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Something Very Strange and Mystic Happened to Me, Something Realistic and as Weird as Can be!
To give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labor and not ask for any reward, save that of know that we do Thy will. Do not lower your expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations. Expect the best of yourself, and then do what is necessary to make it a reality. Life is not a destination, it is a journey. It is not a series of goals, it is a series of steps, of events unfolding as you make your way. If a person is accepted, fully accepted, and in this acceptance there is no judgment, only compassion and sympathy, the individual is able to come to grips with oneself, to develop the courage to give up one’s defenses and face one’s true self. However, this is not a perfect World and there is evidence of hostility as members differ. Somehow, in a setting where people are interested in being normal, civil, and peaceful every blow is softened, as if the sharp edges have been removed; if undeserved, people will go off on something else; and the blow is somehow lost. In my own case, even those people who originally irritate me, with further acquaintance I begin to accept and respect; and the thought occurred to me as I tried to understand what was happening: Once you come close to a person, perceive one’s thoughts, one’s emotions, one’s feelings, one become not only understandable but good and desirable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Some of the more aggressive ones speak more than they should, more than their right share, but the group itself, by its own being, not by setting rules, eventually made its authority felt; and unless a person is very sick or insensitive, members more or less, in this respect, conform to what is expected of them. The problem-the hostile, the dominant, the neurotic—is not too acute; and yet if measured in a formal way, with a stop watch, at no time is a session free from aimless talk and waste of time. However, as one watches the process, the idea may persist that perhaps this waste of time may be necessary; it may very well be that that way a person learns best; for certainly, as I look back at the whole experience, I am fairly certain that it would have been impossible to earn as much or as well or as thoroughly in the traditional classroom setting. What a better way can a person learn than by becoming involved with one’s whole self, one’s very person, one’s root drives, emotions, attitudes and values? No series of facts or argument, no matter how logically or brilliantly arranged, can even faintly compare with that sort of thing. In the course of this process, I saw hard, inflexible, strict and rigid persons, in the brief period of several weeks, change in front of my eyes and become sympathetic, understanding and to a marked degree non-judgmental. I saw neurotic, compulsive persons ease up and become more accepting of themselves and others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
In one instance, a student who particularly impressed me by his change, told me when I mentioned this: “It is true. I feel less rigid, more open to the World. And I like myself better for it. I do not believe I ever learned so much anywhere.” I saw shy persons become less shy and aggressive persons more sensitive and moderate. One might say that this appears to be essentially an emotional process. However, that I believe would be altogether inaccurate in describing it. There was a great deal of intellectual content, but the intellectual content was meaningful and crucial to the person, in a sense that it meant a great deal to one as a person. In fact, one student brought up this very question. “Should we be concerned,” he asked, “only with the emotions? Has the intellect no play?” It was my turn to ask, “Is there any student who has read as much or thought as much for any other course?” The answer was obvious. We had spent hours and hours reading; the room reserved for us had occupants until 10 o’clock at night, and then many left only because the university guards wanted to close the building. Students listened to recordings; they saw motion pictures; but best of all, they talked and talked and talked. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
In the traditional course, the instructor lectures and indicates what is to be read and learned; students dutifully record all this in their notebooks, take an examination and feel good or bad, depending on the outcome; but in nearly all cases it is a complete experience, with a sense of finality; the laws of forgetting begin to operate rapidly and inexorably. When people read and think inside and outside the class; it was they who chose from this reading and thinking what was meaningful to them, not the instructor. This non-directive kind of teaching, I should point out, was not 100 percent successful. There were three or four students who found the whole idea distasteful. Even at the end of the course, although nearly all became enthusiastic, one student to my knowledge, was intensely negative in his feelings; another was highly critical. These wanted the instructor to provide them with a rounded-out intellectual piece of merchandise which they could commit to memory and then give back on an examination. They would then have the assurance that they had learned what they should. As one said, “If I had to make a report as to what I learned in this course, what could I say?” Admittedly, it would be much more difficult than in a traditional course, if not impossible. The desperateness with which detachment is defended has a further explanation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
The threat to detachment, “smashing the wall,” often means more then temporary panic. What may result is a kind of disintegration of personality in psychotic episodes. If in analysis detachment beings to crumble, the patient not only becomes diffusely apprehensive but directly and indirectly express definite fears. There may be, for instance a fear of becoming submerged in the amorphous mass of human beings, a fear, primarily, of losing one’s uniqueness. There is also a fear of being helplessly exposed to the coercion and exploitation of aggressive persons—a result of one’s utter defenselessness. However, there is still a third fear, that of going insane, which may emerge so vividly that the patient wants absolute reassurance against such a possibility. Going insane in this context does not mean going berserk, nor is it a reaction to an emerging wish for irresponsibility. It is a straight expression of the specific fear of being split right open, often expressed in dreams and associations. This would suggest that relinquishing one’s detachment would bring one face to face with one’s own conflicts; that one would not be able to survive it but would be split like a tree struck by lightning, to use an image that occurred to a patient. This assumption is confirmed by other observations. Highly detached persons have an almost insurmountable aversion to the idea of inner conflicts. Later will tell the analyst that they simply did not know what one was talking about when one spoke of conflicts. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Whenever the analyst succeeds in showing them a conflict operating within themselves, they will imperceptibly and with amazing unconscious skill veer away from the subject. If, inadvertently, before they are ready to admit it, they recognize a conflict in a momentary flash, they are seized with acute panic. When later they approach the recognition of conflicts on a more secure basis, a greater wave of detachment follows. Thus we arrive at a conclusion that at first glance would have been bewildering. Detachment is an intrinsic part of the basic conflict, but it is also a protection against it. The puzzle resolves itself, however, if we are more specific. It is a protection against the two more active partners in the basic conflict. Here we must reiterate the statement that the predominance of one of the basic attitudes does not prevent the other contradictory ones from existing and operating. We can see this play of forces in the detached personality even more clearly than in the other two groups described. To begin with, the contradictory strivings often show in the life history. Before one has clearly accepted one’s detachment a person of this type will often have gone though episodes of compliance and dependence as well as through periods of aggressive and ruthless rebellion. In contrast to the clearly defined values of the other two types, one’s sets of values are most contradictory. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
In addition to one’s permanent high evaluation of what one regards as freedom and independence, one may at some time in the analysis express an extreme appreciation for human goodness, sympathy, generosity, self-effacing sacrifice, and at another time swing to a complete jungle philosophy of callous self-interest. One may feel puzzled by these contradictions, but with some rationalization or other one will try to deny their conflicting character. If one has no clean perspective of the whole structure, the analyst will easily become confused. One may try to follow one path or the other without getting very far in either direction because again and again the patient takes refuge in one’s detachment, thereby shutting all the gateways as one would shut the watertight bulkheads of a ship. There is a perfect and simple logic underlying the special resistance of the detached person. One does not want to relate oneself to the analyst or to take cognizance of one as a human being. One does not really want to analyze one’s human relationships at all. One does not want to face one’s conflicts. And if we understand one’s premise, we see that one cannot even be interested in analyzing any of these factors. One’s premise is the conscious conviction that one need not bother about one’s relations with others so long as one keeps at a safe distance from them; that a disturbance in these relations will not upset one if only one keeps away from others. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
And even the conflicts of which the analysts speaks can and should be left formant because they will only bother one; and that there is no need to straighten things out because one will not budge from one’s detachment anyway. As we have said, this unconscious reasoning is logically correct—up to a point. What one leaves out and for a long time refuses to recognize is that one cannot possibly grow and develop in a vacuum. The all-important function of neurotic detachment, then, is to keep major conflicts out of operation. It is the most radical and most effective of the defenses erected against them. One of the many neurotic ways of creating an artificial harmony, it is an attempt at solution through evasion. However, it is no true solution because the compulsive cravings for closeness as well as for aggressive domination, exploitation, and excelling remain, and they keep harassing is not paralyzing their carrier. Finally, no real inner peace of freedom can ever be attained as long as the contradictory set of values continue to exist. Let us meditate on the mystery of time. Augustine points to the depth of this mystery, when he says, “If nobody asks me about it, I know. If I want to explain it to somebody who asks me about it, I do not know.” There is something unspeakable about time, but this has not prevented the most profound religious minds from thinking and speaking about it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
It is not vain speculation when the writer of the first part of the 90th Psalm confronts the eternity of God with the transitoriness of human existence. The melancholy experience of human finiteness drives one to utter the tremendous words of the psalm. It is not empty curiosity when Augustine tries, in his most personal book, the Confessions, to penetrate the ground of our temporality. We are not making an abstract statement but are rater expressing a profound religious feeling, when we sing, “Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away.” It is not mere philosophy, but a tragic feeling of life, which impels the earliest Greek philosopher to say that all things must return to their origin, suffering punishment, “according to the order of time.” It is not merely in the interest of systematic theory that the Fourth Gospel uses again and again the phrase “eternal life” as the expression of the highest good, which is ever present in Christ. It was a religious event when Meister Eckhardt pointed to the “eternal now” within the flux of time, and when Soren Kierkegaard pointed to the infinite significance of every moment as the now of decision. Time is as inexhaustible as the ground. Even the greatest minds have each discovered only one aspect. However, everyone, even the most simple mind, apprehends the meaning of time—namely, one’s own temporality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
One may not be able to express one’s knowledge about time, but one is never separated from its mystery. One’s life, and the life of each of us, is permeated in every moment, in every experience, and in every expression, by the mystery of time. Time is our destiny. Time is our hope. Time is our despair. And time is the mirror in which we see eternity. Let me point to three of the many mysteries of time: its power to devour everything within its sphere; its power to receive eternity within itself; and its power to drive toward an ultimate end, a new creation. Humankind has always realized that there is something fearful about the flux of time, a riddle which we cannot solve, and the solution of which we could not stand. We come from a past which is no more; we go into a future which is not yet; ours is the present. The past is ours only in so far as we have it still present. The past is ours only in so far as we have it still present; and the future is ours only in so far as we have it already present. We possess the past by memory, and the future by anticipation. However, what is the nature of the present itself? If we look at it closely, we must say: it is a point without extension, the point in which the future becomes the past; when we say to ourselves, “This is the present,” the moment has already been swallowed by the past. The present cannot be caught; it is always gone. So it seems that we have nothing real—neither the past nor the future, nor even the present. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Therefore, there is a dreaming character about our existence, which the psalmist indicates, and which religious visionaries have described in so many ways. Time, however, could not even give us a place on which to stand, if it were not characterized by that second mystery, its power to receive eternity. There is no present in the mere stream of time; but the present is real, as our experience witnesses. And it is real because eternity breaks into time and gives it a real present. We could not even say “now,” if eternity did not elevate that moment above the ever-passing time. Eternity is always present; and its presence is the cause of our having the present at all. When the psalmist looks at God, for Whom a thousand years are like one day, he is looking at that eternity which alone gives him a place on which he can stand, a “now” which has infinite reality and infinite significance. In every moment that we say “now,” something temporal and something eternal are united. Whenever a human being says, “Now I am living; now I am really present,” resisting the stream which drives the future into the past, eternity is. In each such “now,” eternity is made manifest; in every real “now,” eternity is present. Let us think for a moment of the way in which we are living our lives in our period of history. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Have we not lost a real present by always being driven forward, by our constant running, in our indefatigable activism, toward the future? We suppose the future to be better than any present; but there is always another future beyond the next future, again and again without a present, that is to say, without eternity. According to the Fourth Gospel eternal life is present gift: one, who listens to Christ, has eternity already. He is no longer subject to the driving of time. In him the “now” becomes a “now eternal.” We have lost the real “now,” the “now eternal;” we have, I am afraid, lost eternal life in so far as it creates the real present. There is another element in time, its third mystery, which makes us look at the future; for time does not return, nor repeat itself: it runs forward; it is always unique; it ever creates the new. There is within it a drive toward an end, unknown, never to be reached in time itself, always intended and ever fleeing. Time runs toward the “future eternal.” This is the greatest of all the mysteries of times. It is the mystery of which the prophets, Christ, and the Apostles have spoken. The eternal is the solution of the riddle of time. Time does not drive toward an endless self-repetition, nor to an empty return to its beginning. Time is not meaningless. It has a hidden meaning—salvation. It has a hidden goal—the Kingdom of God. It brings about a hidden reality—the new creation. The infinite significance of every moment of time is this: in it we decide, and are decided about, with respect to our eternal future. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Life is not a destination, it is a journey. It is not a series of goals, it is a series of steps, of events unfolding as you make your way. The purpose of life is not to be happy. The purpose of life is to matter, to be productive, to have it make a difference that you lived at all. “Time is nothing. I shall wait for another to come who is as strong as you are. Humans are changing. Their dreams are filled with the forecast of these changes. Mortals dream ceaselessly of immortality, as their lives grow longer. They dream of unimpeded flight,” page 884 of The Witching Hour by Anne Rice. Be careful of what you focus on. There are forces in this World that are billions of years old. “It is sufficient to say not that he is Precambrian and self-sufficient, and if not immortal, his life span could be billions of years. It is conceivable that he absorbed consciousness from mankind, that is consciousness gives off a palpable energy, he had fed upon this energy and a mutation has created his mind. He continues to feed upon the consciousness of the Mayfair Witches and their associates, and from this springs his learning, and his personality, and his will,” page 886 of The Witching Hour by Anne Rice. This is why the King James Bible says, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you,” reports James 4.8. And it is also where the idea of the law of attraction comes from. You attract what you focus on. You give that power in your life, and it will have the ability to manifest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The law of attraction is also why some Christians do not seek revenge. They believe God will act in the favour and take care of all that needs to be handled. God says he will never give us more than we can bear and through our faith, we have to consent to that truth. Speak to our hearts, O Christ our Overseer; say to us, “Hail, be strong and of good courage.” Thou who didst this of old, canst Thou not do the same now? Thou canst, Thou canst indeed! For Thou art Almighty. Thou canst, O most Loving, Thou canst do what we cannot conceive; for nothing is impossible to Thee, Almighty God! Truly, O Saviour, for us Thy Body is red with Blood; Thou has “washed Thy garment in wine, and Thy clothes in the blood of grapes;” for Thou art God alone, crucified for us, whom the old transgression gave over unto death; by Thy wound have been healed the countless wounds of our sins. And now, O loving and crucified Christ, redeem us with Thine own; save us, O loving Goodness, O God, Who reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, One God for ever, throughout all ages. Hear us, O Lord, Father Almighty, through the New Adam; that being buried with Jesus Thy Son, and raised up again by His life, we may in this ensuing night of His holy Resurrection, by the grace that attends the great solemnity, by His gift and Thy blessing, and the counsel and mysterious working of the Holy Spirit, obtain absolution through Him, Who with Thee we will have World peace and overcome all obstructions and bondage. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
God by mode is in all things by His presence, power and substance; still He is said to be present more familiarly in some by grace. God is said to be in a thing in two ways; in one way after the manner of an efficient cause; and thus He is in all things created by Him; in another way he is in things as the object of operation is in the operator; and this is proper to the operations of the soul, according as the things know is in the one who knows; and the thing desired in the one desiring. In this second way God is especially in the rational creature which knows and loves Him actually or habitually. And because the rational creature possessed this prerogative by grace. He is said to be thus in the saints by grace. However, God is in other things created by Him, may be considered from human affairs. A king, for example, is said to be in the whole kingdom by his power, although he is not everywhere present. Again a thing is said to be by its presence in other things which are subject to its inspection; as things in a house are said to be by its present to anyone, who nevertheless may not be in substance in every part of the house. Lastly, a thing is said to be by way of substance or essence in that place in which its substance may be. Now there were some (the Manichees) who said that spiritual and incorporeal things were subject to the divine power; but that visible and corporeal things were subject to the power of a contrary principle. Therefore against these it is necessary to say that God is in all things by His power. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
O God, Thy main plan, and the end of thy will is to make Christ glorious and beloved in Heaven where he is now ascended, where one day all the elect will behold his glory and love and glorify him for ever. Though here I love him but little, may this be my portion at last. In this World thou hast given me a beginning, one day it will be perfected in the realm above. Thou hast helped me to see and know Christ, though obscurely, to take him, receive him, to possess him, love him, to bless him in my heart, mouth, life. Let me study and stand for discipline, and all the ways of worship, out of the love for Christ; and to show my thankfulness; to seek and know his will from love, to hold it in love, and daily to care for and keep this state of heart. Thou hast led me to place all my nature and happiness in oneness with Christ, in having heart and mind centered only om him, in being like him in communicating good to others; this is my Heaven on Earth, but I need the force, energy, impulses of thy Spirit to carry me on the way to my Jerusalem. Here, it is my duty to be as Christ in this World, to do what he would do, to live as he would live, to walk in love and meekness; then would he be known, then would I have peace in death. “And I, Moroni, will not deny the Christ; wherefore, I wander withersoever I can for the safety of mine own life,” reports Moroni 1.3. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
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And I Want Just to Call You ‘Cause We Go Together Just Like Jam and Bread or Maybe Birds of a Feather!
