Home » veteran (Page 54)

Category Archives: veteran

Sometimes an Angel Has to Fall to Know One Was in Heaven—Are You Living?

January 1, 2020 12:46 am

Make sustained rapid improvement a way of life. Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. If it is in the right direction, there is nothing wrong in change. To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often. Start by doing what is necessary; then do what is possible; and suddenly you are doing this impossible. God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform; God plants his foot steps in the sea, and rides upon the storm. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance. Some people think that it seems God does not exist because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. And the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. They say, if God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the World. Therefore, God does not exist is their thought. However, it is said in the person of God: “I am Who am,” reports Exodus 3.14. We know God exists. It is certain, and evident to our senses that in the World some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is noting else than the reduction of something in a state of actuality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

However, nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thu that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cld. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, exempli gratia that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. However, this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the World of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient case of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible, Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinite, because in all efficient cases following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient cases, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. However, if there be no first cause it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name Go. The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be. However, it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Therefore, if everything is possible not to be, then at one time there could have been noting in existence. Now if this were true, even now there would be nothing in existence, because that which does not exist only begins to exist by something already existing. Therefore, if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence—which is absurd. Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary. However, every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not. Now it is impossible to go out to infinite in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another, as has been already proved in regard to efficient causes. Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in other their necessity. This all beings speak of as God. The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something in which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God. The fifth way is taken from the governance of the World. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God. Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil. This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it to produce good. Since nature works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent, whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its first cause. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

So also whatever is done voluntarily must also be traced back to some higher cause other than human reason or will, since these can change or fail; for all things that are changeable and capable of defect must be traced back to an immovable and self-necessary first principle. The human situation is one of finiteness—all flesh is grass and the grass withereth. It is one of sin—we receive double for all our sins. It is one of vanity and pride—we are brought to nothing and fall utterly. However, in spite of one’s realistic knowledge of human nature and density, darkness and light follow each other; after the depth of sin and punishment, the prophet announces forgives and liberation. However, the wave falls, and the prophet asks himself how he could have made such an announcement, when all the goodness of mortal beings is as the flower of the field, which faces because the breath of God blows upon it. However, he does not remain in the depths of his melancholy: over against human mortality the word of God shall stand forever. There is something eternal to which we can cling: Be not afraid, the Lord God shall come with strong hand. So the wave rises, and then again it falls: the nations are as a drop of water and a piece of dust; all nations are as nothing before God, they are counted as less than nothing. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Again the wave rises: God stands above the circle of the Earth, above all created things, above the highest and the lowest! And when once more the wave falls and the servant of God complains that he does not receive justice from God, the answer is that God acts beyond human expectation. He gives power to the faint and to one that hath no might God is increaseth strength. God acts paradoxically; He acts beyond human understanding. How shall we interpret these words? Is there a way to unite the heights and depths contrasted in this essay? Shall we understand the words of consolation and hope as vain promises, never fulfilled in the past and never to be fulfilled in any future? Shall we understand then as an escape from the realization of Human’s real situation, through mysticism and poetic elevation? If so, what about the probing realism of the prophet’s analysis of the human situation? One saw history as it is, but at the same time one looked beyond history to the ultimate power and meaning and majesty of being. One knew two orders of being: the human, political, historical order, and the divine, eternal order. Because one knew these two orders, one could speak as one did, moving continually between the depth of human nothingness and the great height of divine creativity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Let us look at these orders, these different natures, and their interrelation. In speaking of them we speak of ourselves, because we belong to both of them in every moment of our life and history. The human order, the order of history, is primarily the order of growing and dying. “Surely the people is grass.” Human’s experience of melancholy, awakened by fading and perishing nature, is symbolic of one’s transitoriness. Generations after generations grow up, struggle, suffer, enjoy and disappear. Should we take all this seriously? Should we take it more seriously than the growing and fading of the grass? He prophet, when one was asked to speak one’s nation, raised the question: Why speak to them? They are grass. We could continue: Why write and work and struggle for them? They are grass. What matter, when after a few years all those for whom we wrote and spoke and struggled will have vanished? They were grass, the grass withered, the flowers faded. That is the order of history. However, the other appears at the horizon: the word of God shall stand forever. Second, the order of history is an order of sin and punishment. The exile, following the destruction of Jerusalem, was, as all the prophets said, the punishment of the people for their sins. We do not like words such as “sin” and “punishment.” They seem to us old-fashioned, barbaric, and invalid in the light of modern psychology. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

However, whenever I have met exiles of high moral standards and insights, I have discovered that they feel responsible for what has happened within their own countries. And very often I have met citizens who democratic countries, citizens of this country, who have expressed a feeling of guilt for the situation of the World today. They were right, and the exiles were right: they are responsible, as are you and I. Whether or not we call it sin, whether or not we call it punishment, we are beaten by the consequences of our own failures. That is the order of history. However, at the horizon the other order appears, saying that our struggles are not in vain, that our iniquity is pardoned. There is a third element in the order of history, uniting finiteness and sin: the tragic law which controls the historical process, the law which ordains that human greatness utterly fall. There is human greatness in history. There are great and conquering nations and empires; there are even nations and empires which manifest a certain righteousness. There are princes and even good princes; there are judges and even just judges. There are states and constitutions and even states and constitutions which provide a certain amount of freedom; there are social orders and even some which provide a certain amount of equality. There are creative spirits and even some which have the power of knowledge and understanding. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

However, just in being great and powerful and righteous they touch the divine sphere, and they become arrogant, and they are brought to nothing. They are without roots; they wither; the divine storm blows over them, and they vanish. That is the subject of Greek tragedy. That is the message f the prophet to the nations of the World. They are all subject to the law of tragic self-destruction—the bad and the good, individuals and nations, the weak and the heroic. And again the other order, the order beyond history and tragedy, appears at the horizon: He gives power to the faint and their strength is renewed, so that they shall mount up with wings as eagles. The order beyond the order of history is the divine order. And it is paradoxical: humans are like grass, but the word of God spoken to them shall stand forever. Humans stand under the law of sin and punishment, but the divine order breaks through it and bring forgiveness. Humans faint, falling from the height of their moral goodness and youthful power, and just when they have fallen and are weakest, they run without weariness and rise up with wigs as eagles. God acts beyond all human assumptions and valuations. He acts surprisingly, unexpectedly, paradoxically. The negative character of the historical order is the beneficial character of the divine order. The weak and despairing, the sinful and tragic in the historical order are the strong and victorious in the divine order. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

The prophet speaks of the paradoxical destiny of the servant, the elected nation. Described as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, it is despised and rejected in the human order. Who does not think, hearing these words, of the exiles not only of Israel but of all nations of the World? However, the divine order appears. The exiled nation, or (as the Christians later, historically wrong, spiritually right, interpreted it) the Man on the Cross, represents another order, an order in which the weakest is the strongest, the most humiliated, the most victorious. The historical, human order is overcome by the suffering servant, the crucified Saviour. If we doubt this paradox, if we despair about our human situation, if our exile is without hope or meaning for us, the prophet should fill us with shame for the arrogance of our rationalism and the narrowness of our moralism, of history. He asks, “Who has directed the Spirit of God? With whom took He counsel and who instructed Him and taught Him the path of Justice?” We always wish to teach God the path of justice. We tell Him that He must punish the bad and reward the good, especially in relation to ourselves. However, He accepts no counsel concerning the course of history, as He took no counsel concerning the structure of the World, with all its natural destruction, cruelty, and transitoriness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The divine order cannot be judged according to the measures of the historical order, the measures of human comfort and morality, democracy and civilization. That was the answer Job received from God when he struggled with Him about the unintelligible injustice of his historical fate. God did not justify Himself in moral categories; He triumphantly pointed to the unexplorable greatness of nature which cannot be measured according to the measure of human righteousness. However, if the divine order and the historical order have nothing to do with each other, how can the divine order concern us at all? How can eternity and forgiveness and divine help concern us if we are in the other order, the historical order, standing under the law of finiteness and weakness and punishment? How can the divine order comfort us in our misery? How can we listen to the words of the prophets which tell us of the end of our warfare? There are three answers to this question. First, the divine order is not the historical order; and we should not confuse these two orders. No life is able to overcomes finiteness, sin, and tragedy. The illusions of our period have been that modern civilization can conquer them, and that we can achieve security in our own existence. Progress seemed to have conquered tragedy; the divine order seemed to be embodied in the progressive, historical order. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

However, for nearly three decades our generation has received blow after blow, destroying that illusion, and driving to despair and cynicism those who wanted to transform, and thought they could transform the historical order into a divine order. Let us learn from the catastrophe of our tie at least the fact that no life and no period are able to overcome finiteness, sin, and tragedy. The second answer is that there is another order to which we, as human beings, belong, an order which makes beings always dissatisfied with what is given to one. Humans transcend everything in the historical order, all the heights and depts of one’s own existence. One passes, as no other being is able to pass, beyond the limits of one’s given World. One participates in something infinite, in an order which is not transitory, not self-destructive, not tragic, but eternal, holy, and blessed. Therefore, when one listen to the prophetic word, when one hears of the everlasting God and of the greatness of His power and the mystery of His acts, a response is awakened in the depth of one’s soul; the infinite within one is touched. Every being knows, in some depth of one’s soul, that is true. Our despair itself, our inability to escae ourselves in life and in death, witnesses to our infinity. The third answer is that the two orders, the historical and the eternal, although they can never become the same, are within each other. The historical order is not separated from the eternal order. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

What is new in the prophets and in Christianity, beyond all paganism, old and new, is that the eternal order reveals itself in the historical order. The suffering servant of God and the enemies because of whom one suffers, the Man on the Cross and those who fainted under the Cross, the exiled and persecuted in all periods of history, have all transformed history. The strong in history fall; the strength of each of taken from us. However, those who seem weak in history finally shape history, because they are bound to the eternal order. We are not a lost generation because we are a suffering, destroyed generation. Each of us belongs to the eternal order, and the prophet speaks to all of us: Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people! I have learned that there are not different types but qualifications of love, since the different qualities are presented, by efficiency or deficiency, in every act of love. This insight, however, does not make the distinction of the qualities of love less important. If, as I shall suggest, one has to distinguish the libido, the philia, the eros, the agape qualities of love we must ask: how are they related to each other? What is meant if one speaks of love without qualification? Which quality of love is adequate to the Great Commandment? Which to its emotional quality? #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Whenever the word love is used one also speaks of self-love. How is self-love related to the qualities of love, to its ontological and to its ethical character? First of all one must ask whether self-love is a meaningful concept at all. Considering that love presupposes a separation of the loving subject, and the loved object, is there such a separation in the structure of the self-consciousness? I am very doubtful about using the term self-love, and if it is used, abut using the term self-love, and if it is used, about using in it any except a metaphorical sense. Besides this terminological question, one must ask how the different qualities of love are related to what is metaphorically called self-love, and how it is related to the ethical and to the ontological nature of love. This survey of the problems and confusion, connected with the use of the term love is equaled by a survey of the confusions and problems connected with the public discussion of the concept of power. I may tell an anecdote which has more symbolic than analytical meaning. I have been warned not to announce a lecture on “Love, Power, and Justice” in the Untied States, because power would be understood as the product of the electrical power companies, and justice as the fight against the policy of the Federal Government to provide for affordable electrical power by the regulation of rivers according to the pattern of the Tennessee Valley Authority. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Power in the sense presupposed by this story is electrical power. In the same way the term power can be applied to all physical causes, although theoretical physics has got rid of this anthropomorphic symbol and has replaced it by mathematical equations. However, present-day physics speaks of power-fields in order to describe the basic structures of the material World. This is at least an indication of the significance the term power has even in the most abstract analysis of physical occurrences. Physicists are usually conscious of the fact that they use an anthropomorphic metaphor when they use the term power. Power is a sociological category and from there it is transferred to nature (just as is law). However, the term metaphor does not solve the problem. We must ask, how is it possible that both physics and social science use the same word, power? There must be a point of identity between the structure of the social and the structure of the physical World. And this identity must be manifest in the common use of the term power. There is, however, only one way of discovering the root meaning of power, namely to ask about its ontological foundation. And this, of course, is one of the purposes of these lectures. Within the social realm the meaning of power is burdened by another ambiguity, the relation of power and force. This duality is almost exclusively restricted to the human sphere. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

For only in humans, that is in the being whose nature is finite freedom, the distinction of power and force is meaningful. One speaks of power politics, and one often does so with moral indignations. However, this is the consequence of mere confusion. Politics and power politics are one and the same thing. There are no politics without power, neither in a democracy nor in a dictatorship. Politics and power politics point to the same reality. It does not matter which term you are using. Unfortunately, however, the term power politics is used for a special type of politics, namely that in which power is separated from justice and love, and is identified with compulsion. This confusion is possible because there is indeed a compulsory element in the actuality of power. However, this is only one element, and if power is reduced to it and loses the form of justice and the substance of love, it destroys itself and the politics based on it. Only penetration into the ontological roots of power can overcome the ambiguities in the relation of power and compulsion. If power is distinguished from compulsion the question arises whether there is a power which is neither physical nor psychological, but spiritual. Compulsion uses both physical and psychological means in order to exercise power, must conspicuously in the terror methods of dictatorships. No compulsion at all is presupposed in spiritual power. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Nevertheless, one assumes that spiritual power is the greatest, that it is the ultimate power. One does so whenever one says that God is Spirit. It is meet and right that we should give thanks to Thee, O Lord God, through Jesus Christ Thy Son, Who, being God Eternal, was pleased to becomes Man for our salvation. O the one, peerless, manifold Mystery of our Saviour! For He, being one and the same, God mist high, and perfect Man, both supreme High priest and most scared Sacred Sacrifice, according to His Divine power created all things, according to His human condition delivered humans; by virtue of His Sacrifice He atoned for the polluted, in right of His Priesthood He reconciled the alienated. O the peerless Mystery of redemption! Wherein those ancient wounds were healed by the Lord’s new medicine, and the judgment passed before on the first human rescinded by the privileges of our Saviour. The one in self-indulgence extended one’s hands to the tree, the other patiently fitted His to the Cross; therefore deservedly did the punishment borne by innocence become the discharge of the debtor, for with good right are debts remitted to debtors when discharged on their behalf by Him Who owed nothing. “And it came to pass that they began to spread upon the face of the land, and to multiply and to till the Earth; and they did wax strong in the land,” reports Ether 6.18. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Creator and Redeemer God, Author of all existence, source of all blessedness, I adore thee for making me capable of knowing thee, for giving me reason and conscience, for leading me to desire thee; I praise thee for the revelation of thyself in the gospel, for thy heart as a dwelling place of pity, for thy thoughts of peace towards me, for thy patience and thy graciousness, for the vastness of thy mercy. Thou hast moved my conscience to know how the guilty can be pardoned, the unholy sanctified, the poor enriched. May I be always amongst those who not only hear but know thee, who walk with and rejoice in thee, who take thee at they word and find life there. Keep me always longing for a present salvation in Holy Spirit comforts and rejoicings, for spiritual graces and blessings, for help to value my duties as well as my privileges. May I cherish simplicity and Godly sincerity of character. Help me to be in reality before thee as in appearance I am before humans, to be religious before I profess religion, to leave the World before I enter the church, to set my affections on things above, to shun forbidden follies and vanities, to be a dispenser as well as a partaker of grace, to be prepared to bear evil as well as to do good. O God, make me worthy of this calling, that the name Jesus may be glorified in me and I in him. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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. Dining rooms are perhaps the best evidence of the revolution that took place in society in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution not only made all the furniture, dishes, and silver plate possible, but also created a new class of people to use them. Early in the nineteenth century, the existence of a dining room at all was the mark of gentry. The landed gentry of the South and the merchant shippers of the North might boast a separate room just for eating, but they represented only a very small part of the population. By the 1860s, a separate dining room was considered de rigueur (prescribed or required by fashion, etiquette, or custom) for even a cottage.

When the guest filed into a Victorian dinner in the late nineteenth century, they found small menus on the table describing what cuisine they would be served. Staff set and removed plate for every course, and no one used fingers to touch the food. There were special forks and ladles and knives for every conceivable food: oyster ladles and forks; tomato servers; fish knives and forks; cake knives and servers forks; different spoons for clear sup, for cream soup, for dessert, for fruit, for breakfast coffee, for dinner coffee, and for tea. The volume and variety of silver-plated flatware and hollowware would baffle any modern dinner. What is so amazing about Victorian table manners is how successful they were. We may no longer use all the cutlery, but we have internalized their whole system of suppressing bodily functions and being proper. Cresleigh homes residence 4 osfer a formal dining room. Have your cake and eat it with whipped cream!

Style is displayed in exquisite proportions in residence 4, of Cresleigh homes, at Brighton Station. This 3,501 square foot home has a superb floor plan, which has a cache of thoughtful amenities. The chef inspired kitchen has a huge island, and opens up to the large great room, with an optional fireplace. Notice the abundance of storage in the butler’s pantry, and walk-in pantry. There is also a cozy home management office on the first floor, along with a formal dining room, coat closet, and a master suite with its own bathroom. The first floor also boast of a powder room for guest, a mud room and a 3-car tandem garage, which easily holds a family fleet, or a portion of it that can be converted into an optional workshop.

