressive usually dread belittlement, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rage of fury that results from that dread. (The combination produces such blunted aggression as sarcasm and dawdling.) In those experiencing borderline personality disorder (a mental disorder characterized by emotional instability, feelings of worthlessness, insecurity, impulsivity, and impaired social relationships), these people usually dread extreme belittlement, insignificance combined with extreme rage, fury (which leads to both fusion, tyranny and isolation, and withdrawal). In cases of manic depression, we often see dread associated with confinement, limitation, and delay on the one hand, and assertion, stimulation, and ambition on the other. In people who suffer from schizophrenia, which is a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation, these people usually dread vaporizing (which may lead to disorganized, omnipotence-striving states) and exploding (which may foster obsessive, catatonic-like qualities). Schizophrenia associates with constrictive and expansive dreads in their most radical forms. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Although dread of (and compensation for) constrictive/expansive polarities can be seen at every existential level and is integral to the respective liberation of every level, its genesis is far from uniform. Constrictive or expansive dread can arise in a wide variety of spatial, temporal, and dispositional contexts. Acute trauma is the perception of an event as immediately contrary and shocking. It is an existential jolt that produces extreme fear. When a child falls ill, for example, a profound alteration in mobility may be experiences. If this alteration is powerful enough, it can alarm the child, not merely at the level of physiology (pleasure-pain) but at the higher levels of one’s groundedness in the World. It may be associated with mortal fears of diminishment, minimization, imperceptibility, and perhaps even dissolution. The intensity of the child’s fear is a function of many factors, including (but not limited to) one’s original psychophysiological disposition (for instance, one’s hardiness level), the severity of one’s illness, the cultural and familial context in which one contracts the illness, and so on. Discrepancy is the key here. The greater one experiences a discrepancy between one’s original disposition and subsequent events, the greater is the likelihood that one will deny those subsequent events and hence become experientially debilitated. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Such debilitation is likely to manifest itself initially in the form of excessive efforts to expand (for example, cry out, refuse, defy) one’s condition of growing immobilization. If these protestations prove comparatively viable, one will be able to maintain one’s denial of smallness and live out one’s life in a variety of compensatory fashions. Depending on the severity and subsequent handling of one’s trauma, accordingly, one is likely to exhibit a range of expansionist traits, from exuberance and feistiness to outright belligerence and imperiousness. If, on the other hand, the child’s attempts to deny one’s illness are repeatedly and unabatingly rebuffed, then another traumatic cycle may develop—the cycle of chronic trauma. Whereas acute trauma focuses on the original dread of constructing (for example, of becoming immobilized), chronic trauma centers on the counteraction of that dread (fruitless and repeated efforts to become mobilized, expand). The result of this shift is a complete reversal of the original situation. Instead of denying and overcompensating for psychophysiological smallness, the client now does everything one can to render oneself small and to avoid psychophysiological greatness. There is yet a third scenario for developing constrictive or expansive trauma. This is the subtler cycle of intergenerational, or implicit trauma. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

Implicit trauma is the indirect, vicariously transmitted trauma of family and caretakers. Unlike acute and chronic trauma, implicit trauma is never directly experienced by the affected individuals but is learned, accepted, and stored in their memories. While the basis for implicit trauma is relatively obscure, both initial dispositions and modeling appear to play instrumental roles. The implicit-trauma sequence goes something like this: A family member, say our hypothetical client, experiences acute or chronic trauma. One’s trauma (for instance, one’s fear of immobility) leads, in turn, to compensatory behavior (such as overachieving) designed to thwart the precipitating injury. As this cycle solidifies in our client’s personal life, it also begins to filter into one’s relationship with one’s children. It is at this point, predictably, that one’s children develop a risk for implicit trauma. For this to occur, however, two basic conditions must be met: the children must idealize, and thereby strive to emulate, their mother’s excesses, and they must display inherent dispositions (for instance, ambitiousness) that comfortably conform to these excesses. Given these prime conditions, accordingly, immobility and smallness can prove far-ranging intergenerational enemies, unwittingly internalized and unknowingly transmitted. Only the broken-hearted causalities, such as those who are not superachievers, can begin to unravel the contagion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