Accept the pain, cherish the joys, resolve the regrets; then can come the best of benedictions. As you simplify your life, the laws of the Universe will be simpler. There is only a slight difference between keeping your chin up and sticking your neck out, but it is a difference worth knowing. All of us try to feel, and pretend to feel, but we seldom do so alone. Most often we do it when we exchange gestures or signs of feelings with others. Taken together, emotion work, feeling rules, and interpersonal exchange make up our private emotional system. We bow to each other not only from the waist but from the heart. Feeling rules set out what is owed in gestures of exchange between people. They enable us to assess the worth of an outward tear or an inward attempt to feel sad for people who are inappropriate behavior. Looking at a bright light to make a tear glisten is a mark of homage, a way of paying respect to those who proclaim that sadness is owed. More generally, it is a way of paying respects to a rule about respect paying. In psychological “bowing,” feeling rules provide a baseline for exchange. There are two types of exchange—straight and improvisational. In straight exchange, we simply use rules to make an inward bow; we do not play with them. In improvisational exchange, as in improvisational music, we presuppose the rules and play with them, creating irony and humor. However, in both types, it is within the contact of feeling rules that we make our exchange and settle our accounts. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
In our society, some unmeant gestures occur in such a wide variety of performances and convey impressions that are in general so incompatible with the ones being fostered that these inopportune events have acquired collective symbolic status. First, performer may accidentally convey incapacity, impropriety, or disrespect by momentarily losing muscular control of oneself. One may trip, stumble, fall; one may belch, yawn, make a slip of the tongue, scratch oneself, or be flatulent; one may accidentally impinge upon the body of another participant. Secondly, the performer may act in such a way as to give the impression that one is too much or too little concerned with the interaction. One may stutter, forget one’s lines, appear nervous, or guilty, or self-conscious; one may give way to inappropriate outbursts of laughter, anger, or other kinds of affect which momentarily incapacitate one as an interactant; one may show too much serious involvement and interest, or too little. Thirdly, the performer may allow one’s presentation to suffer from inadequate dramaturgical direction. The setting may not have been put in order, or may have become readied for the wrong performance, or may become deranged during the performance; unforeseen contingencies may cause improper timing of the performer’s arrival or departure or may cause embarrassing lulls to occur during the interaction. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Performances differ, of course, in the degree of item-by-item expressive care required of them. In the case of some international cultures, we are ready to see a high degree of expressive coherence. Granet, for example, suggests this of filial performances in China: Their fine toilet is in itself a homage. Their good deportment will be accounted an offering of respect. In the presence of parents, gravity is requisite: one must therefore be careful not to belch, to sneeze, to cough, to yawn, to blow one’s nose nor to spit. Every expectoration would run the risk of soiling the paternal sanctity. It would be a crime to show the lining of one’s garments. To show the father that one is treating him as a chief, one ought always to stand in his presence, the eyes right, the body upright upon the two legs, never daring to lean upon any object, to bend, nor to stand on one foot. It is thus that with the low and humble voice which becomes a follower, one comes night and morning to pay homage. After which, one waits for orders. Wen we commence a relationship with somebody for some purpose, we begin in a role, as teacher, or as customer, or as helper. In that sense each participant has a role to fulfill. A third party looking at this transaction can watch it and say, “You are fulfilling the role of the helper, and he or she is fulfilling the role of the helpee.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
I may be aware I am supposed to fulfill the role of helper, but I can do this in a way that expressed my genuine commitments and intentions and in my idiosyncratic way. It is the difference between taking a role and playing a role. To take a role is a commitment to a task; to play a role is a charade. Some people lose zest when they feel they can only work in a cut-and-dried, stereotyped way. In due time one outgrows that stereotype way. If one feels one must stick to that stereotyped way, it makes one sick. This is why many nurses, psychotherapists, doctors, and teachers ultimately get fed up with their professions. They lose zest because they feel that they have got to keep up the appearance of the role of a teacher, a nurse, a doctor, a therapist in some stereotyped way. When they do that, what they are telling you is that they are more committed to imitating the role than they are carrying out their professional commitment, that is [to] bring about results. When your commitment is to goals, and not means, you cannot help but be eccentric, idiosyncratic, offbeat, oddball, and creative. In contrast, in persons in whom the craving for prestige is uppermost, hostility usually takes the form of a desires to humiliate others. This desire is paramount in those persons whose own self-esteem has been wounded by humiliation and who have thus become vindictive. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Usually they have gone through a series of humiliating experiences in childhood, experiences that may have had to do either with the social situation in which they grew up—such as belonging to a underrepresented group, or being themselves poor but having wealthy relatives—or with their own individual situation, such as being discriminated against for the sake of other children, being spurned, being treated as a plaything by the parents, being sometime privileged, and other times shamed and snubbed. Often experience of this kind are forgotten because of their painful character, but they reappear in awareness if the problems concerning humiliation are clarified. In adult neurotics, however, never the direct but only indirect results of these childhood situations can be observed, results which have been reinforced by passing through a “vicious circle”: a feeling of humiliation; a desire to humiliate others; enhanced sensitivity to humiliation because of a fear of retaliation; enhanced wish to humiliate others. The tendencies to humiliate are deeply repressed, usually because the neurotic, knowing from one’s own sensitivity how hurt and vindictive one feels when humiliated, is instinctively afraid of similar reactions in others. Nevertheless some of these tendencies may emerge without one’s being conscious of it: in an inadvertent disregard of others, such as letting them wait, in inadvertently bringing others into embarrassing situations, in letting others feel dependent. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Even if the neurotic is completely unaware of wishing to humiliate others or of having done so, one’s relations with them will be pervaded by a diffuse anxiety which is revealed in a constant anticipation of rebuke or humiliation for oneself. Inhibitions resulting from this sensitivity to humiliation often appear in the form of a need to avoid anything which might possibly seem humiliating to others; such a neurotic, for example, may be incapable of criticizing, of refusing an offer, of dismissing an employee, with the result that one often appears overconsiderate or over-polite. Finally, a tendency to humiliate may be hidden behind a tendency to admire. Since inflicting humiliation and bestowing admiration are diametrically opposed, the latter offers the best means of eradicating or concealing tendencies toward the former. This is the reason also why both these extremes are frequently to be found in the same person. There are several ways in which the two attitudes may be distributed, the reasons for the distribution being dependent on the individual. They may appear separately in different periods of life, a period of a general contempt for people succeeding a period of hero-worship; there may be admiration for men and contempt for women, or vice versa; or there maybe blind admiration for one or two persons, and just as blind a contempt for the rest of the World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
It is in the process of analysis that one can observe that the two attitudes in reality exist together. A patient may at the same time blindly admire and despise the analyst, either suppressing one of the two feelings or vacillating between them. In the striving for possession hostility usually takes the form of a tendency to deprive others. The wish to cheat, steal from, exploit or frustrate others is not in itself neurotic. It may be culturally patterned, or it may be warranted by the actual situation, or it may normally be considered a question of expediency. In the neurotic person, however, these tendencies are highly charged with emotion. Even if beneficial advantages one derives from them are sight or irrelevant one will feel elated and triumphant if one meets with success; in order to find a bargain, for example, one may spend time and energy entirely disproportionate to the amount saved. One’s satisfaction at success has two sources: a feeling that one has outwitted others, and a feeling that one has injured others. This tendency to deprive others takes many forms. The neurotic person will feel resentment toward a physician if one is not treated gratuitously, or for less than one is able to pay. One will feel anger toward one’s employees if they are not willing to work overtime without pay. In relations with friends and children the exploiting tendency is often justified by alleging that they have an obligation toward one. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The ordinary aspirant, whose intuition is not sufficiently developed, should test the person one proposes to accept as one’s master. This will require one to watch the other closely for a period of time. In some cases a week will give the answer, in others three months will be needed. In all cases, the aspirant ought not to commit oneself until one has enough evidence that one is committing oneself rightly. Those who lack the innate discernment or wide experience needed to detect the real character and true capacity of a master, should wait sufficiently long an seek outside advice before entrusting themselves to one. The faith that God is working through a particular being can be tested for its validity by watching one, for a sufficient length of time, what happens to those who reject one utterly or respond to one ardently. In their excessive eagerness to discover a master, they fail to practice discernment. However, wait for the true master requires a certain patience and strength. A true self-actualized person is hard to find. A false one, drooling one’s plagiarism or one;s platitudes, is easy to find. Do not fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Parents may actually destroy their children’s lives by demanding sacrifices on such a basis, and even if the tendency does not appear in such destructive forms, any mother who acts according to the belief that the child exist to give her satisfaction is bound to exploit the child emotionally. A neurotic of this kind may also tend to withhold things from others, withhold money which one ought to pay, information which one could give, pleasures of the flesh which one has led another to expect. The presence of robbing tendencies may be indicated by repeated dreams of stealing or one may have conscious impulses to steal, which one checks; one may actually have been a kleptomaniac at some period. Persons of this general type are often unaware that they purposely deprive others. The anxiety connected with their wish to do so may result in an inhibition as soon as something is expected of them, so that, for example, they forget to buy an expected birthday present, or they become impotent if a woman is willing to yield to them. This anxiety, however, does not always lead to an actual inhibition, but may become apparent in a lurking fear that they are exploiting or depriving others, as indeed they are, though consciously they would indignantly repudiate such an intention. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
A neurotic may even have this fear concerning certain of one’s activities in which these tendencies are actually not present, at the same time remaining unaware that in other activities one does exploit or deprive other people. These tendencies to deprive others are accompanied by an emotional attitude of begrudging envy. Most of us will feel some envy if others have certain advantages which we should like to have ourselves. With the normal person, however, the emphasis lies on the fact that one wishes to have these advantages oneself; with the neurotic the emphasis lies on the fact that one begrudges them to others, even if one does not want them at all. Mothers of this kind often begrudge the gaiety of their children and tell them that “those who sing before breakfast will cry before supper.” The neurotic will try to disguise the crudity of one’s begrudging attitude by putting it on the basis of a justified envy. The advantage of others, whether it concerns a doll, a girl, leisure or a job, appears so glorious and desirable that one feels entirely justified in one’s envy. This justification is possible only with the help of some inadvertent falsification of facts: an under-estimation of what one has oneself, and an illusion that the advantages of others are the really desirable ones. The self-deception may go so far as to make ne actually believe that one is in a miserable state because one fails to have the one advantage in which another person surpasses one, completely forgetting that in all other respects one would not like to change with the other. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The price one has to pay for this falsification is incapacity to enjoy and appreciate the possibilities for happiness that are available. This incapacity, however, serves to protect one from the much-feared envy of others. One does not deliberately keep oneself from satisfaction with what one has, as many normal persons who have good reason to protect themselves against the envy of certain persons, and therefore misrepresent their real situation; one does a thorough job of it, and really deprives oneself of any enjoyment. Thus one defeats one’s own ends: one wants to have everything, but in consequence of one’s destructive drives and anxieties one emerges at the end with empty hands. Love, power, and justice are metaphysically speaking as old as being itself. They preceded everything that is, and they cannot be derived from anything that is. They have ontological dignity. And before having received ontological dignity they had mythological meaning. They were gods before they became rational qualities of being. The substance of their mythological meaning is reflected in their ontological significance. Dike, the goddess of justice, receives Parmenides when he is introduced into truth itself. For there is no truth without the form of truth, namely justice. And being-itself, according to the same philosopher, is kept within the bondage of eternal laws. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The logos of being is the power which keeps the World going and the city alive, according to Heraclitus, and Mind is the divine power which swings the wheel of being, according to Xenophanes. According to Empedocles, it is hate and love, separation, and reunion which determine the movements of the elements. Love, power, and justice are ever repeated subjects of ontology. There is hardly a leading philosopher who does not put them into they very foundations of one’s thought. In Plato we find the doctrine of eros as the power which drives to the union with the true and the good self. In his interpretation of ideas as the essences of everything, he sees them as the power of being. And justice for him is not a special virtue, but the uniting form of the individual and the social body. In Aristotle we find the doctrine of the universal eros which derives everything towards the highest form, the pure actuality which moves the World not as a cause (kinoumenon) but as the object of love (eromenon). And the movement he describes is a movement from the potential to the actual, from dynamis to energeia, two concepts which include the concept of power. Marriage under the Lordship of Christ is a mutually sanctifying relationship—it moves us toward holiness. Most of us, by the time we get married, are like a well-furnished home—and a lot of furniture needs to be tossed out to make room for the other person. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Marriage helps empty those rooms. Genuine marital love reveals rooms of self-centeredness. Beyond these are autonomy and self-will—an ongoing house cleaning. Marriage certainly did that for me. I had no idea how self-centered I was until I married! In fact, marriage is the one institution which tames the inveterate barbarianism of man. Over the years a good marriage can change us for the better—almost beyond recognition. There is indeed a mutual sanctification in marriage. However, the emphasis in the Scriptures is on the responsibility of a husband’s love for his wife: “to make her holy, cleansing her by he washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless,” reports Ephesians 5.21-6.9. This is what Christ will do through our divine married to Him, for at His return the washed and regenerated Church will be presented to Him in absolute perfection. This is the dealing of the romance of the ages. Meanwhile, these divine nuptials are a parable of what ought to be the loving husband’s elevating effect on his wide. He is to be the man ff the Word who lives a Godly life, praying and sacrificing for his wife. His authentic spirituality is meant to buoy her onward and upward toward the image of Christ. The man who sanctifies his wife understands that this is his divinely ordained responsibility. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Men (ignoring for the moment our wives’ spiritual responsibility to us), do you realize it is your responsibility to seek your wife’s sanctification? Even more, honestly, do you accept it? Marriage will reveal something about her which you already know about yourself—that she is a sinner. Marriage reveals everything: her weaknesses, her worst inconsistencies, the things others never see. Loving your spouse is not to love as a saint, but as a sinner. If we love her for her saintliness, we do not love her at all. You see your wife as you see yourself, and you love her as yourself. You realize your mutual need, and you delve into God’s Word, to listen to it with your heart and try, by His grace, to love out so that she will be encouraged by your life—and thus become an even more beautiful bride for Christ. This brings up some hard questions: Is my wife more like Christ because she is married to me? Or is she like Christ in spite of me? Has she shrunk from His likeness because of me? Do I sanctify her or hold her back? Is she a better woman because she is married to me? Is she a better friend? A better mother? Men, our call is clear: sanctifying love. A passage emphasizing the complete and absolute forgiveness of our sins is Isaiah 43.25, “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.” Here God uses two expressions: He blots out our transgressions—that is, He removes them from the record—and He remembers them no more. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
A friend of mine, because of a teenage “prank,” had a felony conviction in Canada. Later, he received a Queen’s pardon. Now, if his past is ever investigated for criminal activity, the response given is, “We have no record of this person.” His record has not just been marked “pardoned,” it has been completely removed from the file and destroyed. It has been blotted out, never to be seen again. This is what God does with our sins. When you trust in Jesus Christ as you Savior, God removes your record from the file. He does not keep it there or daily add the long list of sins you continue to commit even as a Christian. God not only blots our sins from His record, He also remembers them no more. This expression means God no longer holds them against us. The blotting out of our transgressions is a legal act. It is an official pardon from the Supreme Governor. The remembering them no more is a relational act. It is the giving up by an injured party of all sense of being offended or injured. It is a promise never to bring up, either to Himself or to you, your sins. There is a difference between not remembering and forgetting. Forgetting is passive and is something that we human beings, not being omniscient, so. “Not remembering” is active; it is a promise whereby one person (in this case, God) determines not to remember the sins of another against him. To “not remember” is simply a graphic way of saying, “I will not bring up these matters to you or others in the future.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Consider a rebellious, recalcitrant student in a classroom. His acts of defiance toward the teacher may have both legal and relational consequences. Legally, he may be expelled from school. Relationally, the teacher may feel a deep sense of hostility toward the student. Even if the student is allowed to return to school (the equivalent of a pardon), the teacher may continue to hold hostility toward the student, “remembering” his rebellion and defiance. In order to gain a good standing in the classroom, the rebellious student needs to be both pardoned by the school authorities and forgiven by the teacher. On needs to have the teacher give up al sense of being offended and agree “not to remember”—for instance, not to bring up—his poor behavior. (Obviously, for this to happen, the student’s attitude and future conduct must change. However, still, the teacher must decide to not remember the past.) This, then, is similar to what God does when He blots out our transgressions and remembers our sins no more. As the Supreme Governor and Judge, God pardons us. As the offended party, God forgives us and He promises never to bring up our sins again. Through His death, Jesus not only secured our pardon with God, He also reconciled us to God. However, Paul said, “All this from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ,” reports 2 Corinthians 5.18. God, acting in grace through the giving of His Son to die for us, was the initiator of reconciliation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
If you have trusted in Jesus Christ alone for your salvation, you are both justified (a legal act) and reconciled (a relational act). You are no longer condemned by God. As Paul said, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” Romans 8.1. In addition, you are no longer estranged from God. God is no longer against you; God is now for you. Again as Paul said, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (8.31). Both of these wonderful changes occurred because of God’s grace and despite our sin and guilt: “[For] where sin increased, grace increased all the more” (5.20). Those who hate you do not win unless you hate them—and then you destroy yourself. Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can be felt only if you do not set conditions. Come live with me, and be my love, and we will some new pleasure prove of golden sands and crystal brooks with silken lines, and silver hooks. “And there shall be a new Heaven and a new Earth; and they shall be like unto the old save the old have passed away, and all things have become new,” reports Ether 13.9. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, Who didst descend from Heaven to Earth, out of the bosom of the Father, and didst sustain five wounds upon the wood of the Cross, and shed thy precious Blood for the remission of our sins. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
We humbly beseech Thee, God, that at the day of judgment we may be set at Thy right hand and be thought worthy to hear those sweetest words, “Come, ye blessed, into the kingdom of My Father:” Who with the same Father, who will save all beings. O Father, Thou hast made man from the glory of thyself, and when not an instrument of that glory, he is a thing of nought; no sin is greater than the sin of unbelief, for if union with Christ is the greatest good, unbelief is the greatest sin, as being cross to thy command; I see that whatever my sin is, yet no sin is like disunion from Christ by unbelief. Lord, keep me from committing the greatest sin in departing from him, for I can never in this life perfectly obey and cleave to Christ. When thou takest away my outward blessings, it is for sin, innot acknowledging that all that I have is of thee, in not serving thee through what I have, in making myself secure and hardened. Lawful blessings are the secret idols, and do mist hurt; the greatest injury is in the having, the greatest good in the taking away. In love divest me of blessings that I may glorify thee the more; remove the fuel of my sin, and may I prize the gain of a little holiness as overbalancing all my losses. The more I love thee with a truly gracious love the more I desire to love thee, and the more miserable I am at my want of love; the more I hunger and thirst after thee, the more I faint and fail in finding thee, the more my heart is broken for sin, the more I pray it may be far more broken. My great evil is that I do not remember the sins of my youth, nay, the sins of one day I forget the next. Keep me from all things that turn to unbelief or lack of felt union with Christ. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
By the shedding of the Blood of Christ our Lord, peace has been established in Heaven and Earth. O truly precious is the Covenant of peace, which was made by the offering of that holy Blood! Not with gold, nor silver, nor gems, nor pearls, but with the Blood that gushed from the side of the Saviour. That Blood-shedding gladdened Heaven, purified Earth, and terrified hell. Today, O good Jesus, for us Thou didst not hide Thy Face from shame and spitting. Today, Jesus our Redeemer, for us Thou wast mocked, buffeted by unbelievers, and crowned with thorns. Today, O good Shepherd, Thou didst lay down Thy life on the Cross for the sheep, and wast crucified with robbers, and hadst Thy sacred hands nailed through. Today Thou was laid in the guarded sepulcher, and the Saints burst open their tombs. Today, O good Jesus, put an end to our sins, that no the day of Thy Resurrection we may joyfully receive Thy holy Body, and be refreshed with Thy sacred Blood. O Christ, the Only-begotten Son of the Unbegotten Father, Who for us wast this say slain, the Innocent for the ungodly; remember the price of Thy Blood, and bout out the sins of Thy people; and as Thou wast pleased to endure for us reproaches, spitting, bonds, blows, the scourge, the cross. The nails, the bitter cup, death, the spear, and lastly burial, vouchsafe to us wretched ones for whom Thou didst suffer this, the infinite blessedness of Heavenly kingdom; that we who bow down in reverence for Thy Passion, may be raised up to things Heavenly in the joys of Thy Resurrection. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Love Needs No Debating—It is Hello or Goodbye, Yet I am Between a Kiss and a Sigh!