An elegant stairway leads to the master suite on the second floor, which offers both conviences and quiet seclusion. Included are many special features: a coffee bar, bathroom with deep soaker tub, multiple vanities, and walk-in closet. There are two more bedrooms, complimented by a charming loft, which could be converted into a 5^th bedroom with only a little rearranging, and there is another full bathroom that comes standard. This come contains 3.5 bathrooms and up to five bedrooms. There is also outdoor livability with a large covered porch with an optional outdoor fireplace, and extended patio. How will you customize your 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. These chic residences (1-4) reflect Cresleigh Ranch’s exuberant spirit, varied architectural traditions, and incomparable landscape. Happy Exploring! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-4/

You are My Sunshine, My Only Sunshine, You Make Me Happy When Skies are Gray!

December 31, 2019 5:13 am

The climate of change that defines turn-of-the-century life is with us to stay. And while change of this magnitude demands greater adaptability and a commitment to lifelong learning, it also promises huge opportunity for those who know where and how to look for it. Vision is the capacity to create and communicate a view of a desired state of affairs that induces commitment among those working in the organization. The origin, process, and conclusion of science is something which exists only in the subjective experience of persons and so also is its utilization. Science will never depersonalize, or manipulate, or control individuals. It is only person who can and will do that. That is surely a most obvious and trite observation, yet a deep realization of it has had much meaning for me. It means that the use which will be made of scientific findings in the field of personality is and will be a matter of subjective personal choice—the same type of choice as a person makes in therapy. To the extent that one has defensively closed off areas of one’s experience from awareness, the person is more likely to make choices which are socially destructive. To the extent that one is open to all phases of one’s experience we may be sure that this person will be more likely to use the findings and methods of science (or any other tool or capacity) in a manner which is personally and socially constructive. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

There is, in actuality then, no threatening entity of “Science” which can in any way affect out destiny. There are only people. While many of them are indeed threatening and dangerous in their defensiveness, and modern scientific knowledge multiplies the social threat and danger, this is not the whole picture. There are two other significant facets. There are many persons who are relatively open to their experience and hence likely to be socially constructive. Both the subjective experience of psychotherapy and the scientific findings regarding it indicate that individuals are motivated to change, and may be helped to change, in the direction of greater openness to experience, and hence in the direction of the behavior which is enhancing of self and society, rather than destructive. Science can never threaten us. Only persons can do that. And while individuals can be vastly destructive with the tools placed in their hands by scientific knowledge, this is only one side of the picture. We already have subjective and objective knowledge of the basic principles by which individuals may achieve the more constructive social behavior which is natural to their organismic process of becoming. What this line of thought has achieved for me is a fresh integration in which the conflict between the “experientialist” and the “scientist” tends to disappear. This particular integration may not be acceptable to others, but it does have meaning to me. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Science, as well as therapy, as well as other aspects of living, is rooted in and based upon the immediate, subjective experience of a person. It springs from the inner, total, organismic experiencing which is only partially and imperfectly communicable. It is one phase of subjective living. It is because I find value and reward in human relationships that I enter into a relationship known as therapeutic, where feelings and cognition merge into one unitary experience which is lived rather than examined, in which awareness is non-reflective, and where I am participant rather than observer. However, because I am curious about the exquisite orderliness which appears to exist in the Universe and in this relationship I can abstract myself from the experience and look upon it as an observer, making myself and/or others the object of that observation. As observer I used all of the hunches which grow out of the living experience. To avoid deceiving myself as observer, to gain a more accurate picture of the order which exists, I make use of all the canons of science. Science is not an impersonal something, but simply a person living subjectively another phase of oneself. A deeper understanding of therapy (or of any other problem) may come from living it, or from observing it in accordance with the rules of science, or from the communication within the self between the two types of experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

As to the subjective experience of choice, it is not only primary in therapy, but it is also primary in the use of scientific method by a person. What I will do with the knowledge gained through scientific method—whether I will use it to understand, enhance, enrich, or use it to control, manipulate and destroy—is a matter of subjective choice dependent upon the values which have personal meaning for me. If, out of fright and defensiveness, I block out from my awareness large areas of experience—if I can see only those facts which support my present beliefs, and am blind to all others—if I can see only the objective aspect of life, and cannot perceive the subjective—if in any way I cut off my perception from the full range of its actual sensitivity—then I am likely to be socially destructive, whether I use as tool the knowledge and instruments of science, or the power and emotional strength of subjective relationship. And on the other hand if I am open to my experience, and can permit all of the sensing of my awareness, than I am likely to use myself, my subjective experience, and my scientific knowledge, in ways which are realistically constructive. This then is the degree of integration I have currently been able to achieve between two approaches first experienced as conflicting. It does not completely resolve all the issues posed, but it seems to point toward a resolution. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

It rewriters the problem or reperceives the issue, by putting the subjective, existential person, with the values which one holds, at the foundation and the root of the therapeutic relationship and of the scientific relationship. For science too, at its inception, is an “I-Thou” relationship with person or persons. And only as subjective person can I enter into either of these relationships. The fear of success results from fear of the begrudging envy of others and this of the loss of their affection. Sometimes it is a conscious fear. A gifted writer among my patients renounced writing altogether because her mother began to write and proved to be successful. When after a long period she took it up again, hesitantly and apprehensively, she was afraid not of writing poorly but of writing too well. This woman was for a long time incapable of doing anything at all, the main reason being her excessive fear that others would begrudge her everything; instead she put all her energy into the task of making people like her. The fear may appear also as a mere vague apprehension that one would lose friends if one were to have any success. In this fear, however, as in so many others, the neurotic person is more often away not of one’s fear but only of the resulting inhibitions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

When such a person plays tennis, for example, one my feel when one is close to victory that something holds one back and makes it impossible for one to win. Or one may forget to keep an appointment of decisive importance of one’s future. If one has something pertinent to contribute to a discussion or conversation one may speak in so low a voice, or in such condensed expression, that one will fail to make any impression. Or one will let others have the acclaim for work one has accomplished. One may observe that with some persons one can talk intelligently, while with others one is stupid; that with some one can play an instrument in a masterly fashion while with others one plays like a beginner. Although one feels bewildered by such an uneven state of affairs one is unable to change it. It is only when one has gained insight into one’s tendency to recoil that one will discover that when talking to a person less intelligent than oneself one compulsively has to act still less intelligent; or that when playing with a poor musician one has to play still worse, drive by a fear that by excelling one would hurt and humiliate the other. Finally, if one does have a success one is not only unable to enjoy it, but does not even fell it as one’s own experience. Or one will diminish it by attributing it to some fortuitous circumstances or to some insignificant stimulation or help from outside. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

After a success, however, one is likely to feel depressed, partly because of this fear, but also because of an unrecognized disappointment brought about by the fact that the actual success always remains far being one’s secret excessive expectations. Thus the conflict situation of the neurotic person derives from a frantic and compulsive wish to be the first in the race, and at the same time an equally great compulsion to check oneself as soon as one gets well started or makes any progress. If one has done something successfully, one is bound to do it poorly the next time. A good lesson is followed by a bad lesson, an improvement during treatment by a relapse, a good impression on people by a bad one. This sequence keeps recurring and gives one the feeling that one is waging a hopeless fight against overwhelming odds. One is like Penelope, who unraveled every night what she had woven during the day. Thus inhibitions may set in at each step of the way: the neurotic may repress one’s ambitious wishes so completely that one does not even attempt a piece of work; one may try to do something but be unable to concentrate or carry it through; one may do excellent work but shrink from any evidence of success; and finally one may reach outstanding success and be unable to appreciate it or even feel it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

If you come to comfort the disturbed, you will surely disturb the comfortable. “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through the righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord,” reports Romans 5.20-21. A study of the grace of God is a study in contrast, a contrast between the desperate plight of humankind and the abundant and gracious remedy God has provided for us through Christ Jesus. This contrast is beautifully described in the words f an old hymn: Guilty, vile and helpless we, spotless Lamb of God was He; full atonement! Can it be? Hallelujah, what a Savior! We already know that all of us are indeed guilty, vile, and helpless. We recognized that all of us are equally in need of the grace of God. When an engaged couple goes into a jewelry store to shop for that special diamond, the jeweler will often se a dark velvet-covered pad on one’s counter, then carefully lay each diamond on the pad. The contrast of the dark velvet provides the background that enhances the sparkle and beauty of each diamond. Our sinful condition hardly qualifies as a velvet pad, but against the dark background of guilt and moral pollution, God’s grace in salvation sparkles like a beautiful, clear, and flawless diamond. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The apostle Paul used a contrasting background when he described God’s gracious remedy for our ruin in a series of Scriptures I like to call God’s wonderful contractions. Having painted the dark background of our ruin, Paul proceeds to set before us the clear, sparkling diamond of God’s remedy. Notice how be begins: But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. We are all found to be in a state of ruin, but now God has provided a remedy: a righteousness is said to be apart from law, that is, apart from any consideration of how well or not so well we have obeyed the law of God. Under God’s grace, the extent or quality of our law-keeping is not an issue. Instead, those who have faith in Jesus Christ are justified freely by his grace. To be justified means more than to be declared not guilty. It actually means to be declared righteous before God. It means God has imputed or charged the guilt of our sins to His Son, Jesus Christ, and has imputed or credited Christ’s righteousness to us. Not, however, that we are justified by His grace. It is because of God’s grace we are declared righteous before Him. We are all guilty before God—condemned, vile, and helpless. We had no claim on God; the disposition of our case was wholly up to Him. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

God could with total justice have pronounced us all guilty, for that is what we were, and consigned us all to eternal damnation. That is what He dd to the Angels who sinned (see 2 Peter 2.4), and God could have with perfect justice done the same to us. God owed us nothing; we owed Him everything. However, because of God’s grace, God did not cosign us all to hell; instead, He provided a remedy for us through Jesus Christ. “God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood,” reports Romans 3.25. What is a sacrifice of atonement? When God turns aside his wrath, taking away sin. The meaning of Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, then, is that Jesus by His death turned aside the wrath of God from us by takin it upon Himself. As He hung on the cross, He bore our sins in His body and endured the full force of God’s wrath in our place. “He himself bore of sins in His body,” and suffered, “the righteous for unrighteous” reports 1 Peter 2.24, 3.18. By His death Jesus completely satisfied the justice of God, which required eternal death as the penalty for sin. It is not so much that we are afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it is that place in between that we fear. A vision without a plan is only a dream. The outer wall of the soul is perhaps like a permeable membrane in a biological organism, which is designed to allow passage of some but not all foreign objects. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

When the wall of the soul is broken, individuals are at the mercy of forces they cannot handle. The soul can be sustained intact and can function as it is supposed to only in keeping of God. “Behold, all souls are Mine,” reports Ezekiel 18.4. Our actions always arise out of the interplay of the universal factors in human life: spirit, mind, body, social context, and soul. Action never comes from the movement of the will alone. Often—perhaps usually—what we do is not an outcome of deliberate choice and a mere act of will, but is more of a relenting to pressure on the will from one or more of the dimensions of the self. The understanding of this is necessary for the understanding and practice of spiritual formation, which is bound to fail if it focuses upon the will alone. The inadequacy of good intentions alone to ensure proper action is marked by Jesus’ words: “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” If the six dimensions, infinite environment, soul, social, body, mind, and spirit, are properly aligned with God and what is good—and therefore with each other—that mere relenting will be good, and our actions will simply be the good fruit of the good tree. If they are not so aligned, they will be the inevitable bad fruit of the bad tree. If they are not so aligned, they will be the inevitable bad fruit of the bad tree. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

We must clearly understand that there is a rigorous consistency in the human self and its actions. This is one of those things we are most inclined to deceive ourselves about. If I do evil, I am the kind of person who does evil; if I do good, I am the kind of person who does good. Actions are not impositions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities is supervises and interacts with. Today one of the most common rationalizations of sin or folly is, “Oh, I just blew it.” While there is some point to such a remark, it is not the one those who use it hope for. It does not exonerate them. While it may be true that there are other circumstances in which I would not have done the foolish or sinful thing I did, and while what I did may not represent me fully, “blowing it” does not represent me fully. I am the kind of person who “blows it.” “Blowing it” shows who I am as a person. I am, through and through, in my deepest self, the kind of person who “blows it”—hardly a lovely and promising thing to be. Whatever my action is comes out of my whole person. The will or spirit, tiny power that it is, is very largely at the mercy of the forces playing upon it from the larger self and beyond. The God-intended function of the will is to reach out to God in trust. By standing in the correct relation to God through our will we can receive grace that will properly reorder the soul along with the other five components of the self. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

In the life away from God, the order of dominance is: body, soul, mind (thought/feeling), spirit, and God. This is the order in idolatry of all kinds, including that of those who worship “The Good Life,” as it is often called. There are two Gods. There is the God that people generally believe in—A God who has to serve them (sometimes in very refined ways, say by merely giving them peace of mind). This God does not exist. However, the God whom people forget—the God whom we all have to serve—exists, and is the prime cause of our existence and of all that we perceive. In the life under God, by contrast, the order of dominance is: God, spirit, mind (thought/feeling), soul, body. Here the body serves the soul; the soul, the mind, the spirit; and the spirit, God. Conversely, the life from above flows from God throughout the whole person, including the body and its social context. For those who are according to [that is, who live life in terms of] the flesh [the natural human powers only] set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

When the proper ordering of the human system under God is complete—which no doubt will never fully occur in this life because of the social dimension of the self and our finitude and the total spiritual environment surrounding us—then we have people who love God with all their heart, and with all their soul, and with all their strength, and with all their mind; and their neighbor as themselves. When we are like this, our whole life is an eternal one. Everything we do counts for eternity and is preserved there. The spirit must first come alive to and through God, of course. Otherwise we remain dead to him in trespasses and sins. However, once the spirit comes alive in God, the lengthy process of subduing all aspects of the self under God can begin. This is the process of spiritual formation viewed in its entirety. Spiritual transformation only happens as each essential dimension of the human being is transformed to Christlikeness under the direction of a regenerate will interacting with constant overtures of grace from God. Such transformation is not the result of mere human effort and cannot be accomplished by putting pressure on the will (heart, spirit) alone. In spite of all the misuses to which the word love is subjected, in literature and daily life, it has not lost its emotional power. It elicits a feeling of warmth, of passion, of happiness, of fulfilment, whenever it is used. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

The word love brings to mind past or present or anticipated occasion of loving or being loved. Its root meaning, therefore, sees to be an emotional state which like all emotions cannot be defined, but which must be described in its qualities and expressions and is not a matter of intention or demand but of happening or gift. If this were so, love could be kept within the sphere of affections, and it could be discussed as one affection among others. In considering the significance of love, when we consider the nature of the divine substance and about the many ways in which humans participate in it, we must reflect on human’s intellectual love towards God as the love with which God love himself. In other words, love is elevated out of emotional into the ontological realm. And it is well-known that from Empedocles and Plato to Augustine and Pico, to Hegel and Schelling, to Existentialism and depth psychology, love has played a central ontological role. There is another interpretation of love which is neither emotional nor ontological but ethical. In one of the determining documents of Judaism, Christianity and all the New World, the word love is combined with the imperative “thou shalt.” The Great Commandment demands of everyone the total love of God and the love of one’s neighbour according to the measures of human’s natural self-affirmation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

If love is emotion, how can it be demanded? Emotions cannot be demanded. We cannot demand them of ourselves. If we try, something artificial is produced which shows the traits of what had to be suppressed in its production. Repentance, intentionally produced, hides self-complacency in perversion. Love, intentionally produced, show indifference or hostility in perversion. This means: love as an emotion cannot be commanded. Either love is something other than emotion or the Great Commandment is meaningless. There must be something at the basis of love as emotion which justifies both its ethical and its ontological interpretation. And it may well be that the ethical nature of love is dependent on its ontological nature, and that the ontological nature of love gets its qualifications by its ethical character. However, if all this is valid—and we shall try to show that it is valid—the question arises as to how these interpretations of love are related to the fact that love appears in the shape of the most passionate of emotions. Beautiful Christlike love does not just happen! It comes from the inner resolve of a person who has determined to live under the authority of God’s directive regarding how a Godly being must love one’s spouse—as it is spelled out in Ephesians 5. Thy are directives every Christian being out to be familiar with, must understand, and, I think, even commit to memory. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

To examine the Godly being’s responsibility, we must fix in our minds the grand truth at the end of Ephesians 5, verse 31, where Paul quotes Genesis 2.24: when a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, “the two will become one flesh.” He then adds in verse 32, “There is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.” There is an astounding unity in marriage! The assertion that men and women become “one flesh” indicates something of the psycho-spiritual depth of marriage—an exchange of soul. Marriage ideally produces two people who are as much the same person as two people can be! Christians in marriage have the same Lord, the same family, the same children, the same future, and the same ultimate destiny—an astounding unity. An amazing bounding took place the moment I saw my new born children and held them in my arms. They are from my flesh. I am close to my children, interwoven with them. Yet, I am no one flesh with them. I am one flesh only with my wife. This, in my opinion, is why mature couples possessing extraordinarily different appearances yet often look so much alike—they are “one flesh.” There has been an exchange of soul—a mutual appropriation of each other’s lives. This is, indeed, a mystery—which partially illustrates the even deeper marital union of Christ and Church. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

We must keep the mysterious nature of our union constantly before us if we are to understand the disciplines of marital love as they unfold—the discipline of sacrificial love, of sanctifying love, of self love. “And they did land upon the shore of the promised land. And when they had set their feet upon the shores of the promised land they bowed themselves down upon the face of the land, and did humble themselves before the Lord, and did shed tears of joy before the Lord, and because of the multitude of his tender mercies over them. And it came to pass that they went forth upon the face of the land, and began to till the Earth,” reports Ether 6.12-13. May forgiveness, O Lord, we beseech Thee, proceed from the Most High. May it succour us in our misery; may in cleanse us from our offenses; may it be granted to penitents; may it plead for mourners; may it bring back those who wander from the faith; may it raise up those who are fallen into sins; may it reconcile us to the Father; may it confirm us with the grace of Christ; may it conform us to the Holy Spirit. Thou incomprehensible but prayer-hearing God, know, but beyond knowledge, revealed, but unrevealed, my wants and welfare draw me to thee, for thou hast never said, “Seek ye me in vain.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

To thee, great God, I come in my difficulties, necessities, distresses; possess me with thyself, with a spirit of grace and supplication, with a prayerful attitude of mind, with access into warmth of fellowship, so that in the ordinary concerns of life my thoughts and desires may rise to thee, and in habitual devotion I may find a resource that will soothe my sorrows, sanctify my successes, and qualify me in all ways for dealing with my fellow beings. I bless thee that thou hast made me capable of knowing thee, the author of all being, of resembling thee, the perfection of all excellency, of enjoying thee, the source of all happiness. O God, attend me in every part of my arduous and trying pilgrimage; I need the same counsel, defence, comfort I found at my beginning. Let my religion be more obvious to my conscience, more perceptible to those around. While Jesus is representing me in Heaven, may I reflect Him on Earth, while He pleads my cause, may I show forth His praise. Continue the gentleness of thy goodness towards me, and whether I wake or sleep, let thy presence go with me, thy blessing attend me. Thou has led me on and I have found thy promises true, I have been sorrowful, but thou hast been my help, fearful, but thou hast delivered me, despairing, but thou hast lifted me up. Thy vows are ever upon me, and I praise thee, O God. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse. The symmetry and grace of this residence 3 Farmhouse is captured in this design. The two private patios and backyard provides plenty of room for outdoor activities. Inside, the kitchen with center island work counter opens to the dining room, and great room. There is also a flex space and an optional doubled sided fireplace, which opens up to what can be a fourth bedroom, a den, office, library, or sewing room. The heavenly master suite officers a walk-in closet and abundant linen storage. A corner deep soaking bath tub and glass-enclosed shower highlight the bathroom.