The operation of the above traumas, it may be evident by now, is confined neither to period nor place, type of polarization (for instance, constrictive/expansive), nor existential level (for instance, physiological). Although childhood, because of its comparative vulnerability, is more susceptible to traumatic impacts, such impacts are not restricted to childhood. Trauma originates, not in relation to parents, peers, any other stimulus per se, but in relation to being, to the groundlessness that is our condition. Hence it is not so much the specific content of the abuse or pain that unnerves us so, but the implications of that content for our being in the World, for our relationship to the Universe. It is in this sense that physical and emotional shock, parents, family myths, and so on symbolize wider networks of alarm—our smallness or greatness before creation itself. The third principle that has emerged from our existential-integrative formulation is that the confrontation with or integration of constrictive/expansive polarities promotes healing, vitality, and health. This principle also operates at various levels of freedom and can best be understood in terms of these levels. For example, constricting lethargy can be dealt with by nutritional regimens designed to release and expand energy. Expansive criminality can be environmentally modified to constrict via aversive and alternative reinforcements. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Constrictive timidity, conversely, can be environmentally conditioned to expand (for instance, by confronting the object of dread). Rigid belief systems can be rationally restricted into expansive, adaptive belief systems. Sexually expansive adult behavior can be explained on the basis of sexually constrictive (or expansive) childhood behavior and thus rechanneled. Compulsive isolation (and constricting) can be explained and transcended through emotionally corrective bonding (and expanding). By facing and experiencing one’s frailty, finally, one can learn to understand and transform one’s pomposity. Through these means, then, choice and the capacity for genuine self-encounter broaden while denial and overcompensation shrink. Far from associating with injuries, moreover, smallness and greatness begin associating with growth opportunities. For example, humility can replace docility, discipline can replace obsessiveness, and zest can replace inflation. Though medical science has made marvelous progress in the past century in solving some of the mysteries of the brain, the truth is that knowledge in this complex area is still in its infancy. We still do not know exactly how the brain works nor exactly how and why parts of it malfunction. One thing is certain, however: no individual, family, nor group is immune from the effects of mental illness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Wherever you go, you will get instruction from the experiences of life. Any book or person seen or art production which reminds a being of one’s diviner self, is to that extent one’s teacher. Any happening or event or experience which alienates one from such remembrance, whether it be regarded by the World as good or as evil, likewise is one’s teacher. Even one’s own unworthy actions will, because of the consequences to which they must infallibly lead, also be one’s teachers. Those whose inner development or outer circumstances or personal destiny have prepared them for the truth will come to it anyway: they may need a little prodding or a lot of reflection, but in the end they will recognize it for what it is. However, they confound this recognition with the relation of discipleship to some guru. If they are to be correctly understood, the two things need to be separated. Teaching is always available in some way or some form, for Life, through varied situations, takes care of its own; but a Teacher in one’s physical form may not be available just at the necessary point in time. In that case, one may be met through one’s writings. If this does not happen, one may come into the mental life during a great anguish or an enforced inactivity or an unusual relaxation or, finally, though or during prayer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

The secret teaching is to appear to have known all your life what you learned this afternoon. On the way to the truth, many find two guides: the spiritual preceptors and God. To the preceptors one may take a bow, but know that God keeps your heart. Happiness depends on our understanding of life, understanding depends upon the penetration of insight, insight depends upon right instructions received from a competent teacher. The inspirational and moral, the intellectual and prayer helps which a competent guide can give to a worthy disciple are valuable. If such a worthy, honourable, selfless, experienced, and expert guide can be found—and this may be counted exceptionally good fortune—the disciple should certainly submit to one’s tutelage and surrender to one’s influence. We absorb our lessons, and then time and experience help kinit them together. Thought is a process, not an event. The need of a saviour arises from the fact that the ego cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps, cannot rise out of its own dimensions into a higher one, and will not willingly encompass its own destruction. Yet its spiritual career arrives eventually at a point where is finds and sees that it has done what it could, that further efforts are futile, and that only some power outside itself can bring about the next forward move. However, it may not without self-deception declare this point to be reached when in fact it ought to continue with its strivings; it may not cease prematurely from its struggles. If it does so, then it would be equally futile to seek a master’s grace. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

Moments of movements is an important concept and when it appears, is when change actually occurs. Spiritual formation is often understood today as entirely a human matter. The beyond that is within is thought to be a human dimension or power that, if we only manage it rightly, will transform our life into divine life. Or at least it will deliver us from the chaos and brokenness of human existence—at a minimum, perhaps, from life-destroying addictions, such as to alcohol, work, pleasures of the flesh, or violence. We are engulfed by books, programs, and seminars that rest upon this assumption. Thus, for example, one now hears spirituality described as our relationship to whatever is most important in our life. Or perhaps as the process of becoming a beneficial and creative person. These are words taken from contemporary writings, and they represent deep currents of human thought and culture. “They were once a delightsome people, and they had Christ for their shepherd; yea, they were led even by God the Father,” reports Mormon 5.17. O God, Who makest us glad with the yearly expectation of our redemption, grant that as joyfully receive Thine Only-begotten Son as our Redeemer, we may also see Him without fear when He cometh as our Judge; even our Lord, who with Thee. Grant, O merciful God, that for the reception of the transcendent mystery of Thy Son’s Nativity, the minds of believers may be prepared, and also the hearts of unbelievers subdued; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

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

December 5, 2019 3:07 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Randolph Harris II International Institute

Category Archives: United Kingdom

At the Heart of Each Atom there is Quiescence, that Mysterious Stillness of the Unseen Power of God!

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

The Leaves of the Tree of Life are for the Healing of the Nations!

Cresleigh Homes

I Have Always Imagined that Heaven Will be Some Kind of Suburban Ranch!

Cresleigh Homes

A Great Soul Contains the Diary of the Human Race and Changes Lives for the Better!

Cresleigh Homes

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

Cresleigh Homes

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

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

There is One Place Where I Can Find Out Who I am and What I am Going to Become—And that is the Soul!

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Coming Soon!

It is the Work of the Enlightened to Show People What they Cannot See for themselves—their Own Higher Possibilities!

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Coming Soon!

For those Without Money, the Road to the Treasure House of the Imagination Begins in the Soul

Cresleigh Homes

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

Cresleigh Homes

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