Little drops of water, little grains of sand, make the mighty ocean, and the pleasant land. So little minutes, humble though they be, make the mighty ages of eternity. Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, one sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. The human mind is constituted on a plan that has no Universal intuition. Its finiteness obliges it to see but two or three things at a time. If it wishes to take wider sweeps it has to use general ideas, as they are called, and in so doing to drop all concrete truths. Thus, in present case, if as wise beings wish to feel the connection between the milky way and the boy and the dinner and the sparrow and the human’s end of live, we can do so only falling back on the enormous emptiness of what is called an abstract proposition. We must say, all things in the World are fatally predetermined, and hang together in the adamantine fixity of a system of natural law. However, in the vagueness of this vast proposition we have lost all the concrete facts and links; and in all practical matters the concrete links are the only things of importance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The human mind is essentially partial. It can be efficient at all only by picking out what to attend to, and ignoring everything else—by narrowing its point of view. Otherwise, what little strength it has is dispersed, and it loses its way altogether. Humans always want their curiosity gratified for a particular purpose. If, in the case of the sparrow, the purpose is punishment, it would be idiotic to wander off from the cats, boys, and other possible agencies close by in the street, to survey the early Celts and the milky way: the boy would meanwhile escape. And if, in the case of the unfortunate man, we lose ourselves in contemplation of the thirteen-at-table mystery, and fail to notice the ice on the step and cover it with ashes, some other poor fella, who never dined out in his life, may slip on it coming to the door, and fall and break his head too. It is, then, a necessity laid upon us as human beings to limit our view. In mathematics we know how this method of ignoring and neglecting quantities lying outside of a certain range has been adopted in the differential calculus. The calculator throws out all the “infinitesimals” of the quantities one is considering. One treats them (under certain rules) as if they did not exist. In themselves they exist perfectly all the while; but they are as if they did not exist for the purpose of one’s calculations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Just so an astronomer, in dealing with the tidal movements of the ocean, takes no account of the waves made by the wind, or by the pressure of all the steamers which day and night are moving their thousands of tons upon its surface. Just so the marksman, in sighting his rifle, allows for the motion of the wind, but not for the equally real motion of the Earth and solar system. Just so a business man’s punctuality may overlook an error of five minutes, while a physicist, measuring the velocity of light, must count each thousandth of a second. There are, in short, different cycles of operation in nature; different departments, so to speak, relatively independent of one another, so that what goes on at any moment in one may be compatible with almost any condition of things at the same time in the next. The mould on the biscuit in the store-room of a man-of-war vegetates in absolute indifference to the nationality of the flag, the direction of the voyage, the weather, and the human dramas that may go on on board; and a mycologist may study it in complete abstraction from all these larger details. Only by so studying it, in fact, is there any chance of the mental concentration by which alone one may hope to learn something of its nature. On the other hand, the captain who in maneuvering the vessel through a naval fight should think it necessary to bring the mouldy biscuit into his calculations would very likely lose the battle by reason of the excessive “thoroughness” of his mind. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The causes which operate in these incommensurable cycles are connected with one another only if we take the whole Universe into account. For all lesser points of view it is lawful—nay, more, it is for human wisdom necessary—to regard them as disconnected and irrelevant to one another. And this brings us nearer to our special topic. If we look at an animal or a human being, distinguished from the rest of one’s kind by the possession of some extraordinary peculiarity, good or bad, we shall be able to discriminate between the causes which originally produced the peculiarity in one and the causes that maintain it after it is produced; and we shall see, if the peculiarity be one that one was born with, that these two sets of causes belong to two such irrelevant cycles. It was the triumphant originality of Dr. Darwin to see this, and to act accordingly. Separating the causes of production under the title of “tendencies to spontaneous variation,” and relegating them to a physiological cycle which one forthwith agreed to ignore altogether, one confined one’s attention to the causes of preservation, and under the names of natural selection and sexual selection studied them exclusively as functions of the cycle of the environment. Significant learning occurs more readily in relation to situations perceived as problems. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Learning will be facilitated, it would seem, if the teacher is congruent. This involves the teacher’s being the person that one is, and being openly aware of the attitudes one holds. It means that one feels acceptant toward one’s own real feelings. Thus one becomes a real person in the relationship with the students. One can be enthusiastic about subjects one likes, and bored by topics one does not like. One can be angry, but one can also be sensitive or sympathetic. Because one accepts one’s feeling as one’s feelings, one has no need to impose them on one’s students, or to insist that they feel the same way. One is a person, not a faceless embodiment of a curricular requirement, or a sterile pipe through which knowledge is passed from one generation to the next. As I think back over a number of teachers who have facilitated my own learning, it seems to me each one has this quality of being a real person. If your memory is the same, I wonder. If so, perhaps it is less important that a teacher cover the allotted amount of the curriculum, or use the most approved audio-visual devices, than that one be congruent, real, in one’s relation to one’s students. Another implication of the teacher is that significant learning may take place if the teacher can accept the student as one is, and can understand the feelings one possesses. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The teacher who can warmly accept, who can provide an unconditional positive regard, and who can empathize with the feelings of fear, anticipation, and discouragement which are involved in meeting new material, will have done a great deal toward setting the conditions for learning. It will perhaps disturb some that when the teacher holds such attitudes toward school work itself which are expressed, but feelings about parents, feelings of strong dislike for brother or sister, feelings of concern about self—the whole gamut of attitudes. Do such feelings have a right to exist openly in school setting? It is my thesis that they do. They are related to the person’s becoming, to one’s effective learning and effective functioning, and to deal understandingly and acceptantly with such feelings has a definite relationship to the learning of long division or the geography of Pakistan. This brings me to another implication which therapy holds for education. In therapy the resources for learning one’s self are possessed within. There is very little data which the therapist can supply which will be of help since the data to be dealt with exist within the person. In education this is not true. There are many resources of knowledge, of techniques, of theory, which constitute raw material for use. It seems to me that what I have said about therapy suggest that these materials, these resources, be made available to the students, not forced upon them. Here a wide range of ingenuity and sensitivity is asset. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
It is right and just that the ardent aspirations of a sincere candidate should eventually bring one a rewarding meeting in person with someone more advanced or in print with a qualified disciple. If one merits more, if one adds preparation to one’s aspirations, then a personal meeting with such a disciple may follow. However, it is wrong and unjust for one to be too demanding. One should expect further meetings only as one works upon oneself enough to be worthy of them, as well as only as the disciple has time to spare for them. And if one is so fortunate as to meet an adept, one should be satisfied with that single meeting. Such a meeting always brings certain tests with it and usually leads either to a powerful enhancement of the relation or to an abrupt cancellation of it altogether. This is because the tests arise from the power of opposition. The beginner who ventures out in quest of a teacher may have to stumble from charlatan to incompetent until one either finds the right one or abandons the effort as impossible. In most of the other affairs of life we find it necessary to use the services of specialists. Just so, here. We surrender our body to the surgeon. We must surrender our mind to the spiritual guide. Both, if incompetent or unscrupulous, may maim us for life. It is of the greatest importance therefore to exercise right judgement in the choice of one or the others. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
You must be able to communicate clearly what it is exactly that you seek and why you seek a particular individual as an instructor. Seekers have diverse aims. Some want to get away from life. Others aspire after supreme bliss. Yet others want power or knowledge. So one must first be definite as to what, precisely, one seeks. If one falls into the wrong hands, or if one lets oneself be guided by an incompetent amateur instead of a wise and expert being, one’s way will be hindered and even the good one thing one does get will turn out to be evil. One should be determined to wait calmly for the assent of one’s whole being before one makes a decision which must necessarily and tremendously affect one’s whole future. Most people react so strongly to these teachers—either empathic rejection straightway of infatuated acceptance superficially. A clear perception which is unaccompanied by sitting in judgement or rushing into acquiescence, which justly notes what is, unidealized yet unbiased evaluation, is rare. All problems of love, power, and justice drive us to an ontological analysis. The confusions cannot be cleared up, nor can the problems be solved without an answer to the questions: In what way is each of these concepts rooted in being-itself? And the question of being-itself is the ontological questions. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
It is, therefore, appropriate that, before dealing with the ontological roots of each of our concepts, we ask: What “root” in this sense mean? What is the “root-meaning” of a concept? How is the ontological question to be raised and how can it be answered? Ontology is the elaboration of the “logo” of the “on” in English of the “rational word” which grasps “being as such.” It is hard for the modern mind to understand the Latin esse-ipsum, being-itself, or the Greek, being-in-so-far-as-it-is-being. We all are nominalist by birth. And as nominalist we are inclined to dissolve our World into things. However, this inclination in an historical accident and not an essential necessity. The concern of the so-called realists of the Middle Ages was to maintain the validity of the universals as genuine expressions of being. It is however not realism to which I want you to turn from the naïve nominalism in which the modern World lives, but I want you to turn to something older than both nominalism and realism: to the philosophy which asks the question of being before the split into universal essences and particular contents. This philosophy is older than any other. It is the most powerful element in all great philosophies of the past, and it has come into its own in the important philosophical attempts of our period. It is the philosophy which asks the question: What does it mean that something is? What are the characteristics of everything that participates in being? And this is the question of ontology. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Because in our present thought the horror is “hidden,” “sin” as a condition of the human self is not available as a principle of explanation for those who are supposed to know why life goes as it does and to guide others. For example, why do around half of American marriages fail, or why do we have massive problems with substance addiction and with the moral failure of public leaders. Those who are supposed to know are lost in speculations about causes, while the real sources of our failure are possessed in choice and the facts at work in it. Choice is where sin dwells. Our social and psychological sciences stand helpless before the terrible things done by human beings, but the warpedness and wrongness of the human the human will is something we cannot admit into serious conversation. We are like farmers who diligently plant crops but cannot admit the existence of weeds and insects and can only think to pour on more fertilizer. Similarly, the only solution we know to human problems today is education. And indeed education might be a good thing. Who can deny that? It could help. However, what kind of education? And can we really think that if people only knew what is today generally understood to be the right thing to do, they would do it? Education as now understood—the actual social practice—cannot come to grips with the realities of the human self. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
It is not just a matter of “separation of church and state” and all that education has come to mean. Rather, education (the institution) has now adopted values, attitudes, and practices that make any rigorous understanding of the human self and life impossible. “Now, the Eternal cries, bring your case forward. Now, Jacob’s King cries, state your proofs. Let us hear what happened in the past, that we may ponder it, or show me what is yet to be, that we may watch the outcome. Yes, let us hear what is to come, that we may be sure that you are gods; come, do something or other that we may marvel at the sight! Why, you are things of naught; you can do nothing at all! Here is one I have raised from the north; I have called him by name from the east. He shall trample down rulers as morter, like a potter treading clay. Now, we predicted this beforehand. Who foretold it, that we might hail it true? No one predicted it, no one announced it, not a word ever fell from your mouths. As for your idols, I see no one, not a prophet in their midst to answer my inquiries. They are all an empty nothing; all they do it utterly inane. Their metal images are all futile, all vain,” reports Isaiah 41.21-26, 28-29. A dramatic scene is described in the words of the prophet. Jahweh, as judge and party at the same time, calls for the gods of the nations to a Heavenly disputation to be witnessed by the people of the World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
They are to discuss which god has proved to be the true God. The true God must be He Who is the Lord of history. The final decision is that Jahweh is the God of history, and therefore the god who is really God. Jahweh is the God of history, because He has shown through His prophets that He understands the meaning of history, and that He knows the past and the future, the beginning and end, of all things. In showing that, He proves that He makes history, and that it is He Who has raised Cyrus, the destroyer of the power of the Jewish nation cannot answer. For they did not know of that act; they did not predict it; and they did not perform it. The disputation ends with the pronouncement that these gods are all vain, that their works are as nothing, and that their images are as mere wind and illusion. It is Jahweh alone Who is God, for He is the God of history. Seldom in history have beings been as disturbed about history as we are today. We desire urgently to catch at least a glimpse of the future, of wisdom and prophecy. It is not just a few thousand Jewish exiles, to whom our prophet speaks by the rivers of Babylon, but million exiles from all over the World, who try passionately to penetrate the darkness of their future. And with them, a great many other beings long for a strong, inspiring word concerning the future of humankind. However, those who have the power to shape the future fundamentally contradict each other. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Political leaders declare solemnly that it is almost impossible to carry the burden of their office at this time. Ministers at home and in the army can only describe in negative terms the object of their people’s death and sacrifice. Those who have to speak to the people of the enemy soon realize that they can say nothing of real promise on the political plane. Only the prophets of disaster-without-hope give evidence of complete certainty. However, they are not the prophets of God. We should not expect the darkness of our history to de dispersed soon, either by new conferences or by helplessness in regard to the future have depths that are more profound. We do not receive an answer concerning the future, because we ask questions of those who cannot know the future, the gods who are as vanity, the gods of the nations, who are as nothing besides the God of history. Every man tries to wrest an oracle from the god of one’s nation through the mouths of one’s priests, the might and wise. And every being succeeds. All beings throughout the World are flooded with oracles from the gods of their nations and the gods of other nations. All beings compare their oracles with others, and attempt to determine the most credible ones. However, the darkness simply increases. All beings speak of the future in terms of their own nations. Yet even the greatest nation is as nothing to the God of history. For no nation or alliance of nations can say that it is the meaning, the purpose of history, that it is the nation or alliance which holds the knowledge of the past and the power to shape the future. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The entire assembly of national gods must fall finally under the judgment of Jahweh, which condemns it as a thing of naught, as a thing incapable of doing anything at all. We receive so many oracles, but no prophecies, only because we refuse to turn to the source of prophecy, the God of history. Jahweh revealed Himself through Israel’s pain as the God Who is the first and the last, beginning and the end, of history. A complete national breakdown alone made the remnants of Israel ready to receive this revelation in its universal significance. However, whenever the Jewish nation used that revelation as an excuse for national pride, and transformed Jahewh into a merely national god, another breakdown followed. For Jahweh as a national god is always condemned by Jahweh the God of history. The mystery of Judaism today is possessed in that fact. Our prophet describes two very great figures: Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, the World-figure of his time, called by the prophet the shepherd and the anointed, the man of God’s counsel; and the servant of Jahweh who represents the saving power of the innocent suffering and death. The glorious founder of the Empire had to be the servant of the servant of Jahweh. He had to liberate the remnants of Israel, out of which the suffering servant arose. I feel that the only solution of this historical problem today is possessed in that prophetic concept. For there are two forces in our battered World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
One is the force of those who, like the suffering servant of God, exist, unseen, in all countries. We do not know where these servants live, or what they will make of the future. However, we know that they exist, and that their suffering is not vain. They are hidden tools of the God of history. They are the aged and the children, the young men and the young women, the persecuted and the imprisoned, and all those sacrificed for the sake of the future, for one small stone in the building of the Kingdom of God, the cornerstone of which is the perfect Servant of God. And the second force of the World is the force of those who, like Cyrus, rule Empires, and incorporate all the shame and greatness of Empires. They are the men of God’s counsel, because they carry through His purposes in the service of the suffering servants of Jahweh. However, they are not aware that they are instruments, as Cyrus was not aware that he was God’s man of counsel. They do not know what shall become of their deeds. And if we look to them in our attempts to grasp the future, we shall not know either; if we look to them, we shall always remain in darkness. However, if we turn to the true servants and to the true God whom they serve, the God of history, we shall know of the future. We can find the solution of riddle of history as a whole, and of our particular history, in the figure of Cyrus in the service of the servant of Jahweh. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Another striking metaphor expressing the completeness of God’s forgiveness occurs in Micah 7.19. There the prophet Micah said of God, “You will tread our sins underfoot and hurl our iniquities into the depths of the sea.” When I was a naval officer I had an experience where equipment was lost in the depths of the sea through a small boat accident. I know what it is to drag grappling hooks across the bottom of the sea al day in a vain effort to recover the equipment. That ship’s gear was lost forever. So it is with our sins. God has hurled them into the depths of the sea to be lost forever, never to be recovered, never to be held against us. Again, just as God said He put our sins behind His back, so here He says He will hurl them into the depths of the sea. They will not fall overboard; God will hurl them into the depths. He wants them to be lost forever, because He has fully dealt with them in His Son, Jesus Christ. Do you begin to get the picture? Are you realizing that God’s forgiveness is complete and irreversible? Have you started to understand that regardless of how bad you have been or how many times you have committed the same sin, even if Santa Claus did not bring you a present because of your bad behavior, God completely and forgives you because of Christ? Do you see that, because God has already dealt with your sins in Christ, you do not have to do penance or fulfill some probationary term before God can bless you again? #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
I once heard someone say he felt he could no longer claim God’s gracious promise of forgiveness in 1 John 1.9: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and jut and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” He reasoned that he had sinned so many times he had used up all his “credit” with God. I believe many Christians think that way because we do not entirely comprehend the fullness of God’s forgiveness in Christ. However, if we insist on thinking in terms of “credit: before God, we must think only of Christ’s credit, for we have none on our own. And how much does God have? An infinite amount. That is why Paul could say, “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more,” reports Romans 5.20. Life is like the baseball season, where even the best team loses at least a third of its games, and even the worst team has its days of brilliance. The goal is not to win every game but to win more than you lose, and if you do that often enough, in the end you may find you have won it all. “And now, I would commend you to seek this Jesus of whom the prophets and apostles have written, that the grace of God the Father, and also the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost, which beareth record of them, may be and abide in you forever. Amen,” reports Ether 12.41. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
O Christ, the Son of God, Whom the savage multitude persecuted with blind fury, and while they inflicted suffering on Thee as Man, discerned not in Thee the essence of Godhead; grant that we, confessing Thee, true God and Man, to be One Christ, may be removed far away from eternal punishment. Jesus, our God, Who gavest Thy cheek to those who smote Thee, and wast for our sakes filled full with reproach; grant to us Thy servants that, being instructed by the example of Thy Passion we may be fitted alway to bear Thy sweet yoke, and learn to Thee Who are meek and lowly of heart. O God, Thou hast taught me that Christ has all fullness and so all plenitude of the Spirit, that all fullness I lack in myself is in him, for his people, not for himself alone, he having perfect knowledge, grace, righteousness, to male me see, to make me righteous, to give me fullness; that is my duty, out of a sense of emptiness, to go to Christ, possess, enjoy his fullness as mine, as if I had it in myself, because it is for me in him; that when I do this I am full of the Spirit, as a fish that has got from the shore to the sea and has all fullness of water to move in, for when faith fills me, then I am full; that this is the way to be filled with the Spirit, like Stephen, first faith, then fullness, for this way makes me most empty, and so most fit for the Spirit to fill. Thou has taught me that the finding of this treasure of all grace in the field of Christ begets strength, joy, glory, and renders all graces alive. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Help me to delight more in what I receive from Christ, more in that fullness which is in him, the fountain of all his glory. Let me not think to receive the Spirit from him as a thing apart from finding, drinking, being filled with him. To this end, O God, do thou establish me in Christ, settle me, give me a being there, assure me with certainty that all this is mine, for this only will fill my heart with joy and peace. O Christ, Son of God, Whom God the Father gave up for all, when He received Thee as a true Sacrifice for us; receive the desires of Thy people; save those whom Thou hast delivered; suffer not those to go into everlasting anguish, who Thou camest to redeem from perishing eternally; and grant that through Thee, Whom we believe to have been crucified for all, we may have remission of sins in this life, and everlasting joy in the life to come. Remember, O Jesus, the vinegar and gall, that bitter cup which Thou didst taste for the ungodly; and let the bitterness which was Thy portion be to us a cause of perpetual sweetness. It is easy to create an idealistic figure in imagination and declare that one will always act in such-and-such a way, but in actuality one’s actions are unpredictable and what they are can really be known only when they happen. May God be our guide and bless us in all our thoughts and deeds. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Faith of Our Fathers, Living Still, in Spite of Dungeon, Fire, Sword—O how Our Hearts Beat High with Joy!

We mortal cross the ocean of this World each in one’s average cabin of life. If you get simple beauty and nought else, you get the best thing God invents. I have found the experience of therapy to have meaningful and sometimes profound implications for education, for interpersonal communication, for family living, for the creative process. People in therapy are up against a situation which one perceives as a serious and meaningful problem. It may be that one finds oneself behaving in ways in which one cannot control, or one is overwhelmed by confusions and conflicts, or one’s marriage is going on the rocks, or one finds oneself unhappy at work. One is, in short, faced with a problem with which one has tried to cope, and found oneself unsuccessful. One is therefore eager to learn, even though at the same time one is frightened that what one discovers in oneself may be disturbing. Thus one of the conditions nearly always present in an uncertain and ambivalent desire to learn or change, growing out of a perceived difficulty in meeting life. When one comes to therapy, what are the conditions which this individual meet? If therapy is to occur, it seems necessary that the therapist be, in the relationship, a unified, or integrated, or congruent person. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
What I mean is that within the relationship with the therapist, one must be exactly what one is—not a façade, or a role, or a pretense. I have used the term “congruence” to refer to this accurate matching of experience with awareness. It is when the therapist is fully and accurately aware of what one is experiencing at this moment in the relationship, that one is fully congruent. Unless this congruence is present to a considerable degree it is unlikely that significant learning can occur. Though this concept of congruence is actually a complex one, I believe all of us recognize it in an intuitive and commonsense way in individual with whom we deal. With one individual we recognize that one not only means exactly what one says, but that one’s deepest feelings also match what one is expressing. Thus whether one is angry or affectionate or ashamed or enthusiastic, we sense that one is the same at all levels—in what one is experiencing at an organismic level, in one’s awareness at the conscious level, and in one’s words and communications. We furthermore recognize that one is acceptant of one’s immediate feelings. We say of such a person that we know “exactly where one stands.” We tend to feel comfortable and secure in which a relationship. With another person we recognize that what one is saying is almost certainly a front or a façade. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
We wonder what one really feels, what one is really experiencing, behind this façade. We may also wonder if one knows what one really feels, recognizing that one may be quite unaware of the feelings one is actually experiencing. With such a person we tend to be cautious and wary. It is not the kind of relationship in which defenses can be dropped or in which significant learning and change can occur. Thus this second condition for therapy is that the therapist is characterized by a considerable degree of congruence in the relationship. One is freely, deeply, and acceptantly oneself, with one’s actual experience of one’s feelings and reactions matched by an accurate awareness of these feelings and reactions as they occur and as they change. A third condition in therapy is that the therapist will experience a warm caring for the client—a caring which is not possessive, which demands no personal gratification. It is an atmosphere which simply demonstrates “I care.” Not “I care for you if you behave thus and so.” This attitude is called “unconditional positive regard,” since it has no conditions of worth attached to it. I have often used this term “acceptance” to describe this aspect of the therapeutic climate. It involves as much feeling of acceptance for the client’s expression of negative, “bad,” painful, fearful, and abnormal feelings as for one’s expression of “good” beneficial, mature, confident and social feelings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Unconditional positive regard also involves an acceptance of and a caring for the client as a separate person, with permission for one to have one’s own feelings and experiences, and to find one’s own meanings in them. To the degree that the therapist can provide this safety-creating climate of unconditional positive regard, significant learning is likely to take place. An empathic understand is also important. The therapist is supposed to experience an accurate, empathic understanding of the client’s World as seen from the inside. To sense the client’s private World as if it were your own, but without ever losing the “as if” quality—this is empathy, and this seems essential to therapy. To sense the client’s anger, fear, or confusion as if it were your own, yet without your own anger, fear, or confusion getting bound up in it, is the condition we are endeavoring to describe. When the client’s World is this clear to the therapist, and one moves about in it freely, then one can both communicate one’s understanding of what is clearly known to the client and can also voice meanings in the client’s experience of which the client is scarcely aware. That such penetrating empathy is important for therapy. The therapist must be well able to understand the patient’s feelings, never in any doubt about what the patient means, and remarks fit in just right with the patient’s mod and content. And the therapist’s tone of voice must convey the complete ability to share the patient’s feelings. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