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. The master suite in #MillsStation Residence 3 is heavenly! Get a full spa experience—right in your own home. 🧖‍♀️🧖‍♂️ Watch the full walkthrough on our IGTV. How would you customize your #CresleighRanch home? https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-3/

Please Plant this Heart of Mine Underneath the Lonesome Pine on the Hill When it is Twilight on the Trail!

December 29, 2019 4:51 am

Almost one hundred years ago, in October and November of 1929, the stock market crashed and the World entered the Great Depression. The Roaring Twenties came to an end. Wealthy people everywhere lost their fortunes. Multimillionaires jumped out of windows. My grandparents told me they even cut back on eating meat. So, why does Paul in the Bible attack conformism? Why does he not call the Christian the perfectly adjusted being? Why does he not describe the Christian way as the way to a complete acceptance of the moral and religious standards of society? His thought is far from this, and according to the certain criteria of adjustment, certainly he could not have been called a good educator. However, he knew why he rejected conformism. He knew that all conformism is a state of being conformed to this eon. So let us try to understand the meaning of this strange assertion. This eon means the state of things in which we are living, which is, according to Paul, a state of corruption. Being conformed to it, therefore, means to participate in its corruptedness. Where there is conformism there is acceptance of corruption, subject to the present questionable state of things. In our English Bibles, the Greek word for eon is translated “World.” This is somehow misleading. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

When we speak of World we think of the Universe. However, the Universe, including our Earth and everything in it, is the product of incessant divine creativity here and now. It is good in its created form, and it is the place to which the kingdom of God shall come, as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. It is one of those most dangerous misunderstandings of the Christian message to deny this World and its created glory, and to direct our eyes to a Superworld, unrelated to the original creation. The Bible speak of a new Heaven and a New Earth in contrast to the Old Heaven and the Old Earth. And now we understand what Paul means when he speaks of conformity to this eon: he means the untransformed Old Earth and the untransformed Old Heaven. He means the corrupted state of the Universe, and especially of our Universe—the Universe of beings—when he warns us not to become conformed to it. The attitude towards this eon, toward ourselves, and towards our World that the apostle demands is threefold: judgment, resistance, and transformation. However, one may ask—must I judge, must I resist, must I transform everything I encounter? Ought we not to adjust to that which is borne out of the wisdom of the ages, bestowed upon us by the generations before us through their experience and insights? #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Could one not say—be conformed to what has been proved to be good and noble and in conformity with the spirit of love? We must ask this question with great seriousness and self-criticism. However, we must not forget that we are living in this eon, under the control of its forms and ways, where the uncorrupted is mixed with corruption, and the acceptable with the unacceptable, and good with evil. This is what makes conformity so dangerous. If the corruption of this eon were obvious, very few would be tempted to be conformed to it. Not many people, in reality or in literature, make a pact with the devil. However, there are many who are lured by elements of goodness, indeed of real goodness, into a pact with this eon, into the state of being conformed to it. And certainly, there are strong arguments for accepting conformity. We all are conformed to the family into which we are born whether we want to be or not. Shall we try to be non-conformists in our family because conformism would mean adjustment to this eon, to the corrupted state of things? Would that not bring much suffering to the other members of the family, and deprive us of the many blessings that an intimate and ordered family life can provide? How can the commandment to honor father and mother be combined with the warning of the apostle not to be conformed to this eon? #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Jesus says—“I have come to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. One who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and one who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me,” reports Matthew 10.35-37. There are the most radical statements of non-conformity. And even Paul’s radicalism sounds conservative in comparison with them. It is astonishing that a faith based on words like these has been used throughout its history as a most successful instrument of conformity inside and outside family relations. How did this happen? Why is it the predominant attitude within Western culture even today, in spite of all the forces of disintegration? It is because it is infinitely difficult to find the point where the state of being conformed contradicts love as it is manifest in the Christ. It would be easy to notice the point where separation becomes unavoidable, if our family, as often was the case in early Christianity, tried to make us reject the Christ and what he stands for. However, this is not so today. Instead of it, the question of conforming or not conforming arises in innumerable small moments of our daily life. And in each moment, our answer is a risk, burdened with struggles within our own conscience. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

We do not know with certainty whether our non-conformity is based on a wrong conformity to ourselves or whether it is our awareness of corruption that drives us to non-conformity. And we do not know with certainty whether our non-resistance is based on a wrong surrender or whether it is an element of love and wisdom that keeps us conformed to the family group. We do not know these things with certainty, and we can act only at the risk of being wrong. However, act we must. Most people try to avoid the risk by being conformed to the state of things into which they have been thrown by destiny. However, those who have transformed our World risked wrong decisions. And the greater beings they were, the more conscious were they of the risk. They did not cease to doubt in spite of the depth and the passion of their faith. For when they refused to be conformed to themselves, but were renewed in their own being and could thus renew other things. And precisely for this reason they never became self-assured—they took upon themselves the risk of not being conformed and the anxiety and doubt and glory of this risk. Paul demands this of every Christian. Every Christian must be strong enough to risk non-conformity, even in the radical sense that Jesus describes with respect to one’s family. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

The situation in the family is an example, and more than an example. For all conformity is rooted in it. And resistance to conformity is first of all resistance to the family. However, there are other larger groups in which we breathe the air of conformity day and night, and where the resistance is sometimes easier, yet often more difficult, than in the family. I am thinking of educational, social, political, and religious groups. Let us look at each of them in the light of the apostolic word. It seems that an educational group is least exposed to conformity. Those who are learning are usually more inclined to resist than to accept their teachers and what they are taught by them. And the teachers are chosen on the basis of the independence of their judgments and the freedom of their scholarly questioning. This seems to make the institutions of higher learning the representative places of non-conformity. I do not think that this is so, however. One needs to ask the students two questions: Do not you often build, out of your resistance to what you are taught, a new conformity of rebellion? And do you resist the group or gang to which you belong as strongly as you resist your teachers, or are you conquered by gang conformity and all the elements of this eon, and the corruption implied in such conformity? How would you answer? #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

As we read some of the passages from the prophets, we might easily imagine that we were reading the reports of eye-witnesses from Warsaw or Hiroshima, Tokyo (2011) Sri Lanka, Berlin, San Francisco (1906), Oakland (1989) on New York (11 September 2001). Isaiah says: “Behold, the Lord maketh the Earth empty and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down and scattereth its inhabitants…Towns fall to pieces; each being bolts one’s door; gladness has gone from the Earth and pleasure is no more. The cities are left desolate; their gates are battered down; and few are left. For Earth has been polluted by the dwellers on its face…breaking the Eternal Covenant. Therefore, a curse is crushing the Earth, and the guilty people must atone.” Every one of these words describes the experience of the peoples of Europe and Asia. The most primitive and most essential foundations of life have been shaken. The destruction is such that we, who have not experienced it, cannot even imagine it. We have not experienced it; we cannot believe that we could be caught in such a destruction and see busses dancing, bridges collapsing, oceans swallowing up 200,000 people and entire cities. And yet, I see American soldiers walking through the ruins of these cities, thinking their own country, and seeing with visionary clarity the doom of its towns and cities. I know that this has happened, and still is happening. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

There are soldiers who have become prophets, and their message is not very different from the message of the ancient Hebrew prophets. It is the message of the shaking of the foundations, and not those of their enemies, but rather those of their own country. For the prophetic spirit has not disappeared from the Earth. Decades before the World wars, people judged the European civilization and prophesied its end in speech and print. There are among us people like these. They are like the refined instruments which register the shaking of the Earth on far-removed sections of its surface. These people register the shaking of their civilization, its self-destructive trends, and its disintegration and fall, decades before the final catastrophe occurs. They have an invisible and almost infallible sensorium in their souls; and they have an irresistible urge to pronounce what they have registered, perhaps against their own wills. For no true prophet has ever prophesied voluntarily. It has been forced upon the by a Divine Voice to which they have not been able to close one’s ears. No being with a prophetic spirit likes to foresee and foreasy the doom of one’s own period. It exposes them to a terrible anxiety within oneself, to serve and often deadly attacks from others, and to the change of pessimism and defeatism on the part of the majority of the people. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

People desire to hear good tidings; and the masses listen to those who bring them. All the prophets of the Old and New Testaments, and others during the history of the Church had the same experiences. They all were contradicted by the false prophets, who announced salvation when there was no salvation. “The prophets prophesy falsely, and my people love to have it so,” cries Jeremiah in despair. They called him a defeatist and accused him of being an enemy of his country. However, is it a sign of patriotism or of confidence in one’s people, its institutions and its way of life, to be silent when the foundations are shaking? Is the expression of optimism, whether or not it is justified, so much more valuable than the expression of truth, even if the truth is deep and dark? Most human beings, of course, are not able to stand the message of the shaking of the foundations. They reject and attack the prophetic minds, not because they really disagree with them, but because they sense the truth of their words and cannot receive it. They repress it in themselves; and they transform it into mockery or fury against those who know and dare to say that which they know. In which of these two groups do you consider yourselves to be? Among those who respond to the prophetic spirit, or among those who close their ears and hearts against it? #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

I have always felt that there might be few who are able to register the shaking of the foundations of the Earth as such, but God Who laid the foundations and would shake them; and that they did not speak of the doom of the nation as such, but of God Who brings doom for the sake of His eternal justice and salvation. As the 102^nd Psalm says: “Thy years are foundations of the Earth, and the Heavens are the work of thy hands. They vanish, but thou shalt endure; they wear out like a robe, thou changest them like garments. However, thou art the same and thy years shall have no end.” When the Earth grows old and wears out, when nations and cultures die, the Eternal changes the garments of God’s infinite being. God is the foundation on which all foundations are laid; and this foundation cannot be shaken. There is something immovable, unchangeable, unshakeable, eternal, which becomes manifest in our passing and in the crumbling of our World. On the boundaries of the finite the infinite becomes visible; in the light of the Eternal the transitoriness of the temporal appears. The Greeks called themselves “the mortals” because they experienced that which is immortal. This is why the prophets were able to face the shaking of the foundations. It is the only way to look at the shaking without recoiling from it. Or is it possible to be conscious of the approaching doom, and yet to regard it with indifference and cynicism? Is it humanly possible to face the end cynically? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

There are certainly some among us who are cynical toward most of that which beings create and praise. There are some among us who are cynical about the present situation of the World and the leaders of the World. We may be cynical, of course, about the true motives behind all human action; we may be cynical about ourselves, our inner growth and our outer achievements. We ay be cynical about religion and about our Churches, their doctrines, their symbols and their representatives. There is scarcely one thing about which we may not be cynical. However, we cannot be cynical about the shaking of the foundations of everything! I have never encountered anyone who seriously was cynical about that. I have seen much cynicism, particularly among the younger people in Europe before the war. However, I know from abundant witness that this cynicism vanished when the foundations of the World began to shake at the beginning of the European catastrophe. We can be cynical about the end only so long as we do not have to see it, only so long as we feel safety in the place in which our cynicism can be exercised. However, if the foundations of this place and all places begin to crumble, cynicism itself crumbles with them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

And only two alternatives remain—despair, which is the certainty of eternal destruction, or faith, which is the certainty of eternal salvation. “The World itself shall crumble, but my salvation knows no end,” says the Lord. This is the alternative for which the prophets stood. This is what we should call religion, or more precisely, the religious ground for all religion. How could the prophets speak as they did? How could they paint these most terrible pictures of doom and destruction without cynicism or despair? It was because, beyond the sphere of destruction, they saw the sphere of salvation; because, in the doom of the temporal, they saw the manifestation of the Eternal. It was because they saw the manifestation of the Eternal. It was because they were certain that they belonged within the two spheres, the changeable and the unchangeable, bot bound within it alone, can face the end. All others compelled to escape, to turn away. How much of our lives consist in nothing but attempts to look away from the end! We often succeed in forgetting the end. However, ultimately we fail; for we always carry the end with us in our bodies and our souls. And often whole nations and cultures succeed in forgetting the end. However, ultimately they fail too, for in their lives and growth they always carry the end with them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Often the whole Earth succeeds in making its creatures forget its end, but sometimes these creatures feel that their Earth is beginning to grow old, and that its foundations are beginning to shake. For the Earth always carries its ends within it. We happen to live in a time when very few of us, very few nations, very few sections of the Earth, will succeed in forgetting the end. For in these days the foundations of the Earth do shake. May we not turn our eyes away; may we not close our ears and our mouths! However, may we rather see, through the crumbling of a World, the rock of eternity and the salvation which as no end! Music, the greatest good that mortals know, and all of Heaven we have below. “And in the mouth of three witnesses shall these things be established; and the testimony of three, and this work, in the which shall be shown forth the power of God and also his word, of which the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost bear record—and all this shall stand as a testimony against the World at the last day. And if it so be that they repent and come unto the Father in the name of Jesus, they shall be received into the kingdom of God. And now, if I have no authority for these things, judge ye’ for ye shall know that I have authority when ye shall see me, and we shall stand before God at the last day. Amen,” reports Ether 5.4-6. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Receive my confession, O my only Hope of Salvation, Jesus Christ, my Lord and God. For in the mortal World I am lost, and altogether in thought, word, and deed, and in all evils, I am overwhelmed. Thou Who justifiest the ungodly and quickenest the dead, Lord my God, justify me and revive me. Save me, O Lord, King of eternal glory, Who canst save. Grant me to will and to do, and to accomplish, what is pleasing to Thee, and profitable to myself; give me assistance in distress, consolation in persecution, and strength in all temptation; vouchsafe me pardon for past evils, amendment of present evils, and be pleased to send me protection against evils to come. Thine it is to give the sinner a stricken heart and a fountain of tears. It is mine, if Thou shalt vouchsafe it, to weep for my sins; it is Thine to efface them speedily, as a cloud. I beseech Thee, O Lord, to forget my sins, and to remember Thy mercies. O Christ, spare me, pity me, not according to Thy word, that I may live, and not be disappointed of my hope. Give me a fountain of tears, O Fountain of life. My hope of salvation is in no works of mine; but my soul hangs simply on the boundlessness of Thy love, and confides in the multitude of Thy mercy. Hear our Prayer, O Lord, and listen to our groanings, for we acknowledge our iniquities, and lay open our sins before Thee. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Against Thee, O God, have we sinned; to Thee we make our confession, and implore forgiveness. Turn Thy face again, O Lord, upon Thy servants whom Thou hast redeemed with Thine own Blood. Spare us, we pray Thee, and vouchsafe pardon to our sins, and be pleased to extend to us Thy loving-kindness and Thy mercy. Thou eternal God, thine is surpassing greatness, unspeakable goodness, super-abundant grace; I can as soon count the sands of ocean’s ‘lip’ as number thy favours towards me; I know but a part, but that part exceeds all praise. I thank thee for personal mercies, a measure of health, preservation of body, comforts of house and home, sufficiency of food and clothing, continuance of mental powers, my family, their mutual help and support, the delights of domestic harmony and peace, the seats now filled that might have been vacant, my country, church Bible, faith. However, O, how I mourn my sin, ingratitude, vileness, the days that to my guilt, the scenes that witness my offending tongue; all things in Heaven, Earth, around, within, without, condemn me—the Sun which sees my misdeeds, the darkness which is light to thee, the cruel accuser who justly charges me, the good Angels who have been provoked to leave me, thy countenance which scans my secret sins, thy righteous law, thy holy word, my sin-soiled conscience, my private and public life, my neighbours, myself—all write dark things against me. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

I deny them not, frame no excuse, but confess, Father, I have sinned; yet still I live, and fly repenting to thy outstretched arms; thou wilt not cast me off, for Jesus brings me near, thou wilt not cast me off, for Jesus brings me near, thou wilt not condemn me, for he died in my stead, thou wilt not mark my mountains of sin, for he levelled all, and his beauty covers my deformities. O my God, I bid farewell to sin by clinging to his cross, hiding in his wounds, and sheltering in his side. O Good Jesus, Who didst enable Lazarus at the sound of Thy voice to rise from the tomb, grant us to hear Thy voice in our souls, and to rise through grace from the depth of our own sin. Cleanse, O Lord, our consciences by the sincere confession of the Catholic Faith, and by continual contrition of heart; that we may always be heard by Thee in Heaven, when we call to Thee for pardon of sins on Earth! Let us live then and be glad, while young life is before us. “Though I speak with the tongues of humans and of Angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal,” reports 1 Corinthians 13.1. “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand,” reports St. Mark 3.25. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard! I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. Our country is the World; our country people are all humankind. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Coming Soon!