A fifth condition for significant learning in therapy is that the client should experience or perceive something of the therapist’s congruence, acceptance, and empathy. It is not enough that these conditions exist in the therapist. They must, to some degree, have been successfully communicated to the client. When these five conditions exist, it has been our experience that a process of change inevitably occurs. The client’s rigid perceptions of oneself and of others loosen and become open to reality. The rigid ways in which one has construed the meaning of one’s experience are looked at, and one finds oneself questioning many of the facts of one’s life, discovering that they are only fact because one has regarded them so. One discovers feelings of which one has been unaware, and experiences them, often vividly, in the therapeutic relationship. Thus one learns to be more open to all of one’s experience—the evidence within oneself as well as the feelings one has regarded as more acceptable. One becomes a more fluid, changing, learning person. In this process it is not necessary for the therapist to “motivate” the client or to supply the energy which brings about the change. Nor, in some sense, is the motivation supplied by the client, at least in any conscious way. Let us say rather that the motivation for learning and change springs from the self-actualizing tendency of life itself, the tendency for the organism to flow into all the differentiated channels of potential development, insofar as these are experienced as enhancing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Therefore, therapy producing a type of significant learning which takes place when the five conditions are met: When the client perceives oneself as faced by a serious and meaningful problem; when the therapist is a congruent person in the relationship, able to be the person one is; when the therapist feels an unconditional positive regard for the client; when the therapist experiences an accurate empathic understanding of the client’s private World, and communicates this; when the client to some degree experiences the therapist’s congruence, acceptance, and empathy. To profit from good advice requires more wisdom than to give it. Sometimes ordinarily quiet and rational persons may freeze with rage or become actually abusive if their aloofness and independence are threatened. Absolute panic may be induced at the thought of joining any movement or professional group where real participation and not merely payment of dues is required. If they do become involved they may thrash about blindly to extricate themselves. Hey can be more expert in finding methods to escape than a person whose life is attacked. Were the choice between love and independence, as a patent once put it, they would choose independence without hesitation. This brings up another point. Not only are they willing to defend their detachment by every available means, but they find no sacrifice too great in its behalf. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
External advantages and inner values will be equally renounced—consciously, by setting aside any desire that might interfere with independence, or unconsciously, by automatic prohibition. Anything so vigorously defended must have an overwhelming subjective value. We can hope to understand the functions of detachment and eventually to be helpful therapeutically only if we are aware of this. As we have seen, each of the basic attitudes towards others have its beneficial value. In moving toward people the person tries to create for oneself a friendly relation to one’s World. In moving against people one equips oneself for survival in a competitive society. In moving away from people one hopes to attain a certain integrity and serenity. As a matter of fact, all three attitudes are not only desirable but necessary to our development as human beings. It is only when they appear and operate in a neurotic framework that they become compulsive, rigid, indiscriminate, and mutually exclusive. This considerably detracts from their value, but does not destroy it. The gains to be derived from detachment are indeed considerable. It is significant that in all Eastern philosophies detachment is sought as a basis for high spiritual development. Of course we cannot compare such aspirations with those of neurotic detachment. There detachment is voluntarily chosen as the best approach to self-fulfillment and is adopted by persons who could, if they wanted, live a different kind of life; neurotic detachment, on the other hand, is not a mater of choice but of inner compulsion, the only possible way of living. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Nonetheless, some of the same benefits may be derived from it—though the extent to which this will be so depends on the severity of the whole neurotic process. In spite of the ravaging force of a neurosis, the detached person may preserve a certain integrity. This would hardly be a factor in a society in which human relationships were generally friendly and honest. However, in a society in which there is much hypocrisy, crookedness, envy, cruelty and greed, the integrity of a none too strong person easily suffers; keeping at a distance helps to maintain it. Furthermore, since neurosis usually robs a person of one’s peace of mind, detachment may provide an avenue of serenity, its extent varying with the amount of sacrifice one is willing to make. Detachment allows one, in addition, some measure of original thinking and feeling, provided that within one’s magic circle emotional life has not been altogether deadened. Lastly, all of these factors, together with one’s contemplative relation to the World and the comparative absence of distraction, contribute toward the development and expression of creative abilities, if one has any. I do not mean that neurotic detachment is a precondition for creation, but that under neurotic stress detachment will provide the best change of expressing what creative ability there is. Substantial though these gains may be, they do not seem to be the main reason why detachment is so desperately defended. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Actually the defense is equally desperate if for one reason or another the gains are minimal or are heavily overshadowed by concomitant disturbances. This observation leads into further depths. If the detached person is thrown into close contact with others one may very readily go to pieces or, to use the popular term, have a nervous breakdown. I use the term advisedly here because it covers a wide range of disturbances—functional disorders, alcoholism, suicidal attempts, depression, incapacity for work, psychotic episodes. The patient oneself, and sometimes the psychiatrist too, tends to relate the disturbance to some upsetting event that occurred just prior to the “break down.” A sergeant’s unjust discrimination, a husband’s philandering and lying about it, a wife’s behaving neurotically, a homosexual episode, unpopularity in college, the need to make a living when life have previously been sheltered, and so on may be held to blame. True enough any such problem is relevant. The therapist should take it seriously and try to understand what in particular was set off in the patient by a specific difficulty. However, to do that is hardly sufficient, because the question remains why the patient has been so intensely affected, why one’s whole psychic equilibrium has been endangered by a difficulty which by and large cannot be considered greater than ordinary frustrations and upsets. In other words, even when the analyst understands how the patient reacted to a particular difficulty, one still needs to understand why there is such a distinct disproportion between the provocation and its effect. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
In answer we could point to the fact that the neurotic trends involved in detachment, like other neurotic trends, give the individual a feeling of security as long as they function, and that, conversely, anxiety is aroused when they fail to function. As long as the detached person can keep at a distance one feels comparatively safe; if for any reason the magic circle is penetrated, one’s security is threatened. This consideration brings us closer to an understanding of why the detached person becomes panicky if one can no longer safeguard one’s emotional distance from others—and we should add that the reason one’s panic is so great is that one has no technique for dealing with life. One can only keep aloof and avoid life, as it were. Here again it is the negative quality f detachment that gives the picture a special color, different from that of other neurotic trends. To be more specific, in a difficult situation the detached person can neither appease nor fight, neither co-operate nor dictate terms, neither love nor be ruthless. One is as defenseless as an animal that has only one means of coping with danger—that is, to escape and hide. Appropriating pictures and analogies that have appeared in associations or dreams: one is like the pygmies of Ceylon, invincible so long as they hide in the forests but easily beaten when they emerge. One is like a medieval town protected by one wall only—if that wall is taken, the town is defenseless against the enemy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Such a position fully justifies one’s anxiety toward life in general. It helps us to understand one’s remoteness as an over-all protection to which one must tenaciously cling and which one must defend at whatever cost. All neurotic trends are at bottom defensive moves, but the others also constitute an attempt to cope with life in a beneficial way. When detachment is the predominate trend it renders a person so helpless in any realistic dealing with life that in the course of time its defensive character becomes uppermost. If you want to understand something, try to change it. “And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall laugh. Blessed are ye, when people shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and case out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake. Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for behold, your reward is great in Heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets. But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. Woe unto you, when all beings shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets,” reports Luke 6.20-26. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Readers and students of the New Testament often find that it is not the refined argument of Paul or the mystical wisdom of John, but the simple sayings of Jesus, as recorded by the first three evangelists, which are the most difficult to interpret. The words of Jesus seem so clear and straightforward and adequate that it is hard to imagine that anybody could miss the meaning. However, when we are asked to express the meaning in our own words, we discover one level of meaning after another. We realize that words of Jesus which we have known since our earliest childhood are incomprehensible to us. And if we try to penetrate them, we are drive from one depth to another; we are never able to exhaust them. Nothing seems simpler, and yet nothing is more perplexing, than, for instance, the Lord’s Prayer, the Parables, and the Beatitudes. We have heard the four Beatitudes and the four Woes as Luke reports them. Their meanings seems unmistakable. The poor, those who are hungry now, those who weep now, those who are isolated and insulted, are praised, congratulated, so to speak, because they can expect precisely the opposite of their present situation. And the rich, those who are full, those who laugh, those who are popular and respected, are pitied, because they must expect precisely that which is contrary. Two questions arise. What is promised and to whom is it promised? What is the kingdom which is to be owned by the less affluent, and who are the less affluent who shall own it? Ans who are the rich against whom the Woes shall be directed, and what shall happen to them? #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Matthew tried to answer these questions. He said that the poor are the poor in spirit, and that those who hunger, hunger after righteousness. He said that those who weep, mourn for the state of the World. And to them is promised the kingdom of Heaven, the vision of the Divine Spirit, the comfort and mercy of the realm of God. Is Matthew’s interpretation right? Or has Matthew, and have the official Christian Churches, following him, spiritualized the Beatitudes? Or, on the other has, has Luke, and have the many sectarian and revolutionary movements, following him, distorted the Beatitudes from a materialistic point of view? Both assertions have been made and both are wrong. If we want the true answer, we must look at those to whom Jesus spoke. He spoke to two kinds of people. One kind lived with their hearts turned toward the coming stage of the World. They were poorly adjusted to things as they were. They were suffering under the conditions of their lives. Many were disinherited, insecure, hungry, oppressed. There is no distinction made in the Beatitudes between spiritual and material wants, and there is no distinction made between spiritual and material fulfillment. Those whom Jesus spoke were in need of both. Neither the prophets nor Jesus spiritualized the message of the Kingdom. Nor did they understand it and interpret it to say that the Kingdom would come as the result of a merely material revolution. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Christianity pronounces the unity of body and soul. The Beatitudes praise those who will be fulfilled in their whole being. However, the other kind of people to whom Jesus spoke were those to whom He promised the Woes. They were unbroken in their relation to the present stage of the World. They lived with their hearts in things as they are. They were well-established in their lives; they enjoyed prestige, power and security. Jesus threatened them spiritually and materially. They were bound to this eon, and they were to vanish with this eon. They had no treasure beyond it. The situation of the people of Galilee to whom Jesus spoke is still our situation. The Woes are promised today to all of us who are well off, respected, and secure, not simply because we have such security and respect, but because it inevitably binds us, with an almost irresistible power, to this eon, to things as they are. And the Beatitudes are promised today to all of us who are without security and popularity, who are mourning in body and soul. And they are promised not simply because we lack so much, but because they very fact of our lacks and our sorrows may turn our heats away from things as they are, toward the coming eon. The Beatitudes do not glorify those who are poor in misery, individuals or classes, because they are less affluent. The Woes are not promised to those who are rich and secure, classes or individuals, because they are rich. If this were so, Jesus could not have promised to the less affluent the reversal of their situation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Jesus praises the less affluent in so far as they live in two Worlds, the present World and the World to come. And He threatens that rich in so far as they live in one World alone. (However, this does not mean that the rich are unrighteous. God loves all of his children.) This brings a tremendous tension into our lives. We live in two orders, one of which is a reversal of the other. The coming order is always coming, shaking this order, fighting with it, conquering it and conquered by it. The coming order is always at hand. However, one can never say: “It is here! It is there!” One can never grasp it. However, one can be grasped by it. And whenever one is grasped by it, one is rich, even if one be less affluent in this order. One’s wealth is one’s participation in the coming order, in its battles, its victories and defeats. One is blessed, one may rejoice and leap even when one is isolated and insulted, because one’s isolation belongs to this order, while one belongs to the other order! One is blessed, while they who cast out one’s name are to be pitied. By their dread and despair, and by their hatred of one, they prove that the Woes Jesus has directed against them have already become real. They lose the one and only order they have; they disintegrate in body and spirit. Perhaps we are right to consider the catastrophe of our present World as a fulfillment of the Words which Jesus directed against a rich, abundant, laughing, self-congratulating social order. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
However, if we believe this, we can also believe that those who have become poor and hungry and sorrowing and persecuted in this catastrophe are those in whom the other order is made manifest. They may betray it, but they are called first. Only through the paradox of the Beatitudes can we begin to understand our own life and the life of our World. “The Lord looks down from Heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God. They have all gone astray, they are al alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one,” reports Psalm 14.2-3. Starting from ruin—we must see the soul and the person in its ruined condition, with its malformed and dysfunctional mind, feelings, body, and social relations, before we can understand that it must be delivered and reformed and how that can be done. One of the greatest obstacles to effective spiritual formation in Christ today is simple failure to understand and acknowledge the reality of the human situation as it affects Christians and non-Christians alike. We must start from where we really are. And where we recall that all people undergo a process of spiritual formation. Their spirit is formed, and with it their whole being. Spiritual formation is not just something for religious people. No one escapes. The most hardened unlawful person as well as the most devout of human beings have had a spiritual formation. They have become a certain kind of person. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
You have had a spiritual formation and I have had one, and it is still ongoing. It is like education: everyone gets one—a good one or a bad one. We reemphasize that those are fortune or blessed who are able to find or are given a path of life that forms their spirit and inner World in a way that is good. Remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to our as the life of a gnat. However, it is immortals whom we jokes with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortals horrors or everlasting splendors. Strangely, it is precisely the intrinsic greatness of the person that makes it in its ruined condition “a horror and a corruption such as you now meet only in a nightmare.” If we were insignificant, our ruin would not be horrifying. The hardest thing to accept in the Christian religion is the great value it places upon the individual soul. Still older Christian writers used to say that God has hidden the majesty of the human soul from us to prevent our being ruined by vanity. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
This explains why even in its ruined condition a human being is regarded by God as something immensely worth saving. Sin does not make it worthless, but only lost. And in its lostness it is still capable of great strength, dignity, and heartbreaking beauty and goodness—enough so to hide from the unenlightened, or those who do not wish to understand, the horror it has become and is becoming. Gracious Lord, Almighty, Jesus Christ, let Thy sufferings assist us, and defend us from all pain and grief, all peril and misery, all uncleanness of heart, all sin, all scandal and infamy, from evil diseases of soul and body, from sudden and unforeseen death, and from all persecution of our foes visible and invisible. For we know that in what day or hour we call to mind Thy Passion, we shall be safe. Therefore relying on Thine infinite tenderness, we beseech Thee, O most loving Saviour, by Thy most benignant and sacred sufferings to protect us with gracious assistance, and in continual tenderness to preserve us from all evil. O God, the Son of God—so loving, yet hated—so forbearing, yet assaulted unto death—Who didst show Thyself so gentle and merciful to Thy persecutors; grant that through the wounds of Thy Passion our sins may be expiated, and as in Thy humiliation Thou didst suffer death for us, so now, being glorified, bestow on us everlasting brightness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
O Lover to the uttermost, may I read the meltings of thy heart to me in the manager of thy birth, in the garden of thy agony, in the cross of thy suffering, in the tomb of thy resurrection, in the Heaven of thy intercession. Bold in this thought I defy my adversary, tread down one’s temptations, resist one’s schemings, renounce the World, am valiant for truth. Deepen in me a sense of my holy relationship to thee, as spiritual bridegroom, as God’s fellow, as sinners’ friend. I think of thy glory and my vileness, thy majesty and my meanness, thy beauty and my deformity, thy purity and my filth, they righteousness and my iniquity, thy purity and my filth, thy righteousness any my iniquity. Thou hast loved me everlastingly, unchangeably may I love thee as I am loved; Thou hast loved me everlastingly, unchangeably, may I love thee as I am loved; Thou hast given thyself for me, may I give myself to thee; thou has died for me, may I live to thee, in every moment of my time, in every moment of my mind, in every pulse of my heart. May I never dally with the World and its allurements, but walk by thy side, listen to thy voice, be clothes with thy graces, and adorned with thy righteousness. “And it came to pass that the Lord said unto me: If they have not charity it mattereth not unto thee, thou hast been faithful; wherefore thy garments shall be made clean. And because thou hast seen thy weakness thou shalt be made strong, even unto the sitting down in the place which I have prepared in the mansions of my Father,” reports Ether 12.37. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Let’s Start the New Year Right, Twelve O’clock Tonight when they Dim the Light Let’s begin!
Temper is what gets most people in trouble, and pride is what keeps them there. Do what you can with what you have, where you are. When you work with people, it is a lot like mining for gold. When you mine for gold, you must literally move tones of dirt to find a single ounce of gold. However, you do not look for the dirt—you look for the gold! Are humans apes or Angels? Now I am on the side of the Angels. It is reasonable to conclude from our study that changes associated with client-centered therapy is that the self-perception is altered in a direction which makes the self more highly valued. This change is not a transient one, but persists after therapy. This decrease in internal tension is a highly significant one. However, therapy will not bring about perfect adjustment, or complete absence of tensions, people are still human, not computers. It is also clear that the changes under discussion have not occurred simply as a result of the passage of time, nor as the result of a decision to seek help. They are definitely associated with therapy. The self-concept changes in therapy, not the ideal self. The latter tends to change but slightly, and its change is in the direction of becoming a less demanding, or more achievable self. We know that the self-picture emerging at the end of therapy is rated by clinicians (in a manner which excludes possible bias) as being better adjusted. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Spirituality in one’s aura, the self-actualized person is not always immediately recognizable although it is always indefinable. The effect one has upon those around one cannot be measured by its immediate result but only by its ultimate on. We know that this emerging self has a great degree of inner comfort, of self-understanding and self-acceptance, of self-responsibility. We know that this post-therapy self finds greater satisfaction and comfort in relationships with others. Thus bit by bit we have been able to add to our objective knowledge of the changes wrong by therapy in the client’s perceived self. The individua makes choices and establishes values differently; one meets frustration with less prolonged physiological tension, one changes in the way one perceives oneself and values oneself. However, this still leaves unanswered question of practical concern to the layman and to society, “Does the client’s everyday behavior change in such a way that the changes can be observed, and is the nature of these changes beneficial?” It seems that the inner changes taking place in therapy will cause the individual after therapy to behave in ways which are less defensive, more socialized, more acceptant of reality in oneself and in one’s social environment, and which give evidence of more socialized system of values. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
One will, in short, behave in ways which are regarded as more mature, and infantile ways of behaving will tend to decrease. The World can judge only by appearances and always judges worst; the World can never hope to understand the independence of a being like the self-actualized who will not hesitate to take on even the appearance of wrong whilst seeking to render service. Actually, one has to subscribe to an infinitely higher ethic than conventional society can understand. One will certainly be unpretentious and may even be unimpressive, but that will be only to the external eye. To those who can see with the mind, the heart, and the intuition, one will be a rare messenger of divinity. Of course, these changes are not only the result of therapy, but therapy combined with religion. Therapy and religion are a good combination towards healing because the individual is working on the mind, and the soul, which will manifest a deep wisdom of reality. We cannot dictate the external form in which one will express one’s attitude. The illuminate will do just that which is demanded of one by the particular circumstances of the case at that particular time and in that particular place. There is nothing arbitrary about one’s action. Some behave as if they know nothing, these hidden illuminati. Most of us are not in a position to judge either the inner being or outer behaviour of such a divinely illumined being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
People have these enlightened beings of the spirit among them and do not know it, often do not care to know it. One is indeed a life full of paradoxes. Outwardly one may be a millionaire, but inwardly one owns nothing, and begs at the door of God for salvation. It is a commonly held view—not only among laymen but also among many scientists—that human beings are machines that function in accordance with certain physiological requirements. They experience hunger and thirst; they have to sleep; they need physical experiences. He physiological or biological needs have to be met. If they are not, people will become neurotic or, if they do no eat, for example, they will die. If those needs are met, however, then everything is just fine. Now the only trouble with that view is that it is wrong. It can happen that all a person’s physiological and biological needs are met but one is still not satisfied, still is not at peace with oneself. Indeed, one may be psychically quite ill even though one seems to have everything one needs. What one lacks is an animating impulse that would make one active. Let me give you a few brief examples of what I mean. In recent years some interesting experiments have been conducted in which people have been deprived of all stimuli. They have been placed in complete isolation in a small space where the temperature and illumination remain constant. Their food is shoved in them through a hatchway. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
All their needs are met, but there are no stimuli. The conditions are comparable, say, to those a fetus experiences in the womb. After a few days’ exposure to this kind of experiment, people begin to develop serious pathological tendencies, often schizophrenic ones. Although their physiological needs are satisfied, this state of passivity is psychologically pathogenic and can lead to insanity. What is a normal situation for a fetus (although even a fetus is not as fully deprived of stimuli as the subjects in those experiments are) produces illness in an adult. In still other experiments, people have been prevented from dreaming. It is possible to do this because we know that very rapid eye movements accompany dreaming. If an experimenter wakes a subject when one sees rapid eye movements, one can keep that individual from dreaming. People subjected to this experiment, too, developed serious symptoms of illness. This suggests that dreaming is a psychic necessity. Even when we are asleep, we remain mentally and psychologically active. If we are kept from that activity, we become ill. The animal psychologist Harry Harlow found in his experiments with monkeys that primates could maintain their interest in a complicated experiment for ten hours at a time. They worked persistently at taking apart complex structure and stuck patiently at their task. No rewards were offered or punishments inflicted. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Because Harlow did not make any use of the stimulus-response mechanism, it was clear that the animals persisted in their work out of sheer interest in it. Animals, too, especially the primates, can develop high levels of interest and are not motivated exclusively by the promise of food or the fear of punishment. Let me mention still another example. Human beings were producing art as long as 30,000 years. We are inclined to belittle that work today by saying it served purely magical ends. Think of the incredibly beautiful and graceful renderings is animals we find in cave paintings. The motivation for those paintings was presumably to ensure success in the hunt. That may well be, but does that explain their beauty? The needs of magic could have been met with far less artistic painting and decorative of caves and vases. The beauty that we can still perceive and enjoy today was an added extra. In other words, people have their interests that go beyond the practical, the functional, the object as took or utensil. They want t be active in a creative way; they want to give shape to things, to develop power latent in themselves. The German psychologist Karl Buehler has coined the very apt phrase “the delight of function” to suggest the joy that activity can being with it. People enjoy functioning not because they need this thing or that thing but because the act of making something, the utilization of their own capacities, itself is a pleasurable experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The point that humans love to create things of value inherently by their nature is of course important because it has a bearing on education. A brilliant Italian teacher, Maria Montessori, realized that children can be trained with the old system of rewards and punishments, but they cannot be educated with it. Numerous studies designed to test that idea have confirmed that people do indeed learn better when what they do is itself inherently satisfying. I believe a human being is fully oneself only when one expresses oneself, when one makes use of the powers within one. If one cannot do that, if one’s life consists only of possessing and using rather than being, then one degenerates; one becomes a thing; one’s life become pointless. It becomes a form of suffering. Real joy comes with real activity, and real activity involves the utilization and cultivation of human powers. We should not forget that exerting our minds encourages the growth of brain cells. That is a fact supported by physiological evidence. Indeed, the growth of the brain can even be weighed and is analogous to the strengthening of muscles of which we make increased demands. If we never subject our muscles to more stress than they are accustomed to, they will remain at the stage of development they have attained, but they will never come near what they are potentially capable of. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Now I would like to introduce some social and economic considerations into discussion of affluence. We can distinguish a few major phases in human history. Perhaps we should begin by noting that the phase in which human evolution has taken places has been a very long one extending over a few hundred thousand years. There was no single step or moment that marked the completion of the development. It was a long process in which quantitative factors underwent a very gradual transformation into qualitative ones. The evolutionary process that produced the precursor of modern humans was more or less complete only 60,000 years ago; Homo sapiens, a creature who is just like us today, first appears about 40,000 years ago. Our beginnings, then go back a very short time. What is it that distinguished humans from animals? Well, human beings have a new and different consciousness, a consciousness of oneself; one knew that one existed and that one was something different, something apart from nature, apart from other people, too. One experienced oneself as an individual. Humans were aware that they thought and felt. As far as we know, there is nothing analogous to this anywhere else in the animal kingdom. That is the specific quality that makes human beings human. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