Cresleigh Meadowsis coming soon! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.

Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/

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

December 28, 2019 4:27 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the low $400’s

Now Selling!

Exemplified in the charm of this house Cresleigh Home is a design reminiscent of early America. The architecture is complimented by stucco and wood siding, which gives this classic Folk-Style Farmhouse the double advantage of good looks and a hardworking, vital floor plan. Note the covered porch provides shelter to the front door. The entry opens the way to causal gatherings. There is that is located right off the entry way, a great room with a fireplace, dining room, and an amazing kitchen, with a butler’s pantry, is handy for both living areas. Residence four is the largest home offered in Cresleigh Riverside.

This two-story, 3,489 square foot home features four bedrooms, including one lavishly appointed suite on the first floor, three- and one-half bathroom, and a true three-car garage. Upstairs, the plan is flexible as they come: four bedrooms, and a loft. The bedrooms could easily be a study or playroom, a sewing room, home office, library, or even a gym. Special amenities make this home a stand-out from others in its class, and will suit your family and lifestyle. You will love the sliding glass doors to the back yard, and the wealth of closets and storage space. Our Plumas Ranch homes are now selling! Not only will you own a beautiful home, you’ll live near this beautiful park, too! 🌳

If you’re interested in learning about the pricing for our #Riverside, #Meadows, or #Bluffs neighborhood, sign up for our interest list or call to learn more about pricing: https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/

#CresleighHomes

There I Will be Just to Make Sure You Keep Your Heart Alone and Fancy and Free—No One Else Can Have it!

December 27, 2019 3:10 am

The World we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking. Experience has shown each one of us that reality is very easily able to deceive ourselves to believe something which later experience shows us is not so. How can I tell whether this tentative belief has some real relationship to observed facts? I can use, not one line of evidence only, but several. I can surround my observation of the facts with various precautions to make sure I am not deceiving myself. I can consult with others who have also been concerned with avoiding self-deception, and learn useful ways of catching myself in unwarranted beliefs, based on misinterpretations of observations. I can, in short, begin to use all the elaborate methodology which science has accumulated. I discover that stating my hypothesis in operational terms will avoid my blind alley and false conclusions. If, as a scientist, I like the way I have gone about my investigation, if I have been open to all the evidence, if I have selected and sued intelligently all the precautions against self-deception which I have been able to assimilate from others or to devise myself, then I will give my tentative belief to the findings which have emerged. I will regard them as a springboard for further investigation and further seeking. It has been suggested that one can rely upon one’s audience to accept minor cues as a sign of something important about one’s performance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

If in the last few years, you have not discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse, you may need to be give the kiss of life. Feedback is a convenient fact that has an inconvenient implication. By virtue of the same sign-accepting tendency, the audience may misunderstand the meaning that a cue was designed to convey, or may read an embarrassing meaning into gestures or events that were accidental, inadvertent, or incidental and not meant by the performer to carry any meaning whatsoever. In response to these communication contingencies, performers commonly attempt to exert a kind of synecdochic responsibility, making sure that as many as possible of the minor events in the performance, however instrumentally inconsequential these events may be, will occur in such a way as to convey either no impression or an impression that is compatible and consistent with the over-all definition of the situation that is being fostered. When the audience is known to be secretly skeptical of the reality that is being impressed upon them, we have been ready to appreciate their tendency to pounce on trifling flows as a sign life we have been less ready to appreciate that even sympathetic audiences can be momentarily disturbed, shocked, and weakened in their faith by the discover of a picayune discrepancy in the impressions presented to them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Some of these minor accidents and unmeant gestures happen to be so aptly designed to give an impression that contradict the one fostered by the performer that the audience cannot help but be startled from a proper degree of involvement in the interaction, even though the audience may realize that in the last analysis the discordant event is really meaningless and ought to be completely overlooked. The crucial point is not that the fleeting definition of the situation caused by an unmeant gesture is itself so blameworthy but rather merely that it is different from the definition officially projected. This difference forces an acutely embarrassing wedge between the official projection and reality, for it is part of the official projection that it is the only possible one under the circumstances. Perhaps, then, we should not analyze performances in terms of mechanical standards, by which a large gain can offset a small loss, or a large weight a smaller one. Artistic imagery would be more accurate, for it prepares us for the fact that a single note off key can disrupt the tone of an entire performance. You are what you are and where you are because of what has gone into your mind; you change what you are and where you are by changing what goes into your mind. To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

In regard to the findings of science, the subjective foundation is well shown in the fact that at times the scientist may refuse to believe one’s own findings. “The experiment showed thus and so, but I believe it is wrong,” is a theme which every scientist has experiences at some time or other. Some very fruitful discoveries have grown out of the persistent disbelief, by a scientist, in one’s own findings and those of others. In the last analysis one may place more trust in one’s total organismic reactions than in the methods of science. There is no doubt that this can result in serious error as well as in scientific discoveries, but it indicates again the leading place of the subjective in the use of science. Wading along a coral reef in the Caribbean this morning, I saw a large blue fish—I think. If you, quite independently, saw it too, then I feel more confident in my own observation. This is what is known as intersubjective verification, and it plays an important part in our understanding of science. If I take you (whether in conversation or in print or behaviorally) through the steps I have taken in an investigation, and it seems to you too that I have not deceived myself, and that I have indeed come across a new relationship which is relevant to my values, and that I am justified in having a tentative faith in this relationship, then we have the beginnings of Science with a capital S. It is at this point that we are likely to think we have created a body of scientific knowledge. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Actually there is there is no such body of knowledge. There are only tentative beliefs, existing subjectively, in a number of different persons. If these beliefs are not tentative, then what exists are strict and rigid doctrines, not science. If on the other hand, no one but the investigator believes the finding then this finding is either a personal and deviant matter, an instance of pathology, or else it is an unusual truth discovered by a genius, which as yet no one is subjectively ready to believe. When one repeats oneself in a redundant way, one is revealing one’s desire to be seen as a member of some group. However, others may not care. Reflections and interpretations may be experienced by other individuals as expressions of the message, “I do not really care about you, I care about my expense, or my comfort, or the rightness of my theories or reflections or interpretations.” Or, these same reflections and interpretations, whether awkward or apt, may be heard as repetitions of, “I wan you to be healthier, I want to help you, I am trying to be helpful.” I believe that trust and hope are not contributors to healing. Rather, they are the experienced aspect of a total organismic healing, or reintegration process. Trust and hope are indications that the healing or reintegration or transcendence process has been set in motion. Trust and hope do not cause healing. They are healing. We can look at healing from various perspectives. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

From a psychological standpoint, healing appears as a state of trust and hope. At a physiological level, it is revealed as changes in white-cell count or in some endocrinological changes. At a behavioral level, healing is manifested in growing vigor and relevance of responding. Continued distrust and hopelessness in a patient undergoing any kind of therapy may be regarded as indications that the disintegration process is unremitting. The patient’s acquiescence to determiners of one’s existence is persisting and may culminate in death or total withdrawal into psychosis. Anything a therapist does which invites an unwell person to trust, to be self-revealing, and to have hope that a better life is possible is therapeutic. The onset of these psychological states signifies that the healing process or desirable personality reorganization has already begun. For people in the healing, the helping, and the teaching professions, here is something most neglect. The most valuable experience I have had finding opportunities to grow and to have my growth confirmed, beyond training, that has maintained my growth edge, is contact with colleagues who are of goodwill and before whom I have not be afraid to be myself; that is, be like a patient, a pupil, a teacher, or a groping, bungling, well-intentioned person trying to make sense of what one is doing and wanting to benefit from somebody else’s experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

Out of informal friendships and informal workshop meetings, more formal workshops such as those held by the American Academy of Psychotherapist evolved. At Academy workshops 50 or 75 therapists spend five days and nights, at each other—liking one another, hating one another, and sharing with one another what we do, what we do not do, why do we do it, and so on. If they do not have of this sort available to them, I think therapists stultify. If such are not available, then a therapist has to find someone one can trust, to tangle with, in order to avoid becoming smug, pompous, rude, and convinced that one has “the word.” One of the greatest dangers of being a teacher, a psychotherapist, a nurse, a minister, or anybody else involved in trying to help others change is the delusion that one “has made it,” that all-American fantasy. There is no one like a self-disclosing colleague to prod one out of such smug pomposity, and invite one back to the task. Change is an inevitable journey. All things are constantly changing, transforming, becoming, something different. Guiding change so that it is successful is what leadership is all about. Indeed, the measure of a leader may well be one’s capacity to understand and deal successfully with change—to stimulate it, shape it, guide it, manage it, and keep it going in the right direction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. Seek the rapids, not the calm of the lake. Take the calm to reflect and prepare for the rapids. If we face permanent white water, we will see the need for and experience change. People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those of us who are doing it. Americans always do the right thing after they try everything else first. When there is a discrepancy between an individual’s actual social identity and one’s virtual one, it is possible for this fact to be known to us before we normal contact one, or to be quite evident when one presents oneself before us. One is a discredited person, and it is mainly one I have been dealing with until now. As suggested, we are likely to give no open recognition to what is discrediting one, and while this work of careful disattention is being done, the situation can become tense, uncertain, and ambiguous for all participants, especially the stigmatized one. The cooperation of a stigmatized person with normal in acting as if one’s known differentness were irrelevant and not attended to is one main possibility in the life of such a person. However, when one is differentness is not immediately apparent, and is not known beforehand (or at least known by one to be known to others), when in fact one’s is a discreditable, and not a discredited, person, then the second main possibility in one’s life is to be found. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The issue is not that of managing tension generated during social contacts, but rather that of managing information about one’s failing. To display or not to display; to tell or not to tell; to let on or not to let on; to lie or not to lie; and in each case, to whom, how, when, and where. For example, while the mental patient is in the hospital, and when one is with adult members of one’s own family, one is faced with being treated as insane, when one knows this is not just. However, for the ex-mental patient the problem can be quite different; it is not that one must face prejudice against oneself, but rather that one must face unwitting acceptance of oneself of individuals who are prejudiced against persons of the kind one can be revealed to be. Wherever one goes one’s behavior will falsely confirm for the other that they are in the company of what in effect they demand but may discover they have not obtained, namely, a mentally untainted person like themselves. By intention or in effect the ex-mental patient conceals information about one’s real social identity, receiving and accepting treatment based on false suppositions concerning oneself. It is this second general issues, the management of undisclosed discrediting information about self, that I am focusing on in these notes, in brief, “passing.” He concealment of creditable facts—reverse passing—of course occurs, but is not relevant here. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

There are many other examples. Sometimes only a change of viewpoint is needed to convert a tiresome duty into an interesting opportunity. I knew a physician who was careful to refrain from using external symbols of her status, such as car-license tags, her only evidence of profession being an identification carried in her wallet. When faced with a public accident in which medical service was already being rendered the victim, or in which the victim was past helping, she would, upon examining the victim at a distance from the circle around one, quietly go her way without announcing her competence. In these situations, she was what might be called a female impersonator. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the World. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. The traditional view point is neither scientifically testable nor easily compatible with evolution. Unfortunately, this traditional understanding of the good life, freedom, community, and tolerance is not scientifically testable. Moreover, Dr. Darwin’s theory of evolution caused many to lose their belief in the existence of natures, human or otherwise. The concepts of unchanging essences and of complete discontinuities between every eidos (type) and all others make genuine evolutionary thinking impossible. I agree with those who claim that the essentialist philosophies of Aristotle and Plato are incompatible with evolutionary thinking. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

The implications of moving species from the metaphysical category that can appropriately be characterized in terms of natures t a category for which such characterizations are inappropriate are extensive and fundamental. If species evolve in anything like the way that Dr. Darwin thought they did, then they cannot possibly have the sort of natures that the traditional philosophers claimed they did. If species in general lack natures, then so does Homo Sapiens as a biological species. If Homo sapiens lacks a nature, then no reference to biology can be made to support one’s claims about human nature. Perhaps all people are persons, share the same personhood, and so forth, but such claims must be explicated and defended with no reference to biology. Because so many moral, ethical, and political theories depend on some notion or other of human nature, Dr. Darwin’s theory brought into question these theories. The implications are not entailments. One can always dissociate Homo sapiens from human being, but the result is a much less plausible position. Things remain the same because it is impossible to change very much without changing most of everything. Nothing in the World is so powerful as an idea whose time has come. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Success is a journey, not a destination. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. When we think about the idea that is a person or group dissociates the species-specific designation Homo sapiens from the designation human being, with all of its attendant moral and theological implications (a being might presuppose a creator), then that person or group has a less plausible position. Why? Why should that which we see, hear, feel, taste, or touch (or observe through scientific method) have sway over any cultural debate, since the entire conclusion in the debate rests on a giant “if”—if a species evolved in anything like the way Dr. Darwin thought they did? Well, if naturalistic evolution is the story of how we came to be, then there is no human nature answering to a divine blueprint and no good life that expresses that nature. There are only accidentally formed individual human beings who are free to create whatever versions of happiness they wish. According to the modern view, the good life is the satisfaction of any pleasure or desire that someone freely and autonomously chooses for oneself. The successful person is the individual who has a life of pleasure and can obtain enough consumer goods to satisfy one’s desires. Freedom the right to do what I want, not the power to do what I by nature ought to. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Community gives way to individualism with the result that narcissism—an inordinate sense of self-love and self-centered involvement—is an accurate description of many people’s lives. If I am free to create my own moral Universe and version of the good life, and there is no right or wrong answer to what I should create, then morality—indeed, everything—ultimately exists to make me happy. When a person considers ending a pregnancy prematurely or physician-assisted suicide, the person’s individual rights are all that matter. Questions about virtue or one’s duty to the broader community simply do not arise. However, as a colleague informed me, death by suicide reflects poorly on the community, perhaps even more so than a murder. Tolerance has come to mean that no one is right and no one is wrong and, indeed, the very act of stating that someone else’s views are immoral or incorrect is now take to be intolerant (of course, from this same point of view, it is all right to be intolerant of those who hold to objectively true moral or religious positions). Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have noting left but political coercion to enforce their views on others, which has been the job of the TV news media especially in the twenty-first century. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

While the Christian faith clearly teaches that believers are to be involved as good citizens in the state, nevertheless, it is obvious why so many secularists are addicted to politics today because political power is a surrogate for a Higher Power. Once God died in the New World—that is, once the concept of God no longer informed the major idea—generating the centers of society turned secular—there would be turmoil and horrible secular wars unchecked by traditional morality because the state would come to be a surrogate god for many. Finally, individual rights have come to dominate our public discussion of mortal issues. The public square—those aspects of society where all citizens must interface regardless of personal views; for example, public schools, and government—has become unveiled: religious, moral, and political debate therein is no longer informed by a clear, robust vision of the moral life shared by most citizens and taken to be true and rational. Once objective duty, goodness, and virtue were abandoned under the guise of scientism and secularism, the only moral map that could replace objective morality is called minimalistic ethics—anything whatever is morally permissible provided only that you do not harm someone else. Many schools resist change while others avidly seek it. If we do not want our schools to atrophy and die, we need educational leaders who can bring about progress by daring to be change managers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down. The World changes faster than the people in it. Individual rights are important, and, for the Christian, they are grounded in the image of God and not in the state. In other words, the Christian believes that human rights are derived from the image of God in us; they do not ultimately come from the state. However, there are more fundamental questions of virtue and duty that are relevant to the overall development of a moral outlook. For example, the abortion debate should not be framed primarily as a debate about the right to life versus the right to choice Basically, it should be discussed in terms of this question: When faced with the question of abortion, what does a woman or a community committed to moral virtue and duty do? When issues of virtue and duty to others is brought to the foreground and rights are relegated to a secondary position in the moral context, the tenor of the debate changes drastically. How then was the Devil dressed? O, he was in his Sunday best; his coast was red, and his breeches were blue, and there was a hole where his tail came through. Until Christians can do a better job of seeing these issues and articulating them in terms of objective duty, the Jack Kevorkians will continue to win the debate (if that is what we should call the media rhetoric that surrounds the framing of moral dilemmas), precisely because the Kevorkians are on the side of individual rights. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

If the only morally relevant question to ask a patient is whether or not one freely and competently chooses physician-assisted suicide, then we are left with no moral categories in which to introduce more basic questions of duty and virtue. And this is where our secular society is at present, given its commitment to scientism that emerged into no small measure because a marginalized and inarticulate church withdrew into privatized religion as she welcomed the Torjan horse of anti-intellectualism within her walls. “I look out on Earth…lo, all is chaos; I look at Heaven…its light is gone; I look out on the mountains…they are trembling; and all the hills are swaying! I look out…lo, the sown land lies a desert; and the towns are all razed by the Lord’s rage. For thus has the Lord said: The whole land shall be desolate…and for this shall the Earth mourn and the Heavens above be black…I have purposed it and will not repent; neither will I turn back from it. At the noise of the horsemen and the archers the land is all in flight, beings taking refuge within woods and caves, and climbing upon the rocks. Every city shall be abandoned, and not a being dwell therein. You ruined creature, what will you do!” reports Jeremiah 4.23-30. From the moment when the divine soul succeeds in taking full possession of a being’s thought and feeling, will and flesh, one’s motives, words, acts, and desires become obscure and mysterious to other beings. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

The World changes faster than the people in it. “For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed. However, my kindness shall not depart from thee; neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that has mercy on thee!” reports Isaiah 54.10. A ship in port if safe, but that is not what ships are built for. “The foundations of the Earth do shake. Earth breaks to pieces, Earth is split in pieces, Earth shakes to pieces, Earth reels like a drunken man, Earth rocks like a hammock; under the weight of its transgression Earth falls down to rise no more! Life up your eyes to Heaven and look upon the Earth beneath: For the Heavens shall vanish away like smoke. And the Earth shall grow old like a robe; the World itself shall crumble. However, my righteousness shall be forever, and my salvation knows no end,” reports Isaiah 24.18-20. It is hard to speak after the prophets have spoken as they have in these pronouncements. Every word is like the stroke of a hammer. There was a time when we could listen to such words without much feeling and without understanding. There were decades and even centuries when we did not take them seriously. Those days are gone. Today we must take them seriously. For they describe with visionary power what the majority of human beings in our period have experienced, and what, perhaps in a not too distant future, all humankind will experience abundantly: “The foundations of the Earth do shake.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

The phrase, “Earth is split in pieces,” is no merely a poetic metaphor for us, but a hard reality. That is the religious meaning of the age into which we have entered. The Bible has always told us of the beginning and the end of the World. It speaks of eternity before the World was founded; it speaks of the time when God laid the foundations of the Earth; it speaks of the shaking of these foundations of the Earth; it speaks of the shaking of these foundations and of the crumbling of the World. In one of the later books, Second Peter, it says that “the Heavens will vanish with a crackling roar, and the elements will melt with fervent heat, the Earth also and the works therein shall be burnt up.” This is no longer vision; it has become physics. We know that in the ground of our Earth, and in the ground of everything in the World that has form and structure, destructive forces are bound. Laying the foundations of the Earth means binding these forces. When the unruly power of the smallest parts of our material World was restrained by cohesive structure, a place was provided in which life could grow and history develop, in which words could be heard and love be felt, and in which truth could be discovered and the Eternal adored. All this was possible because the fiery chaos of the beginning was transformed into the fertile soil of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

However, out of fertile soil of the Earth a being was generated and nourished, who was able to find the key to the foundation of all beings. That being was human. One has discovered the key which can unlock the forces of the ground, those forces which were bound when the foundations of the Earth were laid. One has begun to use this key. One has subjected the basis of life and thought and will to one’s will. And one’s willed destruction. For the sake of destruction one used the forces of the ground; by one’s thought and one’s work one unlocked and untied them. That is why the foundations of the Earth rock and shake in our time. Oh God of the Trinity, Whose Name is ineffable, Who purifies the cavern of human’s heart from vices, and makest it whiter than the snow; bestow on us Thy compassions; renew in our inward parts, we pray Thee, Thy Holy Spirit, by Whom we may be able to show forth Thy praise; that being strengthened by the righteous and princely Spirit, we may attain a place in the Heavenly Jerusalem; through Jesus Christ our Lord. An old man is not necessarily much wiser than a young one. Wisdom cannot be measured by the calendar. We should not respect the years, but their fruit. However, we are still supposed to respect our elders. If a being has found wisdom at the cost of one’s years, we should respect one. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

However, we should not fall into the concealed if persuasive fallacy of honoring advice when it comes from an elder and you know it is bad or unhealthy. When thinking of the self-actualized person, it also gives rise in many minds to the picture of a creature belonging to an extinct species, a boring creature with pompous speech and portentous manner. Yet the lack of the ability to laugh at oneself—and certainly the lack of any sense of humour at all—characterizes fools and not the self-actualized. “ And then shall my revelations which I have caused to be written by my servant john be unfolded in the eyes of all the people. Remember, when ye see these things, ye shall know that the time is at hand that they shall be made manifest in very deed. Therefore, when ye shall receive this record ye may know that the work of the Father has commenced upon all the face of the land. Therefore, repent all ye ends of the Earth, and come unto me, and believe in my gospel, and be baptized in my name; for one that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but one that believeth not shall be damned; and signs shall follow them that believe in my name. And blessed is one that is found faithful unto my name at the last day, for one shall be lifted up to dwell in the kingdom prepared for one from the foundation of the World. And behold it is I that hath spoken it. Amen,” reports Ether 4.16-19. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

O Supreme moving cause, may I always be subordinate to thee, be dependent upon thee, be found in the path where thou doest walk, and where thy Spirit moves, take heed of estrangement from thee, of becoming insensible to thy love. Thou dost not move beings like stones, but dost endue them with life, not to enable them to move without thee, but in submission to thee, the first mover. O Lord, I am astonished at the difference between my receivings and my deservings, between the state I am now in and my past gracelessness, between the Heaven I a bound for and the hell I merit. Who made me to differ, but thee? for I was no more ready to receive Christ than others; I could not have begun to love thee hadst thou not first loved me, or been willing unless thou hadst first made me so. O that such a crown should fit the head of such a sinner! such high advancement be for an unfruitful person! such high advancement be for an unfruitful person! such joys for so vile a rebel! Infinite wisdom cast the design of salvation into the mould of purchase and freedom; let wrath deserved be written on the door of hell, but the free gift of grace on the gate of Heaven. I know that my sufferings are the result of my sinner, but in Heaven both shall cease; grant me to attain this Heaven and be done with sailing, and may the gales of thy mercy blow me safely into harbour. Let thy love draw me nearer to thyself, wean me from sin, mortify me to this World, and make me ready for my departure hence. Secure me by thy grace as I sail across this stormy sea. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

ROCKLIN TRAILS

FINAL HOME REMAINS | Rocklin, CA | Mid $400,000’s

ONE HOME REMAINING!

Boasting an efficient floor plan with plenty of close space, this Modern, Midcentury Modern Doll House design offers some exciting surprises. The dining area is filled with natural light from a full-length window, while the kitchen area enjoys plenty of Sun and light from the expansive widows. A nice high ceiling and fireplace add to the coziness of the great room. The private master bedroom has both a walk-in closet and a master bathroom. The laundry room is conveniently located next to bedrooms 2 and 3. Plans also include an attached two-car garage in the rear of the house.

When we set out to design our new Rocklin Trails community, we didn’t start out by thinking about walls and windows and square footage. We began by thinking about long walks and family dinners and the rush to get your morning started. In short, we started thinking about life and how best to fit that life within the new homes that we build.

Rocklin Trails will inspire you to reinvent the way you think about outdoor living. Here, you’ll find a lifestyle inspired by walkability. Our paseo-fronting homes create beautiful green-space entries and an open environment, all without compromising privacy. Adjacent to the community, Rocklin Trails homeowners have access to a peaceful and natural creek-side walking trail and in just a short stroll, you’ll find the answers to many of your shopping, recreation and entertainment needs.

Within each of the eighty new homes in Rocklin, California, you’ll find thoughtful design to suit the needs of any generation and any lifestyle with energy efficiency and construction longevity at its core.

We invite you to imagine a new way to live – here at Rocklin Trails. https://cresleigh.com/new-homes-in-rocklin-california-rocklin-trails/

I Should Have Known You were Temptation, You Smiled, Luring Me on and My Heart was Gone!

December 26, 2019 1:50 am

Everyone thinks of changing the World, but no one thinks of changing oneself. Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use. The measure of a person’s real character is what one would do if one knew one would never be found out. We all have to be consumers. Everyone of us has to eat and drink. We need clothes, a place to live. Basically, we need and make use of a great many things, and that phenomenon we call “consuming.” Where is the psychological problem in that? That is just the way of nature: We have to consumer to live. Granted, but in saying even that much we have already arrived at the point I want to make: There is consuming and consuming. There is a kind of consuming that is compulsive and that arises from greed, a compulsion to eat, buy, own, use more and more. Now you may ask: Is that not normal? After all, do not all of us want to ass to what we have? The problem, if there is one is that we do not have enough money, not that there is anything wrong with the desire to own more and more. I realize very well that many of you feel this way. However, perhaps an example will show that the issue is not as simple as it may look at first glance. My example is one that will be familiar to you, but I hope very few of you are personally affected by it. Consider someone who is suffering from obesity, someone who simply is above average weight. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

Obesity can be caused by a glandular malfunction, but more often than not it is simply the result of overeating. The person above average weight has a snack here, a snack there; one has a weakness for sweets; one is always nibbling on something. And if you look more closely, you will see not only that one is constantly eating but that one is driven to eat. One has to eat. One cannot stop eating any more than some smokers can stop smoking. And you know that people who do stop smoking will often start to eat more. They excuse themselves by saying that anyone who quits smoking automatically gains weight. And that is one of the common rationalizations people give for not giving up smoking. Why do we cling to those rationalizations? Because the same need to take something into our mouths, to consume things, finds expression in eating, in smoking, in drinking, or in buying things. Doctors are constantly warning people who eat, drink, and smoke compulsively that they may die prematurely of a heart attack. If those people act on their doctors’ warnings and stop their habits, they often suddenly succumb to attacks of anxiety, insecurity, nervousness, depression. Here we see a remarkable phenomenon: Not eating, not drinking, not smoking can make people afraid. There are people who eat or buy things not to eat or to buy but to quell their feelings of anxiety or depression. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

Most of us know from our experience that if we are feeling nervous or depressed we are more prone to go to the refrigerator and find what feels like relief in eating or drinking something for which we have no real appetite. In other words, eating and drinking can actually take over the function of a drug, acting like a tranquilizer. And food and drink are more pleasant because they taste good as well. A depressed person feels something like a vacuum inside one, feels as if one were paralyzed, as if one lacked what it takes to act, as if one could not move properly for lack of something that might set one in motion. If one consumes something, the sense of emptiness, paralysis, and weakness may leave one temporarily, and one may feel: I am someone after all; I have something in me; I am not a nothing. One fills oneself with things to drive out one’s inner emptiness. One is a passive personality who senses that one amounts to very little and who represses those inklings by consuming, by becoming Homo consumens. I have just introduced the concept of the “passive personality,” and you will want to know what I mean by that. What is passivity? What is activity? Let me begin with the modern definitions of passivity and activity, definitions that will be quite familiar to all of you. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

Activity is understood to mean any goal-oriented actions that requires energy. It can be either physical or mental work, and it can include sports as well, for we generally think of sports in a utilitarian way, too: Participation in them either promotes health or enhances the prestige of our country or makes us famous or earns us money. It is usually not pleasure in the game itself that moves us to participate in sports but rather some end result. Anyone who exerts oneself is active. We then say one is “busy.” And to be “busy” is to be engaged in “business.” What constitutes passivity in this view? If we produce no visible results, no palpable achievement, then we have been passive. Let me cite an obvious example: Someone sits still looking out into the landscape, just sit there for five minutes, half an hour, maybe even an hour. One does nothing but look. Because one is not taking any pictures but simply immersing oneself in what one’s eyes are perceiving, we might regard one as strange and would not be at all inclined to grace one’s “contemplativeness” with the name of activity. Or consider someone who meditates (though in our Western culture the sight of someone meditating is rare indeed). One is attempting to become aware of oneself, of one’s own feelings, one’s moods, one’s inner state of being. If one meditates regularly and systematically, one may spend hours at it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Anyone who understands nothing of meditation would consider that mediator a passive person. One is not doing anything. Perhaps one’s whole effort is aimed at driving every last thought out of one’s mind, thinking about nothing, and simply being. That may strike you as peculiar. Try it sometime, just for two minutes, and you will see how difficult it is, how something other will keep popping into your hear, how your mind will drift to every last bit of trivia under the Sun, how defenseless you are against those thoughts because we find it nearly intolerable to sit still and turn off our thoughts. For great cultures in India and China and Japan, that kind of meditation is vitally important. Unfortunately that may not be the case with many in the New World, because, ambition-ridden as we are, we think everything we do has to have a purpose, to achieve something, to produce a result. However, if you try to forget about results for once, if you can concentrate and bring enough patience to this exercise, you may find the “idleness” very refreshing indeed. All I have meant to suggest here is that our modern usage labels behavior that produces visible results activity, while passivity appears to be pointless. It is behavior in which we detect no output of energy. That we see activity and passivity that way has to do with the issues of how and what we consumer. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

If we consume the superfluous things our “bad affluence” supplies us with, what appears to be activity on our part is really passive. What kind of creative activity, of “good affluence,” of richness, of resistance can we imagine that would allow us to be more than mere consumers? From Old Testament times and ancient Greece until this century, the good life was widely understood to mean a life of intellectual and moral virtue. The good life is the life of ideal human functioning according to the nature that God Himself gave to us. According to this view, prior to creation had in mind an ideal blueprint of human nature from which God created each and every human being. Happiness (Greek: eudaimonia) was understood as a life of virtue, and the successful person was one who knew how to live life well according to what we are by nature due to the creative design of God. When the Declaration of Independence says we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them the right to pursue happiness, it is referring to virtue and character. So understood, happiness involves suffering, endurance, and patience because these are important means to becoming a good person who lives the good life. Freedom was traditionally understood as the power to do what one ought to do. For example, some people are not free to play the piano or to say no to lust because they have not undergone the training necessary to ingrain the relevant skillful habits. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

Moreover, since community is possible only if people accept as true a shared vision of the good life, it is easy to see why a sense of community and public virtue could be sustained given this understanding of the good life, happiness, and freedom. Traditionally, tolerance of other viewpoints meant that even though I think those viewpoints are dead wrong and will argue against them fervently, nevertheless, I will defend your right to argue your own case. Just as importantly, I will treat you with respect as an image bearer of God, even though your views are abhorrent to me. Finally, while individual rights are important, they do not exhaust the moral life properly conceived. “If someone says ‘I love God,’ and hates his or her brother or sister, one is a liar,” John unapologetically said, “for the other who does not love one’s brother or sister whom one has seen, cannot love God whom one has not seen,” reports 1 John 4.20. We only live as we should when we are in a right relation to God and to other human beings. Accordingly, the infant who is not received in love by the mother and others is wounded for life and may even die. It must bond with its mother or someone in order to take on a self and a life. And rejection, no matter how old one is, is a sword thrust to the soul that has literally killed many. Western culture is, largely unbeknown to itself, a culture of rejection. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

This culture of rejection is one of the irresistible effects of what is called “modernity,” and it deeply affects the concrete forms of Christian institutions take in our tie. It seeps into our souls and is a deadly enemy to spiritual formation in Christ. The power of our persona relations to others is what gives them their incalculable importance for the formation of our spirit and our entire life—for good, or for ill. And of course our body is the focus of these relations, from its DNA to “looks” (how we look or appear, and how we look at and are looked at by others), from touching and working together to talking and praying. However, being with others, our social dimensions, is also inseparable from our inner thoughts, feelings, choices and actions. Their existence and nature are not independent of our social setting. Our very relation to Christ, our Savior, teacher, and friend, is located in the social dimension, along with our place in his body on Earth—his continuing incarnation, the church. Rightly understood, it is true that there is no salvation outside the church—just not this church or that church. The soul is the dimension of the person that interrelates all other dimensions so that they form one life. It is like a meta-dimension or higher-level dimension because its direct field of play consists of the other dimensions (thought, body, and so on), and through them it reaches ever deeper into the person’s vast environment of God and his creation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

It has been said that each soul is a star in the spiritual Universe—or so it was meant to be. And there can be no doubt that this is the biblical view, understanding that “soul” here is a term that refers to the whole person through its most profound dimension. People, put disciplined hedges around your life—especially if you work with women. Refrain from verbal intimacy with women other than your spouse. Do not bare your heart to another woman, nor pour forth your troubles to her. Intimacy is a great need in most people’s lives—and talking about person matters, especially one’s problems, can fill another’s need for intimacy, awakening a desire for more. Many affairs being in just this way. On the practical level, do not touch. Do not treat women with the casual affection you extend to the females in your family. How many tragedies have begun with brotherly or fatherly touches and then sympathetic shoulders. You may even have to run the risk of being wrongly considered distant or cold by some women. Whenever you dine or travel with a woman, make it a threesome. This may be awkward, but it will afford an opportunity to explain your rationale, which, more often than not, will incur respect rather than reproach. Many women business associates will even feel more comfortable dealing with you. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