From the moment that humans were born as what we would call a full human being one lived for roughly 30,000 years in a situation of prevailing hardship, of perpetual shortage. One lived by hunting animals and by gathering foodstuffs that one could use but had not cultivated. Life in that period was marked by poverty and need. However, then came a great revolution that is sometimes called the Neolithic evolution. That revolution occurred about 10,000 years ago. Humans began to produce, to create material goods. One no longer lived only from what one happened to find r from the yield of the hunt but became a farmer or herdsman. One produced more than one needed at the moment, using one’s foresight, one’s intelligence, and one’s skills to make what one needed as an individual. The first farmers with their simple plows may strike us today as very primitive, but they were the first people to escape from total dependence on the whims of nature, to which all beings before had been subject, and to start using their brains, imaginations, and energies to influence the World and create more hospitable environments for themselves. They planned; they provided for the future; they created, for the first time, a relative affluence. They soon left primitive methods of agriculture and animal husbandry behind. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Human developed culture; they developed cities; and a second era followed quickly on the heels of the first: an era characterized by relative affluence. By “relative affluence” I mean a state in which the earlier poverty and need had been overcome but in which the new affluence was too confined to let everyone partake of it. The minority that controlled society and accumulated increasing power kept the best of everything for itself, leaving only the leftovers for the majority. The table was not set for everyone. Affluence was not available to all. Thus, though we may be oversimplifying for the sake of brevity, we can speak of the relative affluence (or relative poverty) that has been the rule since the beginning of the Neolithic revolution and that is still, to some measure, the rule today. Relative affluence is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, people were able to develop cultures. They had the material base they needed to build buildings, organize states, support philosophers, and so forth. However, on the other hand, the consequences of relative poverty was that a small group had to exploit a large one. Without the majority, that economy could not have flourished. The warring impulse is not, as many people like to claim, rooted in human instinct, in human’s natural drive to destroy. War had its beginnings in the Neolithic period from the moment when there were things worth taking away from someone else and when people had established their communal life in such a way that they could invent war s an institution and use it to attack others who has something they wanted. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We usually have complicated reasons on hand to explain why we go to war. “We were threatened!” we say, and that is supposed to justify a way. And sometimes that is actually the case, but other times there are other motives which are usually pathetically transparent. So we have relative affluence, this accomplishment of the Neolithic period, to thank for culture on the one had and for war and the exploitation of human by human on the others. Ever since that period human beings have lived more or less in a zoo. Accordingly, the entire field of psychology, which is based on the observation of human beings, can be compared with that stage in ethology when all of our knowledge of animals was based on observations made in zoos and not in the wild. It has become particularly clear to psychologist that animals in zoos behave very differently from animals in the wild. Solly Zuckerman observed that the sacred baboons in the London Zoo in Regents Park were incredibly aggressive. He assumed at first that the trait lay in the nature of those particular primates. However, when other scientists observed those baboons in the wild, they found them not very aggressive at all. Imprisonment, boredom, the limitations on freedom—all of these things encouraged the development of an aggression that was absent in natural conditions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
When they are held captive humans and animals behave differently from the way they do when they are free. However, then the first industrial revolution brought about a great change in the human situation, a change that had its beginnings as far back as the Renaissance but has come to a head in our century: All of the sudden mechanical energy took the place of natural human energy, that is, energy supplied by animals and human beings. Now machines supplied the power that had formerly been supplied by living beings. And at the same time a new hope arose. If that energy could be harnessed, then everyone, not just a minority, could enjoy the fruits of affluence. On the heels of the first revolution followed another that has been called the second industrial revolution. In this revolution machines replace not only human energy but also human thought. I am referring here to the science of cybernetics and to the machines that have themselves assumed control of other machines an of the production process. Cybernetics has increased and continues to increase production possibilities to such a massive degree that we can realistically foresee a time—assuming that a war does not break out first or that humanity is not decimated by hunger or epidemics—when the new production methods will provide absolute affluence. At that point no one will be poor or in need anymore; everyone will know affluence. Human life will not be cluttered with the superfluous but will be marked by absolute abundance that frees people from the fear of hunger, the fear of violence. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Our modern society has developed still another thing that never existed before. It produces not only goods but also needs. What do I mean by that? People have always had needs. They have wanted to live in attractive homes, and so forth. However, if you look around you today you will note that every increasing importance that advertising and packaging have acquired. It is rare for desires to arise within people any more; desires are awakened and cultivated from without. Even someone who is well off will feel poor when confronted with the plethora of goods the advertisers want one to want. There is no doubt whatsoever that industry will succeed in creating needs that it will then set about satisfying, indeed, will have to satisfy if it means to stay alive in the present system, for in that system the production of a profit is the test of viability. Our present economic system is based on maximum production and maximum consumption. The nineteenth-century economy was still based on the idea of maximizing savings. Our great grandparents considered it a nice to buy something you did not have the money to pay for. Today that has become a virtue. And, conversely, anyone who buys only what one truly needs borders on the politically suspect; one is a peculiar sort. People who do not own television sets stand out. They are obviously not quite normal. Where will this all lead us? #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
I can tell you. The unlimited increase of consumption produces a type of person who is devoted to an ideal, indeed, to what is almost a new religion, the religion of Trump Tower. If we ask ourselves how modern beings envision paradise, we are probably correct in saying that, unlike the Mohammedans, one does not expect to find oneself surrounded by beautiful women there (a decidedly make view of paradise anyway). One’s vision is of an immense department store where everything is available and where one will always have money enough to buy only everything one wants but also just a little bit more than one’s neighbour. That is part of the syndrome: One sense of self-worth is based on how much one has. And if one wants to be the best one has to have the most. The question of where to call a halt founders in the almost frenzied rounds of production and consumption, and even though most people in this economic system have much more than they can use, they still feel por because they cannot keep up with the pace of production or the mass of goods produced. This situation promotes passivity as well as envy and greed and, ultimately a sense of inner weakness, of powerlessness, of inferiority. A person’s sense of self comes to be based solely on what one has, not on what one is. Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty opportunity is possessed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Learn to pause or nothing worthwhile will catch up to you. Since we have two ears and one mouth, we should listen twice as much as we talk. Isaiah 38.17 gives another pictorial expression to describe the extent of God’s forgiveness of our sins. The prophet said of God, “You have put all my sins behind your back.” When something is behind your back, it is out of sight. We cannot see it anymore. God says He has done that with our sins. It is not that we have not sinned or, as Christians, do not continue with our sins. We know we sin daily—in fact, many times a day. Even as Christians our best efforts are still marred with imperfect performance and impure motives. However, God no longer “see” either our deliberate disobedience of our marred performances. Instead God “sees” the righteousness of Christ, which He has already imputed to us. Does this mean God ignores our sins like an overindulgent, permissive father who lets his children grow up undisciplined and ill-behaved? Not at all. In God’s relationship to us as our Heavenly Father, God does deal with our sins, but only in such a way as for our good. He does not deal with us as our sins deserves, which would be punishment, but at His grace provides, which is for our good. In God’s relationship to us as the moral Governor and Judge of humankind, God has put our sins behind his back. In God’s relationship to us as the Supreme Sovereign dealing with His rebellious subjects, He no longer “sees” our sins. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
And note that our sins do not just happen to be behind God’s back. The Scripture says God has put them there. How can God do this and still be a just and holy God? Again, the answer is that Jesus Christ paid the penalty we should have paid. As another hymn put it, “What can wash away my sing? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” However, that is not a key to keep sinning and expect forgiveness. Keep in mind repentance and damage that may be done to your soul. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, Who for our redemption willedest to be born and circumcised, and rejected by the Jews, betrayed with a kiss by Judas, seized, bound, and led in bonds to Annas, Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate, and before them to be mocked, smitten with palm and fist, with the scourge and the reed; to have Thy face covered and defiled with spitting; to be crowed with thorns, accused by false witnesses, condemned and as an innocent Lamb to be led to slaughter, bearing Thine own Cross; to be pierced though with nails, to have gall and vinegar given Thee to drink, on the Cross to die the most shameful of deaths, and to be wounded with a spear; do Thou by these Thy most sacred pains deliver us from all sins and penalties, and by Thy holy Cross bring us, miserable sinners, to tat place whither Thou didst being with Thyself the crucified robber on his late repentance; Who livest and reignest, please forgive us for all our sins, remove all obstructions, and bless us with abundant prosperity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
My Father, in a World of created changeable things, Christ and his word alone remain unshaken. O to forsake all creatures, to rest as a stone n him the foundation, to abide in him, be borne up by him! For all my mercies come through Christ, who has designed, purchased, promised, effected them. How sweet it is to be near him, the Lamb, filled with holy affections! When I sin against thee I cross thy will, love, life, and have no comforter, no creature, to go to. My sin is not so much this or that particular evil, but my continual separation, disunion, distance from thee, and having a loose spirit towards thee. But thou hast given me a present, Jesus thy Son, as mediator between thyself and my soul, as middle-man who pit holds both him below and him above, for only he can span the chasm breached by sin, and satisfy divine justice. May I always lay hold upon this mediator, as a realized object of faith, and alone worthy by his love to bridge the gulf. Let me know that he is dear to me by his word; I am one with him by the word on his part, and by faith on mine; If I oppose the word I oppose my Lord when he is most near; if I receive the word I receive my Lord wherein he is nigh. O thou who has the hearts of all beings in thine hand, form my heart according to the word, according to the image of thy Son, so shall Christ the Word, and his word, be my strength and comfort. “And it came to pass that I prayed unto the Lord that he would give unto the Gentiles grace, that they may have charity,” Ether 12.36. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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I Used to think Love was Something I Could Take or Leave Alone but Now I Could Not do without My Supply!
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you should begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new end. We should be lenient in our judgment, because often the mistakes of others would have been ours had we had the opportunity to make them. What is food to one being is bitter poison to others. Every negative development in a person is to be understood as the result of damaging influences in early childhood. This has led sometimes to irrational self-accusation on the part of parents who feel guilty for every undesirable or pathological trait that appears in a child after birth, and to a tendency of people in analysis to put the blame for all their trouble on their parents, and to avoid confronting themselves with the problem of their own responsibility. Good intentions mean noting if they cover up the unconscious intentions; “honest” dishonesty demonstrates that it is not enough to have “meant” well consciously. Forces operate in beings of which one is not aware and rationalization protects one from awareness; unconscious forces are integrated in a system to which we call character. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Character syndromes are rooted and nourished in the particular forms of relatedness of the individual to the outside World and oneself; furthermore, inasmuch as the social group shares a common character structure (“social character”) the socioeconomic conditions shared by all members of a group mold the social character. That is where the saying, “birds of a feather flock together” comes from. Love, tenderness, sadism, masochism, ambition, curiosity, anxiety, rivalry—these and many other drives are no longer each attributed to a special instinct, but to the influence of the environment (essentially the significant persons in early childhood) via the psyche. The description given thus far suggest that character determines, the character trait, whether loving or destroying, drives a person to behave in a certain way, and the person is acting according to one’s character feels satisfied. Indeed, the character traits tells us how a person would like to behave. However, we must add an important qualification: if one could. The conflict between what we would like to do and the demands of self-interest remains crucial. We cannot always behave as we are driven to by our passions, because we have to modify our behavior to some extent in order to remain alive. The average person tries to find a compromise between what one’s character would make one want to do and what one must do in order not to suffer more or less harmful consequences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The degree to which a person follows the dictates of self-preservation (ego interest) varies, of course. At one extreme the weight of the ego interest is zero; this holds true for the martyr and a certain type person who targets and terminates prominent people. At the other extreme is the opportunist for who self-interest includes everything that could make one more successful, popular, or comfortable. Between these two extremes all people can be arranged, characterized by a specific blend of self-interest and character-rooted passions. How much a person represses one’s passionate desires depends not only on factors within oneself but on the situations; if the situation changes, repressed desires become conscious and are acted out. This holds true, for instance, for the person with a sadistic-masochistic character. Everybody knows the type of person who is submissive to one’s boss and sadistically domineering to one’s wife and children. Another case in point is the change that occurs in character when the total social situation changes. The sadistic character who may have posed as a meek or even friendly individual may become a fiend in a terroristic society in which sadism is valued rather than deplored. Another may suppress sadistic behavior in all visible actions, while showing it in a subtle expression of the face or in seemingly harmless and marginal remarks. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Repression of character traits also occurs with regard to the most noble impulses. In spite of the fact that the teachings of Jesus are still part of our moral ideology, a being acting in accordance with them is generally considered a fool or a neurotic; hence many people still rationalize their generous impulses as being motivated by self-interests. These considerations show that the motivating power of character traits is influenced by self-interest in varying degrees. They imply that character constitutes the main motivation of human behavior, but restricted and modified by the demands of self-interest under varying conditions. Here is possessed the fundamental difference between behaviorism and psychoanalytic characterology. Conditioning works through its appeal to self-interest, such as the desire for food, security, praise, avoidance of pain. In animals, self-interest proves to be so strong that by repeated and optimally spaced reinforcements that interest for self-preservation proves to be stronger than other instincts like pleasures of the flesh or aggression. Humans of course also behave in accordance with one’s self-interest; but not always, and not necessarily so. One often acts according to one’s passions, one’s meanest and one’s noblest, and is often willing—and able—to risk one’s self-interest, one’s fortune, one’s freedom, and one’s life in the pursuit of love, truth, and integrity—or for hate, greed, sadism, and destructiveness. In this very difference is possessed the reason conditioning cannot be a sufficient explanation for human behavior. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The discovery of unconscious processes and of the dynamic concept of character were radical because they went to the roots of human behavior; they were disquieting because nobody can hide any longer behind one’s good intentions; they were dangerous, because if everybody were to know what one could know about oneself and others, society would be shaken to its very foundations. Psychoanalysts is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one’s subjective needs and expectations (transference), of character, and of conflicts between passionate strivings embodied in character traits and the demands for self-preservation. Thus far, feelings of inferiority have nothing to do with any factual inferiority, but have been discussed only as the effects of a tendency to recoil from competition. Do they then have nothing to do with existing shortcomings, with a realization of actual flaws? They are in fact the result of both actual and imagined inadequacies: feelings of inferiority are a combination of anxiety-motivated belittling tendencies and a realization of existing defects. As I have emphasized several times, we cannot ultimately fool ourselves, though we may be successful in shutting certain impulses out of awareness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
And therefore a neurotic person of the character we have been discussing will know, deep down, that one has anti-social tendencies which one must conceal, that one is far from genuine in one’s attitudes, that one’s pretenses are quite different from the undercurrents below the surface. One’s registering of all these discrepancies is an important cause for one’s feelings of inferiority, even though one never recognizes clearly the source of the discrepancies because they arise from repressed drives. Not recognizing their source, one gives to oneself reasons for feeling inferior which are rarely the real reasons, but only a renationalization. There is another reason why one feels that one’s inferiority feelings are the direct expression of an existing deficiency. On the basis of one’s ambition one has built up fantastic notions of one’s own value and importance. One cannot help measuring one’s realistic accomplishments against one’s notions of being a genius or a perfect human being, and in this comparison one’s real acts or one’s real possibilities appear inferior. The total result of all these recoiling tendencies is that the neurotic incurs real failures, or at most does not get on as well as one should, considering one’s opportunities and one’s gifts. Others who started with one get ahead of one, have better careers, greater success. This lagging behind does not concern only external success. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The older one becomes the more one feels the discrepancy between one’s potentialities and one’s achievements. One feels keenly that one’s gifts, whatever they may be, are going to waste, that one is blocked in the development of one’s personality, that one does not mature as time goes on. The problem of persons around the age of forty is that they become blocked in their development. However, one has not recognized the conditions leading up to such a situation, and therefore has not found any satisfactory solution. And one reacts to the realization of this discrepancy with a vague discontent, a discontent which is not masochistic but real and proportionate. A discrepancy between potentialities and achievement may be due, as I have already pointed out, to external circumstances. However, the discrepancy which develops in a neurotic person, and which is a never-failing character of neuroses, is due to one’s internal conflicts. One’s actual failures and the consequent increasing discrepancy between potentialities and achievements inevitably give even greater force to one’s existing inferiority feelings. Thus one not only believes oneself to be, but actually is inferior to what one might be. The impact of this development is all the greater since it puts the inferiority feelings on a realistic basis. Meanwhile the other discrepancy which I have mentioned—that between high-flown ambitions and the comparatively poor reality—becomes so unbearable that it demands a remedy. As such a remedy fantasy offer itself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
More and more the neurotic substitutes grandiose ideas for attainable goals. The value they have for one is obvious: they cover up one’s unendurable feelings of nothingness; they allow one to feel important without entering into any competition and thus without incurring the risk of failure or success; they allow one to build up a fiction of grandeur far beyond attainable goal. It is this blind-alley value of grandiose fantasies that makes them dangerous, because the blind alley has a definite advantage for the neurotic when compared with the straightforward road. These neurotic ideas of grandeur should be distinguished from those of the normal person and those of the psychotic. Even the normal person will at times think oneself wonderful, attribute undue importance to what one is doing, or indulge in fantasies of what one might do. However, these fantasies and ideas remain decorative arabesques and one does not take them too seriously. They psychotic person with ideas of grandeur is at the other end of the line. One is convinced that one is a genius, the Emperor of Japan, Napoleon, Christ, and will reject all evidence of reality which tends to disprove one’s conviction; one will be wholly unable to comprehend any reminder that one is actually a less affluent doorman, or patient in an asylum or the object of disrespect and ridicule. If one become aware of the discrepancy at all one will decide in favor of one’s grandiose ideas, and will believe that the others do not know any better, or that they are deliberately treating one with disrespect in order to hurt one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
However, if therapy enables the individual to reorient one’s pattern of life and to reduce the tension and anxiety one feels regarding one’s personal problems, then the reactions of one’s automatic nervous system in, for example, a situation of stress, should also be altered. Essentially, if a change in life pattern and in internal tension occurred in therapy, this should show up in organismic changes in autonomic functioning, an area over which the individual has no conscious control. Individual who have experienced therapy develop a higher frustration threshold during their series of therapeutic contacts, and are able to recover their homeostatic balance more rapidly following frustration. After therapy, the individual is able to meet, with more tolerance and less disturbance, situations of emotional stress and frustration or stress was never considered in therapy; the more effective meeting of frustration is not a surface phenomenon but is evident in autonomic reactions which the individual cannot consciously control and of which one is completely unaware. Thus, it is predicted that if therapy enabled the individual to better handle stress at the psychological level, then this should be evident also in one’s autonomic functioning. Therefore, do not major in the minors. Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. Remember to breathe not weak, snatched gasps, but deep riveting drafts. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Another point in which the impossibility of the theory of addition of love and justice becomes visible is the relation of love and justice to the concrete situation. Justice is expressed in principles and laws none of which can ever reach the uniqueness of the concrete situation. Every decision which is based on the abstract formulation of justice alone is essentially and inescapably unjust. Justice can be reached only if both the demand of the universal law and the demand of the particular situation are accepted and made effective for the concrete situation. However, it is love which created participation in the concrete situation. It would be completely wrong to say that love must be added to justice if the uniqueness of the situation is to be reached. For this would mean that justice as such is impossible. Actually the situation shows that justice is just because of the love which is implicit in it. However, this can e understood fully only in the context of an ontological analysis of the root meanings of both love and justice. The weight of the problems and the dangerous character of the confusions is equally obvious when we finally confront power and justice. It is in this realm of problems that the relation of law and order to justice and of all of them to power is discussed and more often confused than illuminated. The first questions is: Who gives the law in which justice is supposed to be expressed? #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