Never flirt—even in jest. Flirtation is intrinsically flattering. You may think you are being cute, but it often arouses unrequited desires in another. This is why many people do not mix business with pleasure. It keeps the business environment civil and safe. Be real about your sexuality. Do not succumb to vain gnostic prattle about your being a Spirit-filled Christian who would never do such a thing! I well remember a man who indignantly thundered that he was beyond such sin. He fell within months! Face the truth—King David fell, and so can you! “Flee the evil desires of youth, and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart,” reports 2 Timothy 2.22. People the heart of our culture oppresses us with its obsessions and pornotopias. Many in the Church has wilted. The statistics tell it all. In order not to become part of those statistics, there has to be some disciplined swear. Are we human enough? Are we beings of God? I pray we are! “I need more than what you offer me. I need more than pleasures of the flesh, and even more than the beauty of the sea, and more than my every wish granted. I need more then money. Because I am afraid of death. I believe nothing, and therefore like many who believe nothing, I must make something, and that something is the meaning which I give to my life. Had my father not died, I would have been a surgeon, and studied the workings of the boy, and made beautiful drawings of my studies as he did,” (Page 357, The Witching Hour by Anne Rice). #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

We act as if God’s grace only makes up what our good works lack. We believe God’s blessings are at least partially earned by our obedience and our spiritual disciplines. We know we are saved by grace, but we think we must live by our spiritual “sweat.” So who needs grace? All of us, the satin as well as the sinner. The most conscientious, dutiful, hardworking Christian needs God’s grace as much as the most dissolute, hard-living sinner. All of us need the same grace. The sinner does not need more grace than the saint, nor does the immature and undisciplined believer need more than the Godly, zealous missionary. We all need the same amount of grace because the currency of our good works is debased and worthless before God. Neither our merits nor our demerits determine how much grace we need, because grace does not supplement merits or make up for demerits. Grace does not take into account merits or demerits at all. Rather, grace considers all men and women as totally undeserving and unable to do anything to earn the blessing of God. Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to bestow it in the presence of human merit. Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to withdraw it in the presence of human demerit. Grace is treating a person without the slightest reference to desert whatsoever, but solely according to the infinite goodness and sovereign purpose of God. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

Perfect people must have existed in antique times, if the accounts which have descended to us are correct; they may even exit today, but in the course of my World wanderings I could not find them. I found remarkable beings, who were perfect enough in their own line, but the broad mantle of realization did not seem to fit their shoulders. I have resigned myself, however, to the acceptance of the probably that the race of realized sages may be extinct today. Is there any being—no matter how spiritual or how well-meaning one may be—who can safely trusted with absolute power over other beings? It is this, along with other and more important observations, that has given me the courage to reject all spiritual authoritarianism. Some defect or some evil is mixed into each one of us. Imperfection is our natural lot here on Earth. In a well-varied experience of my own species and in fairly wide wanderings through this World, I have never, yet, met a perfectly good, perfectly wise, and perfectly balanced being. That is not to say that I shall never meet such a person. I have faith that some must exist. “And blessed is one that is found faithful unto my name at the last day, for one that is found faithful unto my name at the last day, for one shall be lifted up to dwell in the kingdom prepared for one from the foundation of the World, and behold it is I that hath spoken it. Amen,” reports Ether 4.19. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

We beseech Thee, O Lord, in Thy clemency, to shew us Thine unspeakable mercy; that Thou mayest both set us free from our sins, and rescue us from the punishments which for our sins we deserve; though Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, Who purifies the hearts of those who confess their sins unto Thee, and absolvest the self-accusing conscience from al bonds of iniquity; give pardon to the guilty, and vouchsafe healing to the wounded, that they may receive remission of all sins, and preserve henceforward in sincere devotion, and sustain no loss of everlasting redemption; through Jesus Christ our Lord. My God, Thou hast helped me to see, that whatever good be in honour and rejoicing, how good is one who gives them, and can withdraw them; that blessedness does not lie so much in receiving good from and in thee, but in holding forth thy glory and virtue; that it is an amazing thing to see Deity in a creature, speaking, acting, filling, shining through it; that nothing is good but thee, that I am near good when I am near thee, that to be like thee is a glorious thing: That is my magnet, my attraction. Thou art all my good in times of peace, my only support in days of trouble, my one sufficiency when life shall end. Help me to see how good thy will is in all, and even when it crosses mine teach me to be pleased with it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Grant me to feel thee in fire, and food and every providence, and to see that thy many gifts and creatures are but thy hands and fingers taking hold of me. Thou bottomless fountain of all goof, I give myself to thee out of love, for all I have or own is thine, my goods, family church, self to do with as thou wilt, to honour thyself by me, and by all mine. If it be consistent with thy eternal counsels, the purpose of thy grace, and the great ends of thy glory, then bestow upon me the blessings of thy comforts; if not, let me resign myself to thy wiser determinations. Although it is true that meeting with inspired beings does arouse some persons for the first time to the need of a higher life, it is also true that deep probing would show to what a large extent previous events or reflections had already mentally led such persons to the verge of this need. The inspired teacher does not create it. One only indicates it. Fate brings one at the right moment into the other person’s life to enable this to be done. And somewhere, sometime, for every being who sincerely seeks there must come a Guide, merely because this personal opening of the gate is part of Nature’s program. Enthusiasm is the electric current that keeps the engine of life going at top speed. Enthusiasm is the very propeller of progress. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

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. This warm and charming house is a nostalgic tribute to a beloved architectural era. An inviting entry way gracefully leads into the enchanting home, where you are greeted by a spacious great room, dining room, and opens into a well-designed kitchen. The great room is warmed by a fireplace (also has central heating and air). The sumptuous master suit has a soaker tub and a separate shower, duel vanities, and a walk-in closet.

The home offers other special features, like the luxury of a two-car garage and additional parking, secondary bedrooms, and flex spaces and some even have a butler’s pantry. All located in a clean, peaceful, well-manicured, safe neighborhood with lots of fresh air and shopping and entertainment destinations near by. 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. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-2/

But I Never Forget Dear Your Sweet Memory—If You Really Love Me be Honest with Me!

December 25, 2019 2:13 am

Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. However, if you must be without one, be without the strategy. Patience is a virtue that carries a lot of wait. Therefore, be bold in what you stand for and careful in what you fall for. The need for superiority in the case of he detached person has certain superiority in the case of the detached person has certain specific features. Abhorring competitive struggle, one does not want to excel realistically through consistent effort. One feels rather that the treasures withing one should be recognized without any effort on one’s part; one hidden greatness should be felt without one’s having to make a move. In one’s dreams, for instance, one may picture stores of treasure hidden away in some remote village which connoisseurs come from far to see. Like all notions of superiority this contains an element of reality. The hidden treasure symbolizes one’s intellectual and emotional life which one guards within the magic circle. Another way one’s sense of superiority express itself is in one’s feeling of one’s own uniqueness. This is a direct outgrowth of one’s wanting to feel separate and distinct from others. One may liken oneself to a tree standing alone on a hilltop, while the trees in the forest below are stunted by those about them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Where the compliant type looks at one’s fellow humans with the silent question, “Will he or she like me?”—and the aggressive type wants to know, “How strong an adversary is he or she?” or “Can one be useful to me?”—the detached person’s first concern is, “Will he or she interfere with me?” Will one want to influence me or will one leave me alone?” The scene in which Peer Gynt meets the buttonmolder is a perfect symbolic representation of the terror the detached person feels at being thrown with others. One’s own room in hell would be all right, but to be tossed into a melting pot, to be molded or adapted to others, is a horrifying thought. One feels oneself akin to a rare Persian rug, unique in its pattern and combination of colors, forever unalterable. One takes extraordinary pride in having kept free of the leveling influences of environment and is determined to keep on doing so. In cherishing one’s unchangeableness one raises the rigidity inherent in all neuroses to the dignity of a sacred principle. Willing and even eager to elaborate one’s own pattern, to give it greater purity and lucidity, one insists that nothing extrinsic be injected. In all its simplicity and inadequacy the Peer Gynt maxim stands: “To thyself be enough.” The emotional life of the detached person does not follow as strict a patter as that of the other types detached. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Individual variations are greater in one’s case, chiefly because in contradistinction to the other two, whose predominant trends are directed toward beneficial goals—affection, intimacy, love in the one; survival, domination, success in the other—one’s goals are negative: one wants not to be involved, not to need anybody, not to allow others to intrude on or influence one. Hence the emotional picture would be dependent on the particular desires that have developed or been allowed to stay alive within this negative framework, and only a limited number of tendencies intrinsic to detachment as such can be formulated. There is a general tendency to suppress all feeling, even to deny its existence. I should like to quote here a passage from an unpublished novel of the poet Anna Maria Armi, because it succinctly expresses not only this tendency but also other typical attitudes of the detached person. The main character, reminiscing about one’s adolescence, says: “I could visualize a strong physical tie (as I had with my father) and a strong spiritual tie (as I had with my heroes), but I could not see where or how feeling came into it; feelings simply did not exist—people lied about that as about so many other things. B. was horrified. ‘But how do you explain sacrifice?’ she said. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

“For a moment I was astounded by the truth in her remark; then I decided that sacrifice was just another of lies, and when it was not a lie it was either a physical or spiritual act. I dreamed at that time of living alone, of never marrying, of becoming strong and peaceful without talking too much, without asking for help. I wanted to work on myself, to be freer and freer, to give up dreams in order to see and live clearly. I thought morals had no meaning; being good or bad made no difference as long as you were absolutely true. The great sin was to look for sympathy or to expect help. Souls seemed to me temples that had to be guarded, and inside them there were always strange ceremonies going on, known only to their priests, their custodians.” The rejection of feeling pertains primarily to feelings toward other people and applies to both love and hate. It is a logical consequence of the need to keep at an emotional distance from others, in that strong love or hate, consciously experienced, would bring one either close to others or into conflict with them. The term, distance machinery, is appropriate here. It does not necessarily follow that feeling will be suppressed in areas outside human relationships and become active in the realm of books, animals, nature, art, food, and so on. However, there is considerable danger in this. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

For a person capable of deep and passionate emotion it may be impossible to suppress only one sector of one’s feelings—and that the most crucial—without going the whole length of suppressing feeling altogether. This is speculative reasoning, but certainly the following is true. Artists of the detached type, who have demonstrated in their creative periods that they can not only feel deeply but also give expression to it, have often gone through periods, usually in adolescence, of either complete emotional numbness or of vigorous denial of all feeling—as in the passage quoted. The creative periods seem to occur when, following some disastrous attempts at close relationships, they have either deliberately or spontaneously adapted their lives to detachment—that is, when they have consciously or unconsciously determined to keep at a distance from others, or have become resigned to a kind of isolated living. The fact that now, at a safe distance from others, they can release and express a host of feelings not directly connected with human relationships permits the interpretation that early denial of all feelings was necessary to the achievement of their detachment. Another reason why the suppression of feeling may go beyond the sphere of human relationships has already been suggested in our discussion of self-sufficiency. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Any desire, interest, or enjoyment that might make the detached person dependent upon others is viewed as treachery from within and may be checked on that account. It is as if every situation had to be carefully tested from the standpoint of a possible loss of freedom before feeling could be allowed full play. Any threat of dependence will cause one to withdraw emotionally. However, when one finds a situation quite safe in this regard one can enjoy it to the full. Profound emotional experience is possible under these conditions. The lurking fear of either becoming too attached to a pleasure or of its infringing upon one’s freedom indirectly will sometimes make one verge on the ascetic. However, it is an asceticism of its own kind—not oriented toward self-denial or self-torture. We might rather call it a self-discipline which—accepting the premises—is not lacking in wisdom. It is of great important to physic balance that there be areas accessible to spontaneous emotional experience. Creative abilities, for instance, may be a kind of salvation. If their expression has been inhibited, and if then through analysis or some other experience it is liberated, the beneficent effect upon the detached person can be so great as to make it look like a miraculous cure. Caution is in order in evaluating such cures. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

In the first place it would be a mistake to make any generalization about their occurrence: what may mean salvation foe a detached person will not necessarily have any such meaning for others. And even for one it is not strictly a “cure” in the sense of a radical change in neurotic fundamentals. It merely allows one a more satisfactory and less disturbed way of living. The more the emotions are checked, the more likely it is that emphasis will be placed upon intelligence. The expectation then will be that everything can be solved by sheer power of reasoning, as if mere knowledge of one’s own problems would be sufficient to cure them. Or as if reasoning alone could cure all the troubles of the World! Acceptant of the person by loving individuals as a unique being rather than as an object, the more the individual will come to perceive oneself as a person of value rather than a material object to be used. The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour. In greater matters people show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small matters, as they are. Nearly all people can stand adversity, but if you want to test a person’s character, give one power. The foundations of character are built not by lecture, but by bricks of good example, laid day by day. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

In reviewing one’s own moral career, the stigmatized individual may single out and retrospectively elaborate experiences which serve for one to account for one’s coming to the beliefs and practices that one now has regarding one’s own kind and normals. A life event can thus have a double bearing on moral career, first as immediate objective grounds for an actual turning point, and later (and easier to demonstrate) as a means of accounting for a position currently taken. One experience often selected for this latter purpose is that through which the newly stigmatized individual learns that full-fledged members of the group are quite like ordinary human beings. A physically disabled man provides a statement: “If I had to choose one group of experiences that finally convinced me of the importance of this problem [of self-image] and that I had to fight my own battles of identification, it would be the incidents that made me realize with my heart that people who have physical limitations can be identified with characteristics other than their physical disability. I managed to see that people who have a physical disability could be comely, charming, well-built, masculine, neatly dressed, beautiful, ugly, lovely, stupid, brilliant—just like all other people, and I discovered that I was able to hate or love someone with a physical limitation in spite of one’s disability. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

It may be added that in looking back to the occasion of discovering that persons with one’s stigma are human beings like everyone else, the individual may bring to bear a later occasion when one’s pre-stigma friends imputed un-humanness to those one had by then learned to see as full-fledged persons like oneself. Thus, in reviewing one’s experience as a circus worker, a young girl sees first that she had learned her fellow-workers are not freaks, and send that her pre-circus friends fear for her having to travel in a bus along with other members of the troupe. Another turning point—retrospectively if not originally—is the isolating, incapacitating experience, often a period of hospitalization, which comes later to be seen as the time when the individual was able to think through one’s problem, learn about oneself, sort out one’s situation, and arrive at a new understanding of what is important and work seeking in life. It should be added that not only are personal experiences retrospectively identified as turning points, but experiences once removed may be employed in this way. It should be added that not only are personal experiences retrospectively identified as turning points, but experiences once removed may be employed in this way. Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are, to some extent, a gift. Good character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it piece by piece—by thought, choice, courage, and determination. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

There is nothing ambiguous about “abundance” and “superfluity,” even though there is little difference in their root meanings. “Abundance” comes to us from the Latin word una (wave), which English still retains in its basic meaning in words like “undulate” and “undulant.” Abundance, too, means an “overflowing,” yet it has acquired an altogether beneficial meaning in our language. An abundant land provides us with more than just the basic necessities. It is a land of plenty what the Old Testament describes as “a land flowing with milk and honey.” Or suppose you have been to a party where there was no scarcity of refreshments. You might say, “The wine flowed in abundance,” and you would mean something beneficial by that. There was no shortage of good things, no rationing, no need to worry about overdoing today and going without tomorrow. However, if we want to suggest the negative aspects of an “overflowing,” the word that some to mind is “superfluous.” That word, like “affluent,” goes back to the Latin verb fluere, and a superfluity is therefore a “super-flowing.” Here, however, the overflow is seen in a strictly negative light. It is pointless, wasteful. If you say to someone, “Your presence here is superfluous,” you are really saying, “Why do you not go away?” You are not saying, “How nice that you are here,” which is what you do mean, more of less, if you speak of wine being present in abundance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

So whenever we speak of affluence, we have to ask ourselves whether we mean a beneficial, enlivening abundance or a negative, deadening superfluity. Turning now to “ennui,” we find that its basic meaning is stronger than our current definition of boredom or a feeling of dissatisfaction and weariness. Ennui and the English word “annoy” both derive from the Latin inodiare, “to make loathsome or hateful.” We might ask ourselves now, taking our clues from these words we have just examined, whether superfluity does not lead to boredom, disgust, and hatred. If so, then we should ask ourselves some hard questions about our affluent society. By “we” I mean modern industrial society as it has developed in the United States of America, Canada, and Western Europe. Do we live in affluence? Who in our society lives in affluence, and what kind of affluence is it, an affluence of abundance or an affluence of superfluity? To put the question more simply yet: Is it good affluence or bad affluence? Does affluence necessarily produce ennui? And what would a good, abundant, ebullient kind of affluence look like, and affluence that does not produce ennui? There are two possibilities, two approaches to the psychological study of the human psyche. At the moment academic psychology studies human beings primarily from the standpoint of behaviorism. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Behaviorism is limited exclusively to what can be directly seen and observed, to what is visible and what can therefore be measured and weighed, for whatever cannot be directly seen and observed cannot be measures or weighted either, at least not with sufficient precision. Depth psychology, the psychoanalytical method, proceeds differently. It has different goals. It does not limit its study of human actions and behavior solely to what can be seen. It inquires instead into the nature of behavior, into the motives underlying behavior. You can describe, for instance, a person’s smile. That is an action that can be photographed, that can be described in terms of the musculature of the face, and so on. However, you know very well, that there are differences among the smile of a salesgirl in a shop, the smile of someone who is antagonistic toward you but wants to hide one’s antagonism, and the smile of a friend who is happy to see you. You are able to distinguish among hundreds of kinds of smiles that take rise from different psychic states. They are all smiles, but the things they express can be Worlds apart. No machine can measure or even perceive those differences. Only a human being who is not a machine—you, for example—can do that. You observe not only with your mind but also, if I may be allowed such an old-fashioned expression, with your heart. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Your whole being comprehends what transpires before it. You can sense what kind of smile you are seeing. And if you cannot sense things like that, then you will be in for a lot of disappointments in your life. Or take a very different kind of behavior: the way someone eats. All right, so someone eats. However, how does one eat? One person wolfs one’s food down. Another person’s manner at table reveals that one is pedantic and attaches great importance to doing things in an orderly fashion and cleaning up one’s plate. Still another eats without haste, without greediness. One enjoys one’s food. One simply eats and takes pleasure in eating. Or take still another example. Someone bellows and turns red in the face. You conclude one is angry. Surely one is angry. However, then you take a little closer look at one and ask yourself what it is the person is feeling (perhaps you know one fairly well), and suddenly you realize that he or she is afraid. One is frightened, and one’s rage is simply a reaction to one’s own fear. And then you may look even deeper still and realize that this is a human being who feels thoroughly helpless and powerless, someone who is afraid of everything, of life itself. So you have made three observations: that one is angry, that one is afraid, and that one feels a profound sense of helplessness. All three observations are correct. However, they relate to different levels of one’s psychic structure. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

The observation that takes on one’s sense of powerlessness is the one that registers most profoundly what is going on inside one. The observation that takes in nothing but rage is the most superficial. In other words, if you react by flying into a rage as well and see nothing but an angry person in the other individual, then you have failed to see one at all. However, if you can look being the façade of the angry person and see the frightened one, the one who feels helpless, then you will approach one differently, and it may happen that one’s anger will subside because one no longer feels threatened. From a psychoanalytical point of view, what interests us is not human behavior viewed from the outside but rather what motivates a person has, what one’s intentions are, whether one is conscious of them or not. We are interested in the quality of one’s behavior. The analyst listens with a third ear. Or, one reads between the lines. One sees not only what is offered one directly but perceives something more in what is offered and observable. One sees into the heart of the personality whose every action is merely an expression, a manifestation, yet one that is always colored by the entire personality. Every last bit of behavior is a gesture originating in one specific human individual and in no other, and that is why there are no two human actions that are identical, any more than there are two identical human beings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

They may resemble each other; they may be related; but they are never the same. There are no two people who raise a hand in exactly the same way, who walk the same way, who tilt their heads in the same way. That is why you can sometimes recognize a person by one’s gait even though you have not seen one’s face. A gait can be as characteristic for a person as one’s face, sometimes even more so, for it is more difficult to alter a gait than the expression of the face. We can lie with our faces. That is a capability we have that animals do not. It is more difficult to lie with one’s body, though that too can be learned. It is not that some of us become sinful because of an unfortunate childhood environment, while others are blessed with a highly moral upbringing. Rather we are all born sinners with a corrupt nature, a natural inclination to go out own way. As David wrote, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me,” reports Psalm 51.5. Here is an amazing statement from David that he was sinful while still in his mother’s womb, even during the period of pregnancy when as yet he had performed no actions, either good or bad. Because of Adam’s rebellion, we are all born with a sinful perverse nature, an inclination to go our own way. Whether it is the way of the decent individual or the way of the obvious transgressor, it makes no difference. We were all born in a state of rebellion against God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

The Bible says we have all sinned, and almost everyone would agree with the statement. Descriptive synonyms for sin—rebellion, despising, defying—and God takes a far more serious view of sin than the being on the street or even most Christians. Sin, in the final analysis, is rebellion against the sovereign Creator, Ruler, and Judge of the Universe. It resists the rightful prerogative of a sovereign Ruler to command obedience from His subjects. It says to an absolutely holy and righteous God that His moral laws, which are a reflection of His own nature, are not worthy of our wholehearted obedience. Sin is not only a series of actions, it is also an attitude that ignores the law of God. However, it is even more than a rebellious attitude. Sin is a state of heart, a condition of our inmost being. It is a state of corruption, of vileness, yes, even of filthiness in God’s sight. This view of sin as corrupt, vileness, and filth is symbolically when Joshua the high priest—the person holding the highest religious office in Israel is shown dressed in filthy clothes, a pictorial representation of both his sins and the sins of the people he represented as high priest. The filthiness of his garments depicts not the guilt of his sin but its pollution. Like Joshua, all of us are, in a spiritual sense, dressed in filthy clothes. We are not justly guilty before God; we are also corrupted in our natures, polluted and vile before Him. We need forgiveness and cleansing. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

For this reason the Bible never speaks of God’s grace as simply making up our deficiencies—as if salvation consists in so much good works (even a variable amount) plus so much of God’s grace. Rather the Bible speaks of “a God who justifies the wicked,” who is found by those who do not seek Him, who reveals Himself to those who do not ask for Him, reports Romans 4.5, 10.20. However, the seeker should resolve to appeal directly by constant aspiration and prayer to one’s own higher self, in the knowledge that it alone can help one if one is to work without a teacher. On the other hand, if one’s soul has decreed that one is to have a guide, God will bring before one the mental image or intuitive thought of the Master. If this happens, one will not need to seek out the Master’s physical person; the inner picture brings results. Cicero wrote nearly two thousand years ago that the ideally perfect person is nowhere to be found at all. Who, except wishful thinkers and pious sentimentalists, can gainsay him? Those who seek absolute perfection, whether in someone else or for themselves, seek what is unattainable in this World. It is not possible to find human perfection. Travel, contact, and experience with them reveal that not one is always infallible, not one failed to commit errors of judgment. We do not just need God’s grace to make up for our deficiencies; we need His grace to provide a remedy for our guilt, a cleansing for out pollution. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

We need God’s grace to provide a satisfaction of His justice, to cancel a debt we cannot pay. It may seem that I am belaboring the point of our guilt and vileness before God. However, we can never rightly understand God’s grace until we understand our plight as those who need His grace. The first and possibly most fundamental characteristic of divine grace is that it presupposes sin and guilt. Grace has meaning only when beings are seen as fallen, unworthy of salvation, and liable to eternal wrath. Grace does not contemplate sinners merely as undeserving but as ill-deserving. It is not simply that we do not deserve hell. The discipline of the mind is, of course, the greatest of challenges. And Scripture regularly presents its discipline as a discipline of the eyes. Humans, if you are a television-watching, fake news consuming couch bacon cheese burger with medium fries and a diet coke and a slice of cherry pie, it is impossible for you to maintain a pure mind. In one week you will watch more murders, adulteries, and perversions than our grandfathers read about in their entire lives. Things are getting so bad that people are even acting out scripts in their daily lives because they have become slaves to sin and inequity. “Can a human scoop fire into one’s lap without one’s clothes being burned?” reports Proverbs 6.27. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

This also means treating all women with dignity—looking at them respectfully. If their dress or demeanor is distracting, look them in the eyes, and nowhere else, and get away as quickly as you can! The mind also encompasses the tongue. “For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks,” reports Matthew 12.34. “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immortality, or any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk, or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving,” reports Ephesians 5.3. There must be no sexual humor, urbane vulgarities, and coarseness, as so many Christians are so prone to do to prove they are not “slow” or “out of it.” The human self requires rootedness in others. This is primarily an ontological matter—a matter of being what we are. It is not just a moral matter, a matter of what ought to be. And the moral aspect of it grows out of the ontological. The most fundamental “other” for the human is, of course, God himself. God is the ultimate social fact for the human being. That is why people in general think more often about God than about any other thing, even pleasures of the flesh and death. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

However, because all are to be rooted in God—and really are, whether they want it or not—our ties to one another cannot be isolated from our shared relationship to God, nor our relationship to him from our ties to one another. Our relations to others cannot be right unless we see those others in their relation to God. Though others God comes to us and we only really find others when we see them in God. When scripture speaks of God’s arm, the literal sense is not that God has such a member, but only what is signified by this member, namely operative power. Hence, it is plain that nothing false can ever underlie the literal sense of Holy Writ. Appetite is the power of receiving and giving. The appetite that is in all things to receive and to give part of God’s plan. Things receive what is attractive and reject what is repugnant, and the preference of the receiver determines the action of the giver. Giving and receiving, furthermore, are motions the one motion affecting preservation and the other multiplication. Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom. O God, beneath Whose eyes every heart trembles, and all consciences are afraid; be merciful to the groanings of all, and heal the wounds of all; that as not one of us is free from fault, so not one may be shut out from pardon; through Jesus Christ our Lord. “He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh. He hath confounded mine enemies, unto the causing of them to quake before me,” reports 2 Nephi 4.21-22. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Almighty and merciful God, Who willest not the souls of sinners to perish, but their faults; restrain the anger which we deserve, and pour our upon us the clemency which we entreat, that through Thy mercy we may pass from mourning into joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O fountain of all good, destroy in me every lofty thought, break pride to pieces and scatter it to the winds, annihilate each clinging shred of self-righteousness, implant in me true lowliness of spirit, abase me to self-loathing and self-abhorrence, open in me a fount of penitential tears, break me, then bind me up; thus will my heart be a prepared dwelling for my God; then can the Father take up his abode in me, then can the blessed Jesus come with healing in his touch, then can the Holy Spirit descend in sanctifying grace; O Holy Trinity, three Persons and one God, inhabit me, a temple consecrated to thy glory. When thou art present, evil cannot abide; in thy fellowship is fullness of joy, beneath thy smile is peace of conscience, by thy side no fears disturb, no apprehensions banish rest of mind, with thee my heart shall bloom with fragrance; make me meet, through repentance, for thine indwelling. Nothing is too great for thee to do, nothing is too good for thee to give. Infinite is thy might, boundless thy love, limitless thy grace, glorious thy saving name. Let Angels sing for sinners repenting, prodigals restored backsliders reclaimed, Satan’s captives released, blind eyes opened, broken hearts bound up, the despondent cheered, the self-righteous stripped, the formalist driven from a refuge of lies, the ignorant enlightened, and saints built up in their holy faith. I ask great things of a great God. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

NOW SELLING! Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Details make this modern sized Cresleigh home stand out at a glance. It is reminiscent of the Italianate style of architecture that was distinct in the 19th-century phase in the history of architecture. The captivating well-designed floor plans make it even more attractive. Notice how guests as well as family are accommodated: bathroom on first floor; gathering room, fireplace and attached formal dining room. Included is an enchanting master suite with grand bath. There are also other bedrooms, bathrooms, and a two car garage.

An Apple for the Teacher that Seems the thing to do Because I Want to Learn About Romance from You!

December 24, 2019 4:14 am

Only the open gate can receive visitors. Only the open hand can receive gifts. Only the open mind can receive wisdom. Only the open heart can receive love. When in doubt, tell the truth. This rare wisdom does not prevent one from being a normal human being. Whatever you are, be a good one. “Do not be conformed to this eon, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,” Romans 12.2a. “DO NOT be conformed.” This warning of Paul is significant for all periods of history. It is urgently needed in our period. It applies to each of us, to our civilization, to humankind as a whole. It has many facets because of the many things to which one may be conformed. However, there is one all-embracing thing to which the apostle does not want us to be conformed—this eon. Instead of being conformed to this econ he wants us to be transformed by the coming eon, the state of renewal of our World and of ourselves. Not conformity, but the transformation—that is what Paul says in the words of our text. Our period has experienced many revolutionary transformations. The older ones amongst us remember them, often because they have suffered under them in their early lives. Today, both old and young are reacting against revolutions and further transformations of the World in which they have settled down. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

A mood of conservatism permeates large sections of humankind and certainly the people in our Western Civilization. This is natural and, as such, need not be a matter of concern. However, if conservatism becomes conformism, is the motto of the new generation is—not transformation, but conformity, it must become a matter of concern and be challenged. And this seems to be the case starting in school days, when some teachers prevent individual friendships because they threaten “adjustments” (this fallacious principle of education), on through the years when the laws of the gang are more important for the younger than all divine and human laws together, through the years in the institutes of higher learning where the standards imposed by older upon younger students allow the most extravagant behavior; through the years of entrance into the World of adult competition and adaptation to the means of success, through the years of maturity and power and the fear of violating social, political and religious taboos, and through the later years of one’s life when religious propagandists use the fear of approaching end to preach new forms of old religious conformisms. All these stages of our life are accompanied by incessant pressure from the communications media, one of whose functions is to produce conformity without letting people even become aware of it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy. “Do not be conformed,” says the apostle, challenging, in these four words, the main trend of our whole present civilization. However, he challenges more than this. He challenges you and me, whether we are caught by this civilization or not. We may be conformist not only if we agree but also if we disagree, and we may be non-conformist, not only if we disagree but also if we agree. They are words of warning for those of us who believe that their revolutionary thrust liberates us from the danger of conformism. For it does not. The revolutionary gang can be as conformist as the conservative group. One can be conformed not only to a group, but also to oneself. The revolutionary can becomes used to oneself as a revolutionary, so that one loses one’s freedom and becomes a conformist to revolution. In the same way one can be conformed to one’s attitude of indifference or to cynicism or strictness or perfectionism, or one’s own emptiness. One can be conformed to oneself and be prevented from transforming oneself by a renewal of the spirit. One can be non-conformist without love, unable to transform anything because one has not transformed oneself. Civilization, the rise of the state, kingship, the universal religions—all are fed by the same psychological dynamic: guilt and the need for redemption. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

If it is no longer the clan that represents the collective immortality pool, then it is the state, the nation, the revolutionary cell, the corporation, the scientific society, one’s own race. Humans still grope for transcendence, but now this is not necessarily nature and God, but the SS or the CIA; the only thing that remains constant is that the individual still gives oneself with the same humble trembling as the primitive to one’s totemic ancestor. The stake is identical—immortality power—and the unit of motivation is still the single individual and one’s fears and hopes. To see graphically how constant these things have remained, we have only to tune in on the early-morning sign-offs on American television. The message is striking in its primitiveness: several minutes of the alternation of a picture of the flag with that of soldiers in landing barges, combat aircraft streaking across the sky, soldiers marching, the green fields and hills of home, a glistening white military cemetery, again the flag unfurled in the wind, the timeless Lincoln Memorial, and again the firm and determined faces of soldiers marching. The unspoken text is relentless in its assurance of vital power to each person, and a firm place in an immortality system. How the heart must quicken at what is suggested by these images, how the throat must choke up with gratitude. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Of course militarism and the flag hardly begin to cover the various types of things that the person can expand into; human ingenuity is not so limited, which explains why rich and imaginative people often make such poor patriots. Samuel Johnson saw this clearly when he said that patriotism was the last refuge for scoundrels. In out time the young are turning to forms of what is called experiential transcendence—the intense experience of a feeling state which, for a little while anyway, eliminates the problem of time and death. This is a variation on the historical mode of mysticism, only in our time people can imbibe in it en masse helped by the modern technology of color and sound. By embracing the Primordial Oneness, one can escape death before it can hit one. How can that shadowy menace keep an appointment in Heaven with a being whose consciousness has already been dissolved? In a discotheque, the careworn self is smashed by echoing guitars and electronic shrieking, and its fragments are scattered even more finely by showering and splitting light effects. The sedative drift will take you to spaces beyond time and death, as will prayer or a church organ. This explains the massive attendance at rock music festivals which the mature generation has such trouble understanding. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

The festivals represent a joyful triumph over the flat emptiness of modern life, the mechanical succession of news events which carry everyone on willy-nilly, the ticking away of life in an absurd anarchy. The festival is the attempt by the young to reawaken a sense of the awesome and the miraculous as they throb in full communion to the beating music. As one rock music authority so well put it, what the modern young are seeking through this is a way to adequately express wonder, an expression that modern, secular, mechanistic society has denied. This kind of communion in joy and in intensive experience is, we have to conclude, modern youth’s heroic victory over human limitation. Yet it, too, is hardly a modern invention despite the new technics which mediates it. It is a replay of the basic Dionysian expansiveness, the submergence and loss of identity in the transcending power of the pulsating “now” and the frenzied group of like-minded believers. The heroic expansiveness, joy, and wonder have an underside—finitude, guilt, and death—and we have to watch for its expression too. After you have melted your identity into transcending, pulsating power, what do you do to establish some kind of balance? What kind of forceful, instrumental attitude do you summon up to remarshal yourself and your grip on experience? #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

One cannot live in the trembling smallness of awe, else one will melt away. Where is the object on which to focus one’s new self-assertion—and object that is for the most people a victim? This is what we have to be constantly on guard for. The Dionysian festival reflected human’s experience in the round, and so far the masochistic loss of self there was the corresponding sadistic affirmation of self: the Dionysian celebrators tore apart with their bare hands and ate raw a scapegoat or bull to climax the ceremony. Every heroic victory is two-sided: it aims toward merger with an absolute beyond in a burst of life affirmation, but it carries within it the rotten core of death denial in a physical body here on Earth. If culture is a lie about the possibilities of victory over death, then that lie must somehow take its toll of life, no matter how colorful and expansive the celebration of joyful victory may seem. The massive meetings of the Nazi youth or those of Stain in Red Square and Mao in Peking literally take our breath away and give us a sense of wonder. However, the proof that these celebrations have an underside in Auschwitz and Siberia: these are the places where the goats are torn apart, where the pathetic cowardliness of what it is all about on its underside is revealed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