To give a law is the basic manifestation of power. However, if a group which has power gives laws, how are they related to justice? Are they not simply the expression of the will to power of this group? The Marxist theory of the State asserts that the laws of the State are tools which give social control to a ruling group. The origin of its power may be military invasion or it may be socioeconomic stratification. In both cases justice is possible only if the State has withered away and has been replaced by an administration without political power. The justice of the ruling class is injustice and, if defended, ideology. The laws it gives preserve a social order, and as long as there is no alternative social order, the laws of the ruling classes are better than chaos. The more cynical representatives of this theory interpret justice exclusively as a function of power and in no way as its judge. They accept the Marxist analysis without the Marxist expectation, and reduce justice completely to a function of power. In reaction against this removal of justice as an ultimate principle a theory has been developed which tries to separate justice from power and completely and to establish it as a self-contained system of valid judgements. Justice is an absolute, without any relation to structures of power. The absolute law, derived from the principles of the natural or rational law, does not express wat is, but it demands what should be. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Irrespective of power it commands and expects obedience because of its intrinsic validity. It does not express but it judges power. The contrast of these two theories about the relation of power to justice reveals the difficulty of the problem and the necessity of an ontological research into the rot meanings of power and justice. As announced before, I have led you into a jungle of problems and confusions, and, at every point, I have indicated the way out; namely, the ontological analysis of love, power, and justice. When the God we love chose to reveal Himself, He did so in creation itself and in more specific, special ways—most importantly, in the Scriptures and Jesus Christ. When we affirm that the Bible is a revelation from God, we do not simply assert that God as a person is known in and through it. We also mean that God has revealed understandable, objectively true propositions. The Lord’s Word is not only practically useful, it is also theoretically true (John 17.17). God has revealed truth to us and not just Himself. This truth is addressed to our minds and requires an intellectual grasp to understand and then apply. Because of the Bible’s nature, serious study is needed to grasp what it says. Of course, the Scripture contains easily grasped portions that are fairly straightforward. However, some of it is very difficult, intellectually speaking. In fact, Peter one said that some of Paul’s writings were intellectually challenging, hard to understand, and easily distorted (that is, uneducated in Christian theology) and unstable people (2 Peter 3.16). #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The more a person develops the mind and the understanding of hermeneutics (the science of interpreting the Scriptures), the more one will be able to understand the meaning and significance of the Scriptures. Unfortunately, many today apparently think that hard intellectual work is not needed to understand God’s propositional revelation to us. Instead, they believe that the Holy spirit will simply make know the meaning of a text if it is implored to do so. Tragically, this represents a misunderstanding of the Spirit’s role in understanding the Scriptures. In my view, the Spirit does not help the believer understand the meaning of Scripture. Rather, He speaks to the believer’s soul, convicting, comforting, opening up applications of His truths through His promptings. On the evening Christ gave Himself up for us, John 17 tells us, He prayed in succession for Himself, for His twelve disciples, and for all of us who would later believe. When He finished praying for His future bride, He went to the cross. Then came Hos death, His resurrection, His ascension, and His enthronement at the right hand of the Father, where He constantly makes intercession for us. Thus we understand that giving ourselves for our brides involves prayerful intercession. Men, do you pray for your wives with something more than, “Bless good Meghan in all she does”? If not, you are sinning against her and against God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Most Christian men who claim to love their wives never offer more than a perfunctory nod to their wives’ needs before God. Men, you ought to have a list of her needs, spoken and unspoken, which you passionately hold up to God out of love for her. Praying is the material work of a Christian husband! The most basic command is, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave up himself for her.” Men, we are divinely called to die for our brides, to take on her sufferings as our own, and to make intercession for her. You are supposed to be her ride or die man. When it is said that the readiness of the seeker determines the appearance of the master, this applies to the first fundamental initiation of one’s spiritual life. It does not mean that a master will come into one’s own town and seek one out, but that one will come into one’s life. And this may be brought about in various ways—as by the seeker oneself being led, either by Worldly circumstances or by one’s own seeking, out of one’s own town to the town or country where the master is living. The location of one’s spiritual guide will in part be the accident of one’s own geographical situation, for one will obviously be limited in one’s selection to possibilities and reputations in one’s own country or nation or race. The sheer physical and financial difficulties of traveling throughout the World—not to mention the obstacles of personal circumstance, family obligations, and ignorance of where to search and whom to approach in foreign lands, combine to set this limitation upon one’s inquiry and hence upon one’s opportunity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
It is foolish to seek holiness geographically or holy beings in particular places. I have found that one being may live in a Himalayan abode and be a scoundrel and another being may live in a Bowery slum and be a saint. Wherever the live, people always carry their own thoughts and their own selves with them. The Soul, which is the object of our quest, is within us. The Master, who is to guide us upon our quest, will appear whenever we are ready for one and wherever we happen to live—or else we will be led to one. There are beings in the New World and the Old World, not less wise and noble than each other. If we have not met them, “the fault, Dear Brutus is…in ourselves,” primarily in our unworthiness, and secondarily in our incapacity to recognize what is beneath the surface. All speculation upon the motives and the methods of the illuminate will avail little. The light by which one works is denied to ordinary beings. We should not try to bind one down to qualities which fit only those who grope in the dark or move in twilight. We should trust where we cannot see and wait patiently for the day of revilement, when we will find all made clear and all riddle solved to our satisfaction. It is an old truism in the Old World that it takes an adept to understand an adept, but the New World will have to learn this truth by bitter experiences with pseudo-adepts. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
There are many signs of one’s spiritual status in the dignity and composure of one’s bearing, the deliberateness and truthfulness of one’s speech, and the impressiveness of one’s tension-free face. Helter Skelter is a phrase taken from a song performed by a well-known rock music group. Charles Manson used it to characterize that state of confusion in which he kept his followers, and himself as well. In the state of helter-skelter nothing makes sense, and everything makes as much sense as anything else. Manson was able to use this ideology to brainwash his followers and make them believe they were not responsible for their actions and they were not doing anything wrong when the ended the life of an individual. He taught them they if harm came to a person by means of his follower’s hands, then it was meant to be, it was in divine order and they did no really harm the individual and the individual was still alive on a different plane of existence. Aldous Huxley, in one of his retrospective writings, commented on how, among the associates of his youth, the endless talk of meaninglessness—the meaninglessness of life and therefore of everything in it—was merely an excuse to permit them to do whatever they wanted. Their life was organized (or, more properly, disorganized) around their feelings and wayward thoughts, with their will in two. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, resolute action for the good requires that things make sense. You would not want someone caught up in helter-skelter to work on your lawn mower, do your gastrointestinal examination, nor work on your computer. Life makes sense only if you understand its basic components and how they interrelate to form the whole. Evil, on the other hand, thrives on confusion. God is not the author of confusion (1 Corinthians 14.33). Frankly, our visible Christian World is not too far from helter-skelter with reference to its understanding of the makeup of the person and therefore of the spiritual life and spiritual formation. We need to access the fullness of biblical teachings on these matters. We suffer far too much from the influence of a surrounding culture that thrives on confusions. (And therefore its denial that human beings have a nature.) This may seem like a harsh thing to say about our “Christian World,” and I am sorry to day it; but the issues here are too important to mince words. Accordingly, much of what we do in Christian circles with very good intentions—hoping, we say, to see steady, significant growth in Christlikeness—simply makes no sense and lead nowhere so far as substantive spiritual formation is concerned. What a brutal thing to say! However, we need to recognize this, or show why it is not the case. I hope we have taken significant first steps toward a clarity that can serve as a foundation for the effectual practice of Christian spiritual formation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted. “As far as the East is from the West, so far has he removed our transgression from us,” reports Psalm 103.12. How far is the East from the West? If you start due north at any point on Earth, you would eventually cross over the North Pole and start going south, but that is not true when you go East or West. If you start West and continue in that direction you will always be going West. North and South meet at the North Pole, but East and West never meet. In a sense, they are an infinite distance apart. So when God says He removes our transgressions from us as far as the East is from the West, He is saying they have been removed an infinite distance from us. However, how can we get a handle on this rather abstract truth in such a way that it becomes meaningful in our lives? When God uses this metaphorical expression describing the extent of His forgiveness of our sin, He is saying His forgiveness is total, complete, and unconditional. God is saying He is not keeping score with regard to our sins. “He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities,” reports Psalm 103.10. Yes, God actually says that! I know it seems too good to be true. I confess I almost hesitate to write those words because they are so foreign to our innate concepts of reward and punishment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
However, those gracious words are right in the Bible, and they are God’s words. How can God possibly do this? How can He so completely disregard our transgressions as to say He removes them an infinite distance from us? The answer is by His grace through Jesus Christ. God laid our sins on Christ and He bore the penalty we should have borne. Because of Christ’s death in our place, God’s justice is now completely satisfied. God can now, without violating His justice or His moral law, forgive us freely, completely and absolutely. He can now extend His grace to us; He can show favor to those who, in themselves, deserve only wrath. O Loving Wisdom of the living God, O living everlasting Word and everlasting Power of God the eternal Father—for everlasting is Thy birth, Who art the everlasting Son of God the everlasting Father, and art God; without Whom is nothing, by Whom are all things; in Whom consisteth whatever is; Who art God above us, and Man for our sakes; for Thou hast willed for us to be what we are: grant us what Thou hast promised; give to us, although unworthy, what Thou hast offered to all alike; that is, that Thy Passion may be our deliverance, and Thy Death our life, and Thy cross our redemption, and Thy Wound our healing; that being crucified with Thee, we may by Thy gift be lifted up on high to Thy Father, with Whom in bliss Thou livest and reignest. “And it is by faith that my fathers have obtained the promise that these things should come unto their brethren through the Gentiles; therefore the Lord hath commanded me, yea, even Jesus Christ,” reports Ether 12.22. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
O Source of All Good, what shall I render to three for the gift of gifts, then own dear Son, begotten, not created, my redeemer, proxy, surety, substitute, his self-emptying incomprehensible, his infinity of love beyond the heart’s grasp. Herein is wonder of wonders: he came below to rise me above, was born like me that I might become like him. Herein is love; when I cannot rise to him he draws near on wings of grace, to raise me to himself. Herein is power; when Deity and humanity were infinitely apart he untied them in indissoluble unity, the uncreated and the created. Herein is wisdom; when I was undone, with no will to return to him, and no intellect to devise recovery, he came, God-incarnate, to save me to the uttermost as man to die my death, to shed satisfying blood on my behalf, to work out a perfect righteousness for me. O God, take me in spirit to the watchful shepherds, and enlarge my mind; let me hear good tidings of great joy, and hearing, believe, rejoice, praise, adore, my conscience bathed in an ocean of repose, my eyes uplifted to reconcile Father; place me with ox, mule, camel, goat, to look with them upon my redeemer’s face, and in him account myself delivered from sin; let me with Simeon clasp the new-born child to my heart, embrace him with undying faith, exulting that he is mine and I am his. In him thou hast given me so much that Heaven can give no more. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Oh, I Cannot Break Away I Must Have You Everyday as Regularly as Coffee or Tea!
When bad people combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. Successful change requires: painstakingly laying a foundation; planning in incredible detail; tediously covering and recovering all the bases; continuously explaining and re-explaining; dealing with naysayers; playing politics; soothing egos; dispelling fears; cheerleading; troubleshooting; communicating; compromising; coaxing; cajoling; and ultimately, dragging a few stragglers kicking and screaming into the future. That is hard work. It is also leadership! And, the curious paradox is that when one accepts one’s self just as he or she is, then one has the ability to change. Many people are advocating members of society to get mental help, but no one is opening up with a testimony about their experience and what helped them. Drug therapy is not the only form of therapy. Sometimes all a person needs is someone to talk to and express what they are going through so they can feel like an accepted member of the population. Also, old theories about if you seem to have a problem with everyone, then you are likely the problem is an outdated hypothesis because tribalism and pack mentality has become a common expression for many groups in American culture. Therefore, some people are actually singled out and made to feel like misfits when nothing is actually wrong with them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
When the initial self-picture of someone has been in a therapeutic program is compared with those after therapy, it is found that after therapy the client sees himself or herself as changed in a number of ways. One feels one is more self-confident and self-reliant, understands oneself better, has more inner comfort, and more comfortable relationships with others. One feels less guilty, less resentful, less driven and insecure, and feels lees need for self-concealment. It is also an expectation that one will achieve greater congruence of self and ideal primary through alteration of their values, others through the alteration of self. Evidence supports this conclusion, and it appears that the concept of the self is what exhibits the greater change. Some change, however, does occur in the ideal self in the case of our client and the direction of this slight change is of interest. In other words, the self-deal has becomes less perfectly adjusted, or more attainable. It is to some degree a less punishing goal. We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden. Most people are willing to adapt not because they see the light but because they feel the heat. It is better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to have an opportunity and not be prepared. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Another finding in connection with therapy has to do with the “remembered self.” This remembered self turns out to be very different from the self-picture one gives at the time of entering therapy. Usually people need about eighteen months of therapy to see a significant change. In sorting of for the remembered self we have a crude objective measure of the reduction in defensiveness which occurs. One is usually able to give a considerably truer picture of the maladjusted and disturbed person that one was when he or she entered therapy, a picture which is confirmed by other evidence. In client-centered therapy our theory is that in the psychological safety of the therapeutic relationship the client is able to permit in one’s awareness feelings and experiences which ordinarily would be repressed, or denied to awareness. These previously denied experiences now become incorporated into the self. For example, a client who has repressed all feelings of hostility may come, during therapy, to experience one’s hostility freely. One’s concept of oneself then becomes reorganized to include this realization that one has, at times, hostile feelings towards others. One’s self-picture becomes to that degree a more accurate map or representation of the totality of one’s experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
The most significant change in a person’s life is a change of attitude. Right attitudes produce right actions. All change in involves problems, and all successful change involves solving those problems. If you do not tackle problems, you might have less conflict, but you do not get anywhere in terms of change. That is why risk-taking is important. Those who are successful at implementing change do not have fewer problems. The difference is they have a problem-solving attitude and a problem solving mechanism. During and after therapy there will be an increasing congruence between the self as perceived by the client and the client as perceived by a diagnostician. The assumption is that a skilled person making a psychological diagnosis of the client is more aware of the totality of the client’s experience patterns, both conscious and unconscious, than is the client. Hence if the client assimilates into one’s own conscious self-picture many of the feelings and experiences which previously one has repressed, then one’s picture of oneself should become more similar to the picture which the diagnostician has of one. Thus we may say that the objective evidence indicates that the client has become, in one’s self-perception and in one’s total personality picture, substantially the person one wished to become when one entered therapy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
The individuals who will succeed and flourish will also be masters of change: adept at reorienting their own and other’s activities in untried directions to bring about higher levels of achievement. They will be able to acquire and use power to produce innovation. You may have habits that weaken you. The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new. Advice is like the snow. The softer it falls, the deeper it sinks into the mind. Among the many ways of thus recoiling from competition, perhaps the most important is that by which the neurotic creates in one’s imagination such a distance from one’s real or alleged competitor that any competition appears absurd, and is thereby eliminated in consciousness. This distance may be achieved either by setting the other person on a pedestal high out of reach, or by putting oneself so far below all others that any competitive thoughts or attempts seems impossible and ridiculous. The latter process is called “belittling.” Belittling oneself may be a conscious strategy, practiced merely for reasons of expediency. If the disciple of a great painter has done a good picture but has reason to fear the begrudging attitude of one’s master, one may belittle one’s work in order to allay the master’s envy. Always imitate the behavior of winners when you lose. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
The neurotic person, however, has only the vague notion of a tendency to undervalue oneself. If one has done a good job one will seriously believe that others would have done better, or that one’s success was an accident and that one probably could not do so well again. Or, having done well, one may pick out some flaw, such as having worked too slowly, and use this to devaluate one’s entire accomplishment. A scientist may feel ignorant about questions concerning one’s own field, so that one’s friends have to remind one that one’s self has written about them. When asked a question which is unwise or unanswerable one will be inclined to react with a feeling of one’s own folly; when reading a book with which one dimly disagrees one will be inclined, instead of thinking it through critically, to infer that one is not intelligent enough to understand it. One may perhaps cherish the belief that one has managed to preserve a critical and objective attitude toward oneself. However, not only will such a person take one’s inferiority feelings at their face value; one will insist on their validity. In spite of one’s complaints about them and the sufferings they cause one, one is far from accepting any evidence to disprove them. If regarded as a highly competent worker one will maintain that one is being overvalued or that one has succeeded in bluffing others. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
For instance, there was a girl I mentioned heretofore, who developed an inordinate ambition at school after the humiliating experience with her brother, was always the first in her class and was regarded by everyone as a brilliant student, but was still convinced in her own mind that she was stupid. Although a glance into a mirror or the attention paid by men might be enough to convince a woman that she is attractive, she may still cling with an iron conviction to the belief that she is unattractive. A person may be convinced until he is forty that he is too young to assert his opinion or take a lead, and after forty he may switch to a feeling that he is too old. A well-known scholar was continually amazed at the reverence shown him, and in his own feelings insisted on being an insignificant mediocrity. Compliments are discarded as empty flattery or as prompted by ulterior motives, and may even result in anger. Observations of this kind, which can be made almost without limit, show that inferiority feelings, perhaps the most common evil of our times, have an important function, and for that reason are maintained and defended. Their value consists in the fact that by lowering one’s self in one’s own mind and thereby putting one’s self below other people and checking one’s ambition, the anxiety connected with competitiveness is allayed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
For one young lady, this strange sense of cruelty and ugliness always imminent, ready to seize hold upon her, who was the exception, formed one of the deepest influences of her life. Wherever she was, a school, among friends, in the street, in the train, she instinctively abated herself, made herself smaller, feigned to be less than she was for fear that her undiscovered self should be seen, pounced upon, attacked by brutish resentment of the commonplace, the average Self. Incidentally is should not be overlooked that inferiority feelings may factually weaken one’s position for the reason that self-belittling leads to an impairment of self-confidence. A certain amount of self-confidence is a prerequisite for any achievement, whether it be in varying a standard recipe for salad-dressing, selling merchandise, defending an opinion, or making a good impression on a potential relative. A person with strong tendencies to belittle oneself may have dreams in which one’s competitors excel, or in which one is at a disadvantage. Since there is no doubt that one subconsciously wishes for a triumph over competitors such dreams might look like a contradiction of Dr. Freud’s contention that dreams represent wish fulfillments. Dr. Freud’s view must not, however, be taken too narrowly. If direct wish-fulfillment involves too much anxiety, the allaying of that anxiety will be more important than a direct fulfillment of the wish. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Thus when a person who is afraid of one’s ambition has dreams in which one id defeated, one’s dreams are the expression not of a wish to fail but of a preference for failure as the lesser evil. A patient of mine was scheduled to give a lecture during a period of her treatment when she was desperately fighting to defeat me. She has a dream that I was giving a successful lecture and that she was sitting in the audience humbly admiring me. Again, an ambition teacher dreamed that one’s pupil was the teacher and that he failed to know his assignment. The degree to which self-belittling serves as a check on ambitions is shown also by the fact that the capacities that are belittled are usually the ones in which the individual desires most ardently to excel. If one’s ambition is of an intellectual character, intelligence is its instrument and hence is belittled. This connection is so usual that one may guess from the focus of the self-belittling tendency where the greatest ambitions are possessed. The ambiguities in the meaning of love, power, and justice have confusing consequences and produce new problems as soon as the relation of the three concepts to each other is considered. Love and power are often contrasted in such a way that love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. Powerless love and loveless power are contrasted. This, of course, is unavoidable if love is understood from its emotional side and power from its compulsory side. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
However, such an understanding is error and confusion. It was this misinterpretation which induced the philosopher of the “will-to-power” to reject radically the Christian idea of love. And it is the same misinterpretation which induces Christian theologians to reject the philosophy of the “will-to-power” in the name of the Christian idea of love. In both cases an ontology of love is missing and in the second case power is identified with social compulsion. In the same period the theological school which has been created by Albrecht Ritschl dominated the field of Protestant theology. The anti-metaphysical bias of this school caused it to contrast the love of God with His power in such a way that the power actually disappeared and God became identified with love in its ethical meaning. The consequence was an ethical theism which neglected almost completely the divine mystery and majesty. God as the power of being was discarded as a pagan invasion. The trinitarian symbolism was dissolved. The kingdom of God was reduced to the ideal of an ethical community. Nature was excluded because power excluded. And power was excluded because the question of being was excluded. For if the question of being is asked and concepts like love and power are seen in the light of the ontological question, the unity of their root meanings can become visible. Yet most important are the problems in social ethics which result from the confrontation of love and power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
One could say that constructive social ethics are impossible as long as power is looked at with distrust and love is reduced to its emotional or ethical quality. Such a division leads to a rejection of or indifference to the political realm on the side of religion. And it leads to the separation of the political from the religious and the ethical and to the politics of mere compulsion on the political side. Constructive social ethics presuppose that one is aware of the element of love in structure of power and of the element of power without which love becomes chaotic surrender. It is the ontological analysis of love and power which must produce this awareness. The problems and confusions which characterize the discussion of love in its relation to power, characterize equally the discussion of love in its relation to justice. One does not usually contrast love with justice in the way in which one contrast love with power. However, it is commonly accepted that love adds something to justice that justice cannot do by itself. Justice, one says, demands that an inherited fortune is distributed in equal parts amongst those who have the same legal claim. However, love may induce one of the heirs to surrender one’s right to one of the other heirs. In this case one acts in a way which is not demanded by justice, but may be demanded by love. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Love transcends justice. This seems rather evident, but it is not! If justice is not limited to proportional distribution, the act of resignation might have been an act of non-proportional justice, or it might have been an act of injustice against oneself, as in the first act of Shakespeare’s King Lear, when Lear surrenders all his powers to his daughters. The relation of love to justice cannot be understood in terms of an addition to justice which does not change its character. Only an ontology of justice can describe the true relation of the root concepts. Another example supports this view. A man may say to another: “I know your criminal deed and, according to the demand of justice, I should bring you to trial, but because of my Christian love I let you go.” Through this leniency, which is wrongly identified with love, a person may be driven towards a thoroughly criminal career. This means that one has received neither justice nor love, but injustice, covered by sentimentality. One might have been saved by having been brought to trial after his first fall. In this case the act of being just would have been the act of love. In classical theology the tension between love and justice is symbolized in the doctrine of atonement as developed by Anselm of Canterbury. According to Anselm, God Himself must find a way to escape the consequences of His retributive justice which conflicts with His merciful love. He is subject to the law of justice which is given by Himself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
And this law would cause the eternal death of all beings in spite of His desire to save humans according to His love. The solution is the undeserved, substitutional death of the God-man, Jesus Christ. In spite of its theological weakness this remained the predominant doctrine in Western Christianity because of its psychological power. It implies the ontological insight, which it explicitly contradicts, that ultimately love must satisfy justice in order to be real love, and that justice must be elevated into unity with love in order to avoid the injustice of eternal destruction. However, this is not manifest in the legal form in which the doctrine is developed. O God, Who for us hast willed Thy Son to endure the gibbest of the Cross, that Thou mightiest drive away from us the power of the enemy; grant to us Thy servants to attain the grace of resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. “Our Lord, thy righteous will be done, for I know that thou workest unto the children of men accord to their faith,” reports Ether 12.29. O my God, thou fairest, greatest, first of all object, my heart admires, adores, loves thee, for my little vessel is as full as it can be, and I would pour out all that fullness before thee in ceaseless flow. When I think upon and converse with thee ten thousand delightful thoughts spring up, ten thousand sources of pleasure are unsealed, ten thousand refreshing joys spread over my heart, crowding into every moment of happiness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
I bless thee for the soul thou has created, for adorning it, sanctifying it, though it is fixed in barren soil; for the body thou hast given me, for preserving its strength and vigour, for providing senses to enjoy delights, for the ease and freedom of my limbs, for hands, eyes, ears that do thy bidding; for they royal bounty providing my daily support, for a full table and overflowing cup, for appetite, taste, sweetness, for social joys of relatives and friends, for ability to serve others, for a heart that feels sorrows and necessities, for a mind to care for my fellow-humans, for opportunities of spreading happiness around, for loved ones in the joys of Heaven, for my own expectations of seeing thee clearly. I love thee above the powers of language to express, for what thou art to thy beings. Increase my love, O my God, through time and eternity. O God, Who for our redemption hast received the Blood of Jesus Christ, destroy the works of the devil, and break through all the snares of sin; that those who have been created by a new birth may not be defiled by the old contagion. Lord Jesus Christ, Who didst stretch out Thine hands on the Corss, and redeem us by Thy Blood, forgive me a sinner, for none of my thoughts are hid from Thee. Pardon I ask, pardon I hope for, pardon I trust to have. Thou Who art pitiful and merciful, spare and forgive me. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
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One of these Mornings, it Won’t be Very Long, You’ll Look for Me…I’ll be Gone!
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. If humans do find the solution for World peace, it will be the most revolutionary reversal of their record we have ever known. We must have the power to change ourselves, then things will change around us. Unreasonable and absurd ways of life are truly an offense to God. Christians desire to be like God and live a deep and fruitful Christian life. Our Lord is a God of reason as well as revelation. God is perfect in knowledge and, in fact, knows everything both actual and possible. The Son of God became incarnate as the Logos (Greek: “the word”), which some take to represent and emphasize this reasoned, omniscient aspect of God’s character, that is, the divine reason or wisdom that is made manifest and understandable in the God-man Jesus Christ. God exhibits wise intelligence in choosing the best goals and the best means of accomplishing them. So wise is He that Scripture calls Him “the only wise God,” reports Romans 16.27. He is the God of truth who cannot lie, and who is completely reliable. His very word is true and His church—not the university—is the pillar and support of the truth. God invites His people to come and reason together with Him by bringing a legally reasoned case against His actions to which He will respond. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
What a contrast the God of the Bible is with the god of Islam, who is so transcendent that his ways are inscrutable (beyond understanding)! How different God is from the irrational, fickle, finite deities of the Greek pantheon or other polytheistic religions! These mythological “gods” exhibit the folly of human emotions and the danger of ignoring revelation. The God of the Bible requires teachers who diligently study His Word and handle it accurately. He demands of His evangelists that they give rational justification to questioners who ask them why they believe as they do. On one occasion His chief apostle, Paul, emphasized that his gospel preaching was by way of words of truth and rationality when Festus charged that his great learning was driving him mad. No anti-intellectualism here! By contrast, the monistic religions of the East promote gurus who offer koans, paradoxes like the sound of one hand clapping, upon which to meditate in order to free the devotee from dependence on reason and enable one to escape the laws of logic. The Buddhist is to leave one’s mind behind, but the Christian God requires transformation by way of its renewal. Is it any wonder that we Christians started the first universities and have planted schools and colleges everywhere our missionaries have gone? #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Is it any wonder that science began in Christian Europe because of the belief that the same rational God who made the human mind also created the World so the mind would be suited to discern the World’s rational structure placed there by God? God is certainly not a cultural elitist, and He does not love intellectuals more than anyone else. However, it needs to be said in the same breath that ignorance is not a Christian virtue if those virtues mirror the perfection of God’s own character. The opening charge in Ephesians 5 is a clear call to radical, sacrificial love: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,” reports Ephesians 5.25. This call to martial love was a bare-knuckled swing at the domestic commitment (or lack of same) of people of the day—just as it is today. Taken seriously, the unveiled form of these words, “love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,” is staggering! And honestly received, the punch it delivers flattens many Christian men…because they fall so short! The reason the punch hurts is because it is an obstructed call to love with a willingness to sacrifice, even unto death. Martial love is like death—it wants all of is. If you do not understand this, you do not know what marital love it. This does not mean marriage wants to kill us, but the love of a marriage wants to take over every aspect of our live and being, with no return. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The realization of what this call means may at first be frightening, but it is also beautiful, because a being who embraces such a love will experience the grace of death to self. Marriage is a call to die, and a man who does not die for his wife does not come close to the love to which he is called. Christian marriage vows are the inception of a lifelong practice of death, of giving over not only all you have, but all you are. Is this a grim gallows call? Not at all! It is no more grim than dying to self and following Christ. In fact, those who lovingly die for their wives are those who know the most joy, have the most fulfilling marriages, and experience the most love. Christ’s call to Christian husbands is not a call to be doormats, but to die. As we shall see, this can mean a death to our rights, our time, our perceived pleasures—all liberating deaths. This is a truly male thing, a masculine thing—for it takes a strong man to die. When Christ “gave himself up” for us, He not only died, He suffered. And His suffering was not only the cross, but it was and is suffering which comes from identification with His bride, the Church. This is why Saul, who was fanatically persecuting the Church, suddenly heard Jesus cry, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Christ suffers with His bride, and husbands ought to suffer with and for theirs. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Men, when you properly hitch your life to another, you are in for a wild ride with huge ups and downs. Just as when you really love God you will undergo difficulties foreign to an unloving heart, so it is in marriage. You will share her experienced injustices, cruelties, and disappointments. You will experience her upsets, insecurities, and despairs. However, of course, you will also know an index of joys beyond the range of the unloving. You will ride through some dark valleys, but you will also soar among the stars! The question then is, how does spiritual power work, how is it related to physical and psychological power, and how is it related to the compulsory element of power? For hundreds of years people have discussed the meaning of the concept of justice. Since earliest times justice has been symbolized in myth and poetry, in sculpture and architecture. Nevertheless, its meaning is not unambiguous. On the contrary, its legal meaning seems to be contradicted by its ethical one, and both the legal and the ethical meaning seem to be in conflict with its religious meaning. Legal justice, moral righteousness, and religious justification seems to struggle with each other. Aristotle speaks of justices as a proportion, both in distribution and retribution. This raises several problems. First, one must ask whether the terms “distributive” and “retributive justice” constitute a valid distinction. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Distributive justice gives goods to everybody according to one’s just claim; and one’s just claim is determined by one’s social status, which is partly dependent on the status one has received by historical destiny in Universe and society, and partly by one’s own merits in actualizing one’s status and its potentialities. Retributive justice takes place if one diminished one’s status and its just claims by not fulfilling its potentialities or by acting against the social or cosmic order in which one’s status is rooted. Retributive justice then appears as punishment and produces the problem of the meaning of punishment and its relation to justice. Is punishment a purpose in itself, determined by retributive justice, or is it the negative implication of distributive justice, or is it the negative implication of distributive justice and determined by it? Only an ontological consideration of justice can lead toward an answer. The same is true f the meaning of justice as proportion. The term “proportional justice” implies degrees of justified claims. It presupposes a hierarchy of standing and claims. It presupposes a hierarchy of standing and claims for a just distribution. On the other hand, the word “justice” implies an element of equality. How is the hierarchical element in proportional justice related to the equalitarian element in it? If we consider the fact that the status of a being in Universe and society is subject to continuous change, the question becomes even more difficult. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The dynamic character of life seems to exclude the concept of a just claim; it seems to undercut even the idea of proportional justice. Is there a type of justice which transcends and restricts the kind of justice described by Aristotle? Can perhaps the proportional element be taken into dynamic-creative type of justice? This again demands assumptions about the relation of the static to the dynamic character of being; it demands ontological assumptions. None of the concepts of love, power, and justice can be defined, described and understood in their carried meanings without an ontological analysis of their root meanings. None of the confusion and ambiguities in the use of those three concepts can be removed, none of the problems intrinsic in them can be solved without an answer to the question: How are love, power, and justice rooted in the nature of being as such? In view of all we have said about the detached person’s human relationships it will be clear that any close and lasting relation would be bound to jeopardize one’s detachment and hence would be likely to be disastrous—unless the partner should be equally detached and so of one’s own accord respect the need for distance, or unless one is able and willing for other reasons to adapt oneself to such needs. A Solveig who in loving devotion patiently awaits Peer Gynt’s return is the ideal partner. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Solveig expects nothing from Peer. Expectations on her part would frighten him as much as would loss of control over his own feelings. Mostly he is unaware of how little he himself gives, and he believes he has bestowed his unexpressed and unlived feelings, so precious to himself, upon the partners. Provided emotional distance is sufficiently guaranteed, Peer may be able to preserve a considerable measure of enduring loyalty. He may be capable of having intense short-lived relationships, relationships in which he appears and vanishes. They are brittle, and any number of factors may hasten his withdrawal. Relationships that involve pleasures of the flesh may mean inordinately much to one as a bridge to others. If they are transitory and do not interfere with one’s life, one will enjoy them. They should be confined, as it were, to the compartment set aside for such affairs. On the other hand, one may have cultivated indifference to so great a degree that it permits of no trespassing. Then wholly imaginary relationships may be substituted for real ones. All the peculiarities we have described appear in the analytical process. Naturally, the detached person resents analysis because indeed it is the greatest possible intrusion upon one’s private life. However, one is also interested in observing oneself and may be fascinated by the greater vista it opens upon the intricate process going on within one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
One may be intrigued by the artistic quality of dreams or by the aptness of one’s inadvertent associations. One’s joy in finding confirmation for assumptions resembles the scientist’s One is appreciative of the analyst’s attention and of one’s pointing to something here and there, but abominates being urged or “forced” in a direction one has not foreseen. One will often mention the danger of suggestion in analysis—although factually there is less danger of this in one’s case than for any other type, because one is fully armed against “influence.” Far from defending one’s position in a rational way by testing out the analyst’s suggestion, one tends, as is one’s wont, to reject blindly, though indirectly and politely, all that does not fit in with one’s own ideas about oneself and life in general. One finds it particularly obnoxious that the analyst should expect one to change in any way. Of course one wants to get rid of whatever is disturbing one; but it must not involve a change in one’s personality. One is almost as unfailingly willing to observe as one is unconsciously determined to remain as one is. One’s defiance of all influence is only one of the explanations for one’s attitude, and not the deepest one; we shall become acquainted with other later on. Naturally one puts a great distance between one’s self and the analyst. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the World. For a long time the analyst will be only a voice. In dreams the analytical situation may appears as a long-distance call between two reporters on different continents. At first glance a dream like this would seem to express the remoteness one feels toward the analyst and the analytical process—merely an accurate presentation of an attitude that exists consciously. However, since dreams are a search for a solution rather than a mere description of existing feelings, the deeper meaning of such a dream is a wish to keep one’s relationship to the analyst and to the whole analytical process away from one—not to let the analysis touch one in any way. Maturity is the ability to live in peace with that which we cannot change. Managing change in complex organizations is like steering a sailboat in turbulent water and stormy winds. If you are on a course to some destination and the wind is blowing at gale force dead broadside; you have to make a number of critical choices. If you head into the wind, you will lose speed and direction although your probably can ride out the storm. If you let the wind carry you too far, it might blow the boat over; and if your let it go a little less far than that, it may well drive you off course. If you decide to hold rigidly to your course at all costs, you may find that the winds rip the sails and even break off the mast. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The true sailor, knowing these choices, works with the wind. He or she will bring the boat up close between gusts, “fall off” a little on the next gust, and come back up to the course in such a way that the boat stays on the compass heading towards its destination through many short-term decisions, which go with or against the prevailing winds in an appropriate combinations. We live in a time of paradox, contradiction, opportunity, and above all, change. To the fearful, change is threatening because they worry that things may get worse. To the hopeful, change is encouraging because they feel things may get better. To those who have confidence in themselves, change is a stimulus because they believe one person can make a difference and influence what goes on around them. These people are the doers and the motivators. Change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future. It is nice to not have to wait on the clock to change to change our own actions, as humans, we have free will and the ability to constantly be improving and leaving behind ideas, thoughts, actions, situations and people who no longer support the person one is becoming. Now it is a remarkable phenomenon in our culture that people do not fully acknowledge or—perhaps we should say—are not fully conscious of what a grave affliction boredom is. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Take someone in solitary confinement or, to use a less drastic example, take someone who simply does not know what to do with oneself for whatever reason. Unless such a person has the resources within oneself to engage in some vital activity, to produce something, or to call one’s intellectual powers into play, then one will perceive one’s boredom as a burden, an encumbrance, a paralysis that one will not be able to explain by oneself. Boredom is one of the worst forms of torture. It is a very modern phenomenon, and it is spreading rapidly. A person who is that the mercy of one’s boredom and unable to defend oneself against it will feel severely depressed. You may feel moved to ask here why most people do not notice how grave a malady boredom is and how much suffering it causes us. I think the answer is quite simple. We produce today so many things that people can take to help them cope with their boredom. We can temporarily sweep our boredom under the rug by taking a tranquilizer or drinking or going to one cocktail party after another or fighting with our spouses or turning to the media for amusement or devoting ourselves to pleasures of the flesh. Much of what we do is an attempt to keep ourselves from fully acknowledging our boredom. However, do not forget that uneasy feeling that often overcomes you when you have watched a stupid move or repressed your boredom some other way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Remember the hangover that hits you when you realize that what you did for diversion actually bored you do death and that you have not made use of your time but have killed it. Another remarkable thing about our culture is that we will go to any lengths to save time, but once we have saved it, we kill it because we cannot think of anything better to do with it. There exists in the World today a gigantic reservoir of good will toward us, the American people. The Constitution does not provide for the first- and second-class citizens. It is important that we notice who presented Christ as this sacrifice of atonement. God presented Him. The whole plan of redemption was God’s plan and was undertaken at God’s initiative. Why did He do this? There is only one answer: because of His grace. The atonement was God’s extending favor to people who deserved not favor but wrath. The atonement was God’s bridging the awful “Grand Canyon” of sin to reach people who were in rebellion against Him. And He did this at infinite cost to Himself by sending Jesus to die in our place. “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this World and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
“Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. However, because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved,” reports Ephesians 2.1-5. Again we see the contrast drawn so sharply between our ruin and God’s remedy. In verses 1-3, Paul described us as dead in our sins, under the sway of Stan, captivated by the World, prisoners of our own sinful lusts, and objects of God’s holy wrath. Could any picture be more morbid, any background more contrasting? However, against this dark background Paul once again presented the flawless diamond of God’s grace. However, God intervened! We were dead in our transgressions, but God intervened. We were in bondage to sin, but God intervened. We were objects of wrath, but God intervened. God who is rich in mercy intervened. Because of His great love for us, God intervened and made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in our transgressions and sins. All this summed up in one succinct statement: “It is by grace you have been saved.” Our condition was hopeless, but God intervened in grace. “At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. However, when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous thing we had done, but because of his mercy,” reports Titus 3.3-5. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Again Paul draws a gracious contrast between our ruin and God’s remedy. The contrast could not be more bold and complete. Our foolishness, disobedience, and enslavement to all kinds of sinful passions is met by God’s kindness, mercy, and love. The utterly unrighteous are declared righteous (justified) by His grace. God’s grace really is amazing. God’s grace, then, does not supplement our good works. Instead, His grace overcomes our bad works, which are our sins. God did this by placing our sins on Christ and by letting fall on Him the wrath we so richly deserve. Because Jesus completely paid the awful penalty of our sins, God could extend His grace to us through complete and total forgiveness of our sins. As is so often the case, there is an interesting and instructive parallel to the spiritual life of the individual in the historical events of the Old Testament. The descendants of Abraham became a distinct people in the furnace of Egyptian slavery. Though God was, as always, at work in the larger scene, the Israelites lived, so far as they knew, under total domination of a god-system focused in the Pharaoh. That is, in Egyptian slavery they were “dead” to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He meant nothing to them, had noting to do with them—so far as they knew or cared. At the proper time, he approached them through and outcast (Moses [Acts 7.37-40]), as he approached us through an outcast (Jesus [Acts 7.52; Hebrews 13.12-14]). #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
By an act of intervention into their deadness (Deuteronomy 11.1-7) he brought them (and later us) to a new life of interactive (covenant) relationship to him. This interactive, covenant relationship is eternal life (John 17.3). It is what it means to have been “born from above”—which Nicodemus, as a teacher in Israel, was supposed to have understood, but could not because he had only “the mind of the flesh” and so could think only in terms of “the natural” (see John 3.10). However, this eternal kind of life is not a passive life. Passivity was for the Israelites, and it is for us one of the greatest dangers and difficulties of our spiritual existence. The land promised to them was one of incredible goodness—“flowing with milk and honey,” as it is repeatedly described. However, it still had to be conquered by careful, persistent, and intelligent human action, over a long period of time. In the beginning of the conquest of the Promised Land, the walls of Jericho fell down, to make clear God’s presence and power. Welcome to the kingdom! However, that never happened again. The Israelites had to take the remaining cities through hand-to-hand warfare, though always still with divine assistance. What was then true of the Promised Land of the Israelites was then and is now true of individual human beings who come to God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
The Israelites were saved or delivered by grace just as surely as we are. However, in both cases “grace: means we are to be, and are enabled to be, active to a degree we have never been before. Paul’s picture of grace is, “And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed,” reports 2 Corinthians 9.8. We therefore live in “hot pursuit” of Jesus Christ. “My soul followeth hard after thee,” the psalmist called out (68.8). And Paul’s panting cry was, “That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death,” in order to participate in the life of his resurrection reports Philippians 3.10-11. What are we to say of anyone who thinks they have something more important to do than that? The work of spiritual formation in Christlikeness is the work of claiming the land of milk and honey in which we are individually and collectively, to dwell with God. The old hymn rings out: “On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand and cast a wistful eye To Canaan’s fair and happy land, where my possessions lie.” However, the real Jordan, the spiritual “Jordan,” is not physical death, as has usually been supposed. We need not and must not wait until we die to live in the land of milk and honey; and if we will only move to that land now, the passage in physical death will be but one more day in the endless life we have long since begun. That is exactly what Jesus meant when he said, “If anyone keeps my words one shall ever see or taste death,” reports John 8.51. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Even when a teacher is found one may be a master of one pat only and unable to guide aspirants properly along those with which they have individual affinity and for which they have the requisite mental or emotional or volitional capacity. Another false idea is that the masters seek out disciples, make the advances towards them, whether “astrally” or physically. On the contrary, aspirants must take the first step themselves, must request acceptance. The illuminate does not have to engage in a lengthy conversation to find out whether another being is also illumined. “And neither at any time hath any wrought miracles until after their faith; wherefore they first believed in the Son of God. And there were many whose faith was so exceedingly strong, even before Christ same, who could no be kept from within the veil, but truly saw with their eyes the things which they had beheld with an eye of faith, and they were glad,” reports Ether 12.18-19. Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that we who amid so many adversities have fainted through our own infirmity, may be relieved by the intervention of the Passion of Thine only-begotten Son; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that we who are incessantly afflicted by our own transgressions, may be delivered by the Passion of Thine only-begotten Son; Who with Thee one may achieve personal influence and develop idea patterns. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
O God, praise waiteth for thee, and to render it is my noblest exercise; this is thy due from all thy creatures, for all thy works display thy attributes and fulfill thy designs; the sea, dry land, Winter cold, and Summer heat, morning light, evening shade are full of thee, and thou givest me them richly to enjoy. Thou art King of kings and Lord of lords; at thy pleasure empires rise and fall; all thy works praise thee and thy saints bless thee; let me be numbered with thy holy ones, resemble them in character and condition, sit with the at Jesus’s feet. May my religion be always firmly rooted in thy word, my understanding divinely informed, my affection holy and Heavenly, my motives simple and pure, and my heart never wrong with thee. Deliver me from the natural darkness of my own mind, from the corruption of my heart, from the temptations to which I am exposed, from the daily snares that attend me. I am in constant danger while I am in this life; let thy watchful eye ever be upon me for my defence, save me from the power of my Worldly and spiritual enemies and from all painful evils to which I have exposed myself. Until the day of life dawn above let there be unrestrained fellowship with Jesus; until fruition comes, may I enjoy the earnest of my inheritance and the firstfruits of the Spirit; until I finish my course with joy may I pursue it with diligence, in every part display the resources of the Christian, and adorn the doctrine of thee my God in all things. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Life is the Rose’s Hope While Yet Unblown the Reader of an Ever-Changing Tale!
You are rich beyond your wildest dreams! Treasures it, measure it, in units of love. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it. Learning to lead is, on one level, learning to manage change. A leader imposes (in the most beneficial sense of the word) one’s philosophy on the organization, creating or re-creating its culture. The organization then acts on that philosophy, carries out the mission, and the culture takes on a life of its own, becomes more cause than effect. However, unless the leader continues to evolve, to adapt and adjust to external changes, the organization will sooner or later fall. You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chance there is of stubbing your toe, but the more chance you have of getting somewhere. Think of accelerated change as an object hurtling toward you at tremendous speed. If you first spot it a mile away, its speed and the distance between you and it blur its nature; all you can see is an indistinct shape. As the object continues rushing toward you, you begin to discern a rough oblong shape, but you cannot determine much else about it. Is it a threatening enemy missile or a friendly vehicle you might ride toward the future? Quickly, it bears down on you. As you peer at it closely, you suddenly see handles on its side. An opportunity, not a danger! If you have focused well enough and soon enough, you can seize it, letting it whisky you forward well ahead of those who failed to focus on it in time. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Many people do not understand the concept of faith because they are still learning to believe. However, electricity had the possibility of being discovered in 400 A.D., but was not discovered until 1752. So that gives you an idea of how powerful can become as you develop it. Perhaps we will eventually have the power to manifest our blessings by believing they are possible. New ideas do not detach themselves gradually from the traditional concepts of energy by deeper reflection on them, but belongs to those intuitively apprehended ideas which, arising in other realms of a spiritual nature, as it were take possession of the mind and compel it to reshape the traditional conceptions in their own likeness. The question now arises: Whence this new idea that thrusts itself upon consciousness with such elemental force? And whence did it derive the power that could so seize upon consciousness that it completely eclipsed the multitudinous impressions of a first voyage to the tropics? These questions are not so easy to answer. However, if we apply our theory here, the explanation can only be this: the idea of energy and its conservation must be a primordial image that was dormant in the collective unconscious. Such a conclusion naturally obliges us to prove that a primordial image of this kind really did exist in the mental history of humankind and was operative through the ages. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
As a matter of fact, this proof can be produced without much difficulty: the most primitive religions in the most widely separated parts of the Earth are founded upon this image. These are the so-called dynamistic religions whose sole and determining thought is that there exists a universal magical power about which everything revolves. Many people misunderstand this idea of animism. In reality primitives do not mean, by their power-concept, souls or spirits at all, but something which the American investigator Lovejoy has appropriately termed “primitive energetics.” This concept is equivalent to the idea of soul, spirit, God, health, bodily strength, fertility, magic, influence, power, prestige, medicine, as well as certain states of feeling which are characterized by the release of affects. Among certain Polynesians mulungu—this same primitive power-concept—means spirit, soul, daemonism, magic, prestige; and when anything astonishing happens, the people cry out “Mulugu!” This power-concept is also the earliest form of a concept of God among primitives, and is an image which has undergone countless variations in the course of history. In the Old Testament the magic power glows in the burning bush and in the countenance of Moses; in the Gospels it descends with the Holy Ghost in the form of fiery tongues from Heaven. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
In Heraclitus magic power appears as World energy, as “ever-living fire”; among the Persians it is the fiery glow of “Haoma,” divine grace; among the Stoics it is the original heart, the power of fate. Again, in medieval legend it appears as the aura or halo, and it flares up like a flame from the roof of the hut in which the saint lies in ecstasy. In their visions the saints behold the Sun of this power, the plentitude of its light. According to the old view, the soul itself is this power; in the idea of the soul’s immortality the there is implicit its conversation, and in the Buddhist and primitive notion of metempsychosis—transmigration of souls—is implicit its unlited changeability together with its constant preservation. So this idea has been stamped on the human brain for aeons. That is why it lies ready to hand in the unconscious of every being. Only, certain conditions are needed to cause it to appear. These conditions were evidently fulfilled in the case of Benjamin Franklin. The greatest and best thoughts of beings shape themselves upon these primordial images as upon a blueprint. I have often been asked where the archetypes or primordial images comes from. It seems to me that their origin can only be explained by assuming them to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity. One of the commonest and at the same time most impressive experiences is the apparent movement of the Sun every day. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
We certainly cannot discover anything of the kind in the unconscious, so far as the known physical process is concerned. What we do find, on the other hand, is the myth of the Sun-hero in all its countless modifications. It is this myth, and not the physical process, that forms the Sun archetype. The same can be said of the phases of the Moon. He archetype is a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas. Hence it seems as though what is impressed upon the unconscious were exclusively the subjective fantasy-idea aroused by the physical process. Therefore we may take it that archetypes are recurrent impressions made by subjective reactions. Naturally this assumption pushes the problem only further back without solving it. There is nothing to prevent us from assuming that certain archetypes exist even in animals, that they are grounded in the peculiarities of the living organism itself and are therefore direct expressions of life whose nature cannot be further explained. Not only are the archetypes, apparently, impressions of ever-repeated typical experiences, but, at the same time, they behave empirically like agents that tend towards the repetition of these same experiences. For when an archetype appears in a dream, in a fantasy, or in life, it always brings with it a certain influence or power by virtue of which it either exercises a numinous or fascinating effect, or impels to action. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in this World must first come to pass in the heart of America. Deep learning brings about personality change. In psychotherapy, the concept of a “cure” is entirely inappropriate, since in most of these disorders we are dealing with learned behavior, not with a disease. During and after therapy the client increases in attitudes of self-acceptance, and this is correlated with an increase in acceptance of others. We did not ask unanswerable questions as to what instruments would measure success or cure. We asked specific questions related to each hypothesis. What instrument can be used to measure the individual’s concept of self? What instrument will give a satisfactory measure of maturity of behavior? How can we measure the degree of an individual’s acceptance of others? While question such as these are difficult, operational answers are discoverable. Thus our decision in regard to criteria gave us much help in solving the whole problem of instrumentation of the research. Profound research indicates that changes occur in the perceived self of the client during and after therapy; there are constructive changes in the client’s personality characteristics and personality characteristics of the well-functioning person; there is change in the direction defined as personal integrations and adjustment; there are also changes in the maturity of the client’s behavior as observed by friends. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
No one learns to make right decision without being free to make wrong one. In each instance, the change we have observed in someone during and after therapy is significantly greater than that found in people who try to deal with their problems without seeking help. Findings indicate some people are misguided and become somewhat confused and ambiguous when they do not have the proper guidance. For instance, a boy found out he was adopted, ditched his father before entering the ballpark to see a baseball game, sold his ticket and went to meet with some man at the park at night. The boy thought was his biological father because in an email he had claimed to be. In the process, unbeknownst to him, he was about to be kidnapped, when the FBI intercepted and rescued the minor. The boy had no idea he was being preyed on. Prior to the incident, the teacher did notice a change in his personality, and held him after class prior to the incident, but the boy would not confess that anything was wrong. He had also been hanging out with unsavory youth and trying to impress them. Had the boy been in therapy, he would have been able to express his concerns and received proper guidance. Luckily the boy was returned home safely and the bad man was caught in the process, but he could have lost his life and a lot of taxpayer money was used to find him. The bright side, however, is the man will not be able to prey on other young kids. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing World. We must learn to listen. Sometimes change means doing things different. In regard to client-sponsored psychotherapy, at least, there is now objective evidence of beneficial changes in personality and behavior in directions which are usually regarded as constructive and these changes are attributed to the therapy. It is the adoption of multiple specific research criteria and the use of a rigorously controlled research design which makes it possible to make such a statement. If you are like I am, your heart may be saddened by what we have discussed. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we must ask how we can become the kind of people who bring honor to Christ, to help turn the culture toward Him, and to be lights in the midst of darkness for our families, friends, churches, and communities. There is no simple answer to this question, but one thing is crystal clear. We must rededicate ourselves to being deeply spiritual people who it can truly be said that “Christ is formed in you.” And, given the times in which we live, we must obey Jesus’ admonition to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. Surrounded by a fragmented culture, how do we become deeply spiritual people who are wise and savvy, yet innocent and pure? How do we raise children, develop good marriages, serve as role models at work, and make an attractive impact on our communities? #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
More than ever before, we need what the Old Testament calls wisdom. The spiritually mature person is a wise person. And a wise person has the savvy and skill necessary to lead an exemplary life and to address the issues of the say in a responsible, attractive way that brings honor to God. Wisdom is the fruit of a life of study and a developed mind. Wisdom is the application of knowledge gained from studying both God’s written Word and His revealed truth in creation. If we are going to be wise, spiritual people prepared to meet the crises of our age, we must be a studying, learning community that values the life of the mind. Clearly, to become spiritually formed in Christ, a person of wisdom, requires that we follow Christ’s teaching in this critical area—and it was Christ who taught us to love the Lord our God with all our minds. The information of most relevance in the study of stigma has certain properties. It is information about an individual. It is about one more or less abiding characteristics, as opposed to the moods, feelings, or intents that one might have at a particular moment. The information, as well as the sign through which it is conveyed, is reflexive and embodied; that is, it is conveyed by the very person it is about, and conveyed though bodily expression. Information possessing all of these properties I here call “social.” Some signs that convey social information may be frequently and steadily available, and routinely sought and received; these signs may be called “symbols.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The social information conveyed by any particular symbol may merely confirm what other signs tell us about the individual, filling out our image of one in a redundant and unproblematic way. Some lapel buttons attesting to social club membership, are examples, as are male wedding rings, or the color of the sole of some women’s high heel shoes, in some contexts. However, the social information conveyed by a symbol can establish a special claim to prestige, honor, or desirable class position—a claim that might not otherwise be presented or, if otherwise presented, then not automatically granted. Such a sign is popularly called a “status symbol” might be more accurate, the former term being more suitably employed when a well-organized social position of some kind is the referent. Prestige symbols can be contrasted to stigma symbols, namely, signs which are especially effective in drawing attention to a debasing identity discrepancy, breaking up what would otherwise be a coherent overall picture, with a consequent reduction in our valuation of the individual. The shaved head of female collaborators in World War II is an example, as is an habitual solecism through which someone affecting middle class manner and dress repeatedly employs a word incorrectly or repeatedly mispronounces it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
In addition to prestige symbols and stigma symbols, one further possibility is to be found, namely, a sign that tends—in fact or hope—to break up an otherwise coherent picture but in this cause in a beneficial direction desired by the actor, not so much establishing a new claim as throwing severe doubt on the validity of the virtual one. I shall refer here to disidentifiers. On example is the “good English” of an educated inner-city adult visiting the South; another is the bandana or loud boisterous conversations conducted outside the homes affected by some urban lower-class people. A study of illiterates provides another illustration: Therefore, when goal orientation is pronounced or imperative and there exists a high probability that definition as illiterate is a bar to the achievement of the goal, the illiterate is likely to “pass” as literate. The popularity in the group studied of windowpane lenses with heavy horn frames (“bop glasses”) may be viewed as an attempt to emulate the stereotype of the businessman-teacher-young intellectual and especially the high state jazz musician. A New York specialist in the arts of vagrancy provides still another illustration: After seven-thirty in the evening, in order to read a book in Grand Central or Penn Station, a person either has to wear horn-rimmed glasses or look exceptionally prosperous. Anyone else is apt to come under surveillance. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
On the other hand, newspaper readers never seem to attract attention and even the seediest vagrant can sit in Grand Central all night without being bothered if he or she continues to read a paper. Note that in this discussion of prestige symbols, stigma symbols, and disidentifiers, sighs have been considered which routinely convey social information. These symbols must be distinguished from fugitive signs that have not been institutionalized as information carriers. When such signs make claims to prestige, one can all them points; when they discredit tacit claims, one can call them slips. Some signs carrying social information, being present, first of all, for other reasons, have only an overlay of informational function. There are stigma symbols that provide examples: the wrist markings which disclose that an individual has attempted suicide pock marks of drug addicts; the handcuffed wrists of convicts in transit; or black eyes when worn in public by people, as writer on women of the evening suggests: “Outside [the prison were she now is] I had been in the soup with it. Well, you know how it is: the law sees a chick with a shiner, figures she is up to something. Bull figures maybe in the life. Next thing trails her around. Then maybe bang! Busted.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Other signs are designed by a person solely for the purpose of conveying social information, as in the case of insignia of military rank. It should be added that the significance of the underlay of a sign can become reduced over time, becoming, at the extreme, merely vestigial, even while the informational function of the activity remains constant or increases in importance. Further, a sign that appears to be present for non-informational reasons may sometimes be manufactured with malice aforethought solely because of its informing function, as when dueling scares were carefully planned and inflicted. Signs conveying social information vary according to whether or not they are congenital, and, if not, whether, once employed, they become a permanent part of the person. (Skin color is congenital; a brand mark or maiming is permanent but not congenital; a person’s head-shave is neither congenital nor permanent.) More important, impermanent signs solely employed to convey social information may or may not be employed to convey social information may or may not be employed against the will of the informant; when they are, they tend to be stigma symbols. Later it will be necessary to consider stigma symbols that are voluntarily employed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
It is possible for signs which mean one thing to one group to mean something else to another group, the same category being designated but differently characterized. For example, the shoulder patches that prison officials require escape-prone prisoners to wear can come to mean one thing to guards, in general negative, while being a mark of pride for the wearer relative to one’s fellow prisoners. The uniform of an officer may be a matter of pride to some, to be worn on every possible occasion; for other officers, weekends may represent a time when they can exercise their choice and wear mufti, passing as civilians. Similarly, while the obligation to wear the school cap in town may be seen as a privilege by some boys, as will the obligation to wear a uniform on leave by other ranks, still there will be wearers who feel that the social information conveyed thereby is a means of ensuring control and discipline over them when they are off duty and off the premises. So, too, during the eighteen hundreds in California, the absence of a pigtail (queue) on a Chinese man signified for Occidentals a degree of acculturation, but to fellow-Chinese a question would be raised as to respectability—specifically, whether or not the individual has served a term in prison where cutting off of the queue was obligatory; loss of queue was for a time, then, very strongly resisted. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Signs carry social information vary of course as to reliability. Distended capillaries on the cheek and nose, sometimes called “venous stigmata” with more aptness than meant, can be and are taken as indicating alcoholic excess. However, teetotalers can exhibit the same symbol for other physiological reasons, thereby giving rise to suspicions about themselves which are not justified, but with which they must deal nonetheless. A final point about social information must be raised; it has to do with the informing character of the “with” relationship in our society. To be “with” someone is to arrive at a social occasion in one’s company, walk with one down a street, be a member of one’s party in a restaurant, and so forth. The issue is that in certain circumstances the social identity of those an individual is with can be used as a source of information concerning one’s own social identity, the assumption being that one is what the others are. Being with some people alone, like with Paris Hilton, is a prestige symbol. In the extreme, perhaps, is the situation in criminal circles: a person wanted for arrest can legally contaminate anyone he or she is seen with, subjecting them to arrest on suspicion. (A person for whom there is a warrant is therefore said “to have smallpox” and his or her criminal disease is said to be “catching.”) In any case, an analysis of how people manage the information they convey about themselves will have to consider how they deal with the contingencies of being seen “with” particular others. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
By the late nineteenth century, etiquette books no longer had to give advice to people about suppressing bodily functions and being proper. In the early nineteenth century, diners still had to be reminded not to blow their noses on the tablecloth, not to spit food back into the serving dishes, not to pick their teeth with their knives, and not to urinate in front of ladies. As time passed, people learned enough to control themselves in public. The self-contained, modern, discreet person was invented in the late nineteenth century as a reaction to the loss of control inherent in modern, anonymous city life. The noteworthy element is not how quaint the Victorians were or how different, but how much more like us they are than any other people before them. To really appreciate the revolution in eating in the late nineteenth century, it would help to see a Victorian dining room with its pantry fully stocked and its food on the table. The nineteenth century saw the introduction and spread of brand-named foods, prepackaging, logos, and graphic labels. Before the Victorian era, food was either raised or grown at home or bought in bulk. The local general store or grocer had large sacks of sugar, beans, and flours; barrels of molasses and pickles; as well as spices such as pepper, cloves, and allspice. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The grocer measured and weighed his waves into the customer’s containers and kept a tab, billing his or her accounts once a month. Milk, eggs, and fowl were purchased from a country farmer who brought them to market or, more likely, from a city dairyman who kept cows and chickens in town. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the quality of foods often got a lot worse. Railroads and urbanization supported the growth of the food business. Flour was milled closer to the source or closer to inexpensive transportation rather than closer to the consumer. It was commonly extended by unscrupulous companies with a measure of chalk dust or plaster. Tea was often stretched with iron filings, a profitable ingredient for a product sold by weight. Milk was often skimmed of valuable cream and sold as whole. Even when it was not, city cows often lived in multistory brick barns, were fed on rotten silage, and infected with tuberculosis. These consumptive Camilles of the cow Worldly hardly gave thick, white milk that Americans were used to. New York City’s milk was most often described as watery and bluish. By the late nineteenth century, there were strong reactions to the declining quality of food. You can change anything you want, but you cannot change everything you want. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
During the 1870s, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was hired to manage the Western Health Reform Institute which he renamed the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He believed in crispy foods to clean the teeth, uncooked fruit as God made it, and bran to encourage evacuation. “Bran does not irritate, it titillates,” reports Dr. Kellogg. His first commercial product was called Granola, but there was another product already on the market called Granula so he changed the name to Granose and sold 100,000 pounds in the first year. One of his patients was Charles Post. After nine months Post still has his ulcers, but he had learned the joy of food marketing. In 1895 in invented Postum, a coffee substitute, and, soon thereafter, a dry cereal called Elijah’s Manna. As grocers objected to the blasphemy, he renamed it Grape Nuts. Soon after he followed with Post-Toasties. Dr. Kellogg prescribed a diet high in grains and low in the ubiquitous salt pork on which most Americans subsisted. He was so successful that he packaged his corn flakes and advertised them heavily, urging brand-name loyalty as an assurance of purity. Post marketed his Grape Nuts and Post-Toasties in the same way—with a distinctive logo, testimonials from doctors and patients, and factory packaging. The National Biscuit Company put up billboards across America assuring consumers that “You Need a Biscuit” (Uneeda Biscuit) was packaged in a moisture-proof wrapping to ensure a pure, untainted, crisp product. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
At the same time, the Reverend Sylvester Graham was an evangelist for whole-wheat flour and developed a sweetened whole-wheat cracker (the Graham cracker) that was supposed to keep the consumer not only healthy, but also moral. Graham was both a Presbyterian minister and an agent of the Pennsylvania Temperance Society and marketed his new cracker to boarding schools as a suppressant of masturbation in boys. This was certainly creative advertising that even a modern advertising executive would admire. The greatest contributor among these health-food pioneers Gail Borden. City people were being poisoned by tainted milk every day. Borden discovered that by evaporating much of the water from milk and canning the result, the milk did not have to be refrigerated. The cows could live a healthy country life while the consumers could stay far away in the city, hence Borden’s famous slogan for Carnation milk: “from contented cows.” The condition upon which God hath given liberty to humans is eternal vigilance. God made the country, and people made the town. Be always sure you are right—then go ahead. Absence of occupation is not rest, a mind quite vacant is a mind distressed. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Almighty and everlasting God, Who restores us by the blessed Passion of Thy Christ, preserve in us the works of Thy mercy; that by the celebration of this Mystery our lives may be continually devout; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, purify Thy family, and cleanse it from all contagion of wickedness; that the vessels which have been redeemed by their Lord’s Passion may never again be stained by the unclean spirit, but may be possessed by everlasting salvation; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Remember Thy compassions, O Lord, and sanctify with eternal protection Thy servants, for whom Christ Thy Son by His Blood appointed unto us the Paschal mystery; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, Who by the Passion of Thy Christ our Lord hast dissolved that hereditary death of the ancient sin, to which the whole race of Adam’s posterity had succeeded; grant that havng been made conformable unto Him, as we by necessity of nature have borne the image of the Earthly, so by the sanctification of grace we may bear the image of the Heavenly, even of Christ our Lord; Who with Thee we shall prosper and overcome all oppression. “And it came to pass that Orihah did walk humbly before the Lord, and did remember how great things the Lord had done for his father, and also taught his people how great things the Lord had done for their fathers,” reports Ether 6.30. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Lord of all being, there is one thing that deserves my greatest care, that calls forth my ardent desires, that is, that I may answer the great end for which I am made—to glorify thee who hast given me being, and to do all the good I can for my fellow beings; verily, life is not worth having if it be not improved for this noble purpose. Yet, Lord, how little is this the thought of humankind! Most beings seem to live for themselves, without much or any regard for thy glory, or for the good of others; they earnestly desire and eagerly pursue the riches, honours, pleasures of this life, as if they suppose that wealth, greatness, merriment, could make their immortal souls happy; but, alas, what false delusive dreams are these! And how miserable ere long will those be that sleep in them, for all our happiness consists in loving thee, and being holy as thou art holy. O may I never fall into the tempers and vanities, the sensuality and folly of the present World! It is a place of inexpressible sorrow, a vast empty nothingness; time is a moment, a vapour, and all its enjoyments are empty bubbles, fleeting blasts of wind, from which nothing satisfactory can be derived; give me grace always to keep in covenant with thee, and to reject as delusions a great name here or hereafter, together with all sinful pleasures or profits. Help me to know continually that there can be no true happiness, no fulfilling of thy purpose for me, apart from a life lived in and for the Son of thy Love. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
NOW SELLING! Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Residence three is nearly 2,800 square feet, and comes in three different exterior architectural styles. One of my favorite is this Mid-Century Modern house by Cresleigh Homes reminds me of a Frank Lloyd Wright house. It is crisp and commanding, yet looks welcoming, like it is made for down-home hospitality. The star attractions is of course the balcony and angular roofline. Inside, though, the design is truly a hard worker with plenty of room to maneuver: the kitchen is anchored by the large great room, and expansive dining room, and there is a huge first floor master suite. Additionally on the first floor is a powder room and a decent sized foyer, and a mud room just off of the three car garage.
There is also a master bedroom on the second floor, a laundry room, two seondary bedroom, and the third bedroom opens up to the balcony. Do not miss the other extras throughout this home! Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District. You will find yourself in love with one of Cresleigh’s amazing designs. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/