We might say that modern heroism is somewhat out of joint compared with Dionysianism, where both aspects of transcendence took place on the spot; modern scapegoating has its consummation in bureaucratic forms, gas ovens, slow rotting in prison camps. However, it still is all about the real, lived terror of the individual German, Russian, and Chinese over one’s own life, however coldly and matter-of-factly it may be staged, whatever the clean and disinterested scientific methods used. Adolf Eichmann, for instance, was a simple bureaucratic trimmer who followed orders because he wanted to be liked; but this can only be the surface of the story, we now see. Rubber-stampers sign orders for butchery in order to be liked; but to be liked means to be admitted to the group that is elected for immortality. Evil rests on the passionate person motive to perpetuate oneself, and for each individual this is literally a life-and-death matter for which any sacrifice is not too great, provided it is the sacrifice of someone else provided that the leader and the group approve of it. Whatever side of heroism we look at, one thing is certain: it is an all-consuming activity to make the World conform to our desires. And as far as means are concerned, we are all equally insignificant and impotent terrestrial beings trying to coerce the Universe, trying to make the World over to our own urges. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

If we are going to talk about affluence and ennui, then it seems useful to me to make some preliminary remarks about the meanings of those words. Clarity about definitions is crucial in any discussion, this one included. If we grasp the meaning of a word in all its ramification and connotations, then we can often better understand certain problems that are circumscribed by that word. Its definition and history help our understanding. The phrase “the affluent society” has stuck with us ever since John Kenneth Gailbraith’s book of that title appeared in 1958. “Affluence” derives from the same Latin verb (fluere, to follow) that “fluid” does and it means, quite literally, an overflow. However, as we are all aware, and overflow can be either good or bad. If the Sacramento River overflows its banks in a flood, that is a disaster. However, if a farmer has a bumper crop and his or her grain bins are full to overflowing, that is good. “Affluence,” then, is an ambiguous term. It can suggest the abundance that makes life a pleasure rather than a struggle for mere survival, or it can mean superfluity, an overwhelming and even fatal excess. Prayer and aspiration directed toward God will bring the sought-for guidance from within. Moreover, one may have been given help of which one is as yet unaware and, eventually, this will come through into one’s conscious mind. One should not exaggerate the need for a teacher. Ultimately, one’s development will depend on principles rather than on personalities. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Many humans are beings who have lived a lie to live at all. Psychiatrists who practice in New York report that the complaints of impotence increase when the stock market is in a low. Conversely, potency is vigorous when the market is high, or a “bull” market as the apt term has it. We are reminded of how archaic man killed the king as soon as he became impotent: it is conceivable that for primitives, like Wall Streeter, actual impotency might develop if the cultural system of denial lost its power. All of which supports those who old that death anxiety always lingers under the surface and is never surely and smoothly absorbed in the cultural hero system. How can the body ever be surely transcended by an animal who is body and who fears this very thing on some level of one’s awareness? I mention these things in passing only to remind the reader of the tragic aspect of human heroics and the naturalness of vicious scapegoating: somebody has to pay for the way things are. This is the meaning of the Devil in history, as many authorities have told us. The Devil represents the body, the absolute determinism of human’s Earthly condition, and that is why the Devil is so dangerous: he reveals the reality of the situation, the fact that we cannot really escape our Earthly destiny. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

To fight the Devil is to fight what he stands for, and to make the Devil a scapegoat is to do away with what he represents: the defeat of the supernatural, the negation of the spiritual victory over body-boundness. Hence all the vampire stories where the blood-feasting evil one is the terrifying threat. The truth of the vampire story, of bats, blood, and canine teeth, is the same as the truth of the castration complex: that the causa sui project via the body is a lie, that our bodies are really our doom; so long as we are in them we are subject to the complete dominion o Earthly laws of blood and animality. Hence only the sign of the cross can win out over the vampire, only the domain of invisible spirit that promises victory over the body and death can save humans. Thus the vampire story is a perennial horror-passion play reflecting the entire truth of the human condition and the hope beyond it. The Devil is the one who prevents the heroic victory of immortality in each culture—even the atheistic, scientific-humanist ones. On matters of spiritual apotheosis every leader shows one’s basic kinship to Martin Luther, because he has to decry the fettering of man’s glorious spirit by the body, by personal appetite and selfishness. The Devil always confounds the body with the ethereal and makes the decadent capitalist World seem like socialist Heaven. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. People, if we are Christians, it is imperative that we live pure, Godly lives in the midst of our Corinthian, pornotopian culture. We must live above the horrifying statistics or the Church will become increasingly irrelevant and powerless, and our children will leave it. The Church can have no power apart from purity. This demands that we live out Paul’s dictum: “train yourself to be Godly”—holy sweat! An important place to begin our training is with the discipline of accountability. This to be done with someone who will regularly hold you accountable for your more life, asking you hard questions. If you are married, ideally you should use your spouse, but I also recommend another man, one who will give you no quarter in sensual matters. You need someone of the same gender who will understand your sensuality from the inside out—someone you can be completely honest with, to whom you can confess temptations and attractions. You need someone who will help you toe the mark and keep your soul faithful to God, Mutual accountability is the ideal. In this connection I think of a certain salesman who regularly maintains accountability via phone contact with other Christian salesmen, and even works at scheduling trips to cities at the same time they will be there. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Along with this comes the discipline of prayer. Pray daily and specifically for your own purity. I am amazed that so few people who are concerned about their lives pray about it. Enlist the prayers of your spouse and friends, and pray for others in this respect. Do not wait to be asked. Pray for the purity of your friends too. They need it, and so do you! Next, fill yourself with God’s Word through the discipline of memorization. A person can keep one’s way pure by living accord to God’s work. And, God has hidden his work in your heart so that you will not sin against others. Equally important, our body is the body from which we live. We do not live alone. Thank goodness! Our choices, as they settle into character (to be explained later) are farmed out or outsources to our body in its social context, where they then occur more or less automatically, without our having to think about what we are doing. And that is, in general, a very good thing. Just recall how cumbersome it is when we have to think about what we are doing—learning to skate, drive a car, speak a language. The very purpose of learning or training in some activity is to bring it under our direction without having to think about it or make decisions regarding it. The body makes this possible. It has knowledge of its own. Of course this basically good and even glorious feature of the body—its capacity to have a life of its own, as we might say—is also a major problem for, and a primary area of, spiritual formation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

For, trained in a World of wrongness and evil, the body comes to act wrongly before we think, and has motions of sin in its members, which may thwart the true intent of our spirit or will by leaping ahead of it. “It is not me,” he cries, “but sin that dwells in me!” reports Romans 7.17. And “the flesh wants what is contrary to the spirit and the spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in opposition to each other, so that it is impossible for you to do what you really want,” reports Galatians 5.17. However, at the same time, this amazing capacity of the body means that it (like the other dimensions of human life) can be re-formed to become our ally in Christlikeness. Such a re-formation of the body is one major part of the process of spiritual formation. The body is not, in the biblical view, essentially evil; and while it is infected with evil, it can be delivered. Spiritual formation is also and essentially a bodily process. It cannot succeed unless the body is also transformed. One of the most damming indictments of humankind is found in Isaiah 53.6: “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to one’s own way.” Each of us has turned to one’s own way. That is the very essence of sin, the very core of it—going our own way. In a World governed by a sovereign Creator, going our own way is a rebellion. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Consider a particular territory in a country rebellion against the central government of the nation. The citizens of that territory may be generally decent people, basically upright and caring in their dealings with one another. However, all their goodness among themselves is totally irrelevant to the central government. To hose authorities there is only one issue: the state of rebellion. Until that issues is resolved, nothing else matters. If we think in terms of present-day realities, this illustration is in danger of losing its force. Some central governments are so obviously corrupt and unjust, we may applaud a rebellious territory. We might, in some cases, consider their rebellion a just course of actions. However, God’s government is perfect and just. His moral law is holy, righteous and good. No one ever has a valid reason to rebel against the government of God. We rebel for only one reason: We were born rebellious. We were born with a perverse inclination to go our own way, to set up our own internal government rather than submit to God. O God, the most gracious Maker and most merciful Restorer of humankind, Who, when humans, by the envy of the Devil, was cast down from eternal life, didst redeem him with the Blood of Thine Only Son; give life to Thy servants, whose death Thou dost in no wise desire; and as Thou doest not leave them when they are astray, so do Thou receive them when they are brought back. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Let the sorrowful sighings of Thy servants move Thy pity. Do Thou heal their wounds; do Thou extend Thy saving hand to the prostrate, lest Thy Church should be despoiled of any portion of her body; lest Thy flock should suffer loss; lest those who were born again in the salutary laver should be possessed by the second death. Spare Thou those who confess; that in this mortal life they may, by Thy help, so mourn over their sins, that in the day of the dreadful judgment they may escape the sentence of eternal damnation, and may know neither the terrors of the darkness nor the fury of the flame; and that having returned from the path of error to the way of righteousness, they may be pierced with no more wounds, but may retain in fulness and perpetuity both what Thy grace hath vouchsafed, and what Thy mercy hath restored; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ. “They shall not go forth unto the Gentiles until the day that they shall repent of their iniquity, and become clean,” reports Ether 4.6. O Lord God, Who inhabitest eternity, the Heavens declare thy glory, the Earth thy riches, the Universe is thy temple; Thy presence fills immensity, yet thou hast of thy pleasure created life, and communicated happiness; Thou hast made me what I am and given me what I have; in thee I live and move and have my being; Thy providence has set the bounds of my habitation, and wisely administers all my affairs. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

I thank thee for thy riches to me in Jesus, for the unclouded revelation of him in thy word, where I behold his person, character, grace, glory, humiliation, sufferings, death, and resurrection; give me to feel a need of his continual saviourhood, and cry with Job, “I am vile,” and with Peter, “I perish,” with the publican, “Be merciful to me, a sinner.” Subdue me in the love of sin, let me know the need of renovation as well as of forgiveness, in order to serve and enjoy thee forever. I come to thee in the all-prevailing name of Jesus, with nothing of my own to plead, no works, no worthiness, no promises. I am often straying, often knowingly opposing thy authority, often abusing thy goodness; much of my guilt arises from my religious privileges, my low estimation of them, my failure to use them to my advantage, but I am not careless of thy favour or regardless of thy glory; impress me deeply with a sense of thine omnipresence, that thou art about my path, my ways, my lying down, my end. The self-actualizes has one’s limitations, like other human beings. One is subject to the same vicissitudes of fortune that they are. One is liable to the natural changes of life, to sickness and death. One is certainly not so powerful as so many credulous and superstitious believes imagine one to be. To remind the worshippers that one is still a human being is not to criticize or denigrate one. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

A fully functioning kitchen, bathroom, and two car garage are accessible on the first floor as well. This home is comfortable in a country or suburban setting. Other special features make this a great place to come home to. 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. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/

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

December 23, 2019 5:14 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

What can beat the charm of a Home in Cresleigh Ranch? An open floor plan, with lots of natural light from the windows and sliding glass door provide an extra measure of livability to the living room and dining room. A liberal amount of work space is available in the efficient kitchen, with its island and built-in kitchen table. Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse.

The features of this Cresleigh home creates an enchanting manor. 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. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-4/

There is Always a Moment in Life When the Doors Open and Lets the Future in!

December 21, 2019 3:05 am

Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the Universe, a moment that never was before and will never be again. And what do we teach our children in school? We teach them that two and two make four and that Paris is the capitol of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all of the World there is no other being exactly like you. In the millions of years that have passed there has never been another being like you. Even your physical form is a wonder! You make become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven, a Reese Witherspoon, an Aaliyah, a Beyonce, an Oprah. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must cherish one another. You must work; we al must work to make this World worthy of its population. The love of one’s country is a natural thing, but why should love stop at the border? We are all leaves of a tree and the tree is humanity. Our youth are the people who are going to carry on what we have started. They are going to move in and take over our church, schools, universities, and corporations. The fate of humanity is in their hands. There is always a moment in life when the doors open and lets the future in. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Humanity needs more models than critics. While generalizations can be misleading, it is safe to safe to say that from the arrival of the Pilgrims to the middle of the nineteenth century, American believers prized the intellectual life for its contributions to the Christian journey. The Puritans were highly educated people (the literacy rate for men in early Massachusetts and Connecticut was between 89 and 95 percent) who founded colleges, taught their children to read and write before the age of sic, and studied art, science, philosophy, and other fields as a way of loving God with the mind. Christians must rely on the Holy Spirit in their intellectual pursuits, but this does not mean they should expend no mental sweat of their own in defending faith. Faith is a power or skill to act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in what we have reason to believe is true. Understood in this way, we see that faith is built on reason. Before we dedicate ourselves completely to it, we should have good reason for thinking that Christianity is true. We should have solid evidence that our understanding of a biblical passage is correct before we go on to apply it. And so on. For many, religion is identified with subjective feelings, sincere motives, personal piety, and blind faith. When you ask someone how they know God lives, they will tell you God lives in their heart. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Many people can give you concrete proof that God lives because of the things they have learned in the Bible about miracles and divine intervention, and people have set snares and placed traps in their path and even poisoned some, and by the grace of God, individuals can testify that they have overcome these hardship because of God. Therefore, our private experiences are proof that God exists. People might try to tell you that you are cursed because you are experiencing hardships, bullies want to make you hopeless, but you know for a fact that you are blessed and it is by the grace of God that you have been saved and have overcome many trials and tribulations and that is something you can testify to. In our hearts and intellectual life, the Lord must be glorified. In many cases where an individual’s stigmatization is associated with one’s admission to a custodial institution such as a correctional facility, sanatorium, below market rate housing, or an orphanage, much of what one learns about one’s stigma will be transmitted to one during prolonged intimate contact with those in the process of being transformed into one’s fellow-sufferers. As already suggested, when the individual first learns who it is that one must now accept as one’s own, one is likely, at the very least, to feel some ambivalence; for these others will not only be patently stigmatized, and thus not like the normal person one knows oneself to be, but may also have other attributes with which one finds it difficult to associate oneself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

A girl with a new visual impairment describes her experience in a facility for the blind. “My questions about a guide dog were politely turned aside. Another sighted worker took me in tow to show me around. We visited the Braille library; the classrooms; the clubrooms where the blind members of the music and dramatic groups meet; the recreation hall where on festive occasion the blind dance with the blind; the bowling alleys where the blind play together; the cafeteria, where all the blind gather to eat together; the huge workshops where the blind earn a subsistence income by making mops and brooms, weaving rugs, caning chairs. As we moved from room to room, I could hear the shuffling of feet, the muted voices, the tap-tap-tapping of canes. Here was the safe, segregated World of the sightless—a completely different World, I was assured by the social worker, from the one I had just left. I was expected to join this World. To give up my profession and to earn my living making mops. The Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired would be happy to teach me how to make mops. I was to spend the rest of my life making mops with other blind people, eating with other blind people, dancing with other blind people. I became nauseated with fear, as the picture grew in my mind. Never had I come upon such destructive segregation.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Given the ambivalence built into the individual’s attachment to one’s stigmatized category, it is understandable that oscillations may occur in one’s support of, identification with, and participation among one’s own. There will be “affiliation cycles” through which one comes to accept the special opportunities for in-group participation or comes to reject them after having accepting them before. There will be corresponding oscillation in belief about the nature of own group and the nature of normal. For example, adolescence (and the high school peer group) can bring a marked decline in own-group identification and a marked increase in identification with normal. The later phases of the individual’s moral career are to be found in these shifts of participation and belief. The relationship of the stigmatized individual to the informal community and formal organizations of one’s own kind is, then, crucial. This relationship will, for example, mark a great difference between those whose differentness provides them very little of a new “we,” and those, such as marginalized group members as someone who should take pride in one’s infirmary and not seek to get well. In any case, whether the stigmatized group is an established one or not, it is largely in relation to this own-group that it is possible to discuss the natural history and the moral career of the stigmatized individual. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Our youth need our presence more than they need our presents. With even the most reluctant individual there is a small part of them that desperately want to learn and be accepted. The strength of the desire is determined by our acceptance and belief in him or her. Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege than the raising of the next generation. Every one needs tenderness for what they are, and respect for what they may become for the greatest natural resource that any nation can have is its people. Therefore, we must learn to foster greater love for each other so that society may grow. The withdrawal of the corporate body of Christ from the public sphere of ideas is mirrored by our understanding of what is required to produce an individual disciple. However, spiritual life of faith, it is our heart, it is how we operate. What is more important for our youth is that they stay pure in college and, perhaps, witness, have a quiet time, and pray regularly. Obviously, these are important because the purpose of college is not just to get a job, but rather, it is to discover vocation, to identify a field of study in and through which one can serve Christ and Lord. And one way to serve God in this way is to learn to think in a Christian manner about our major. A person’s Christianity does not begin at a dorm Bible study, when class is over; it permeates all of one’s life, including how one thinks about the ideas in one’s college major. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Training the mind is an essential responsibility of the home, the church, and the school. Unless evangelicals prod young people to disciplined thinking, they waste—even undermine of Christianity’s most precious resources. However, if faith and reason are polar opposites, and if discipleship is private and sacred but college studies are public and secular, then training the intellect will not be valued as a part of the youth’s mentoring. That is why our discipleship materials often leave Christian young people vulnerable to atheistic college professors with an agenda to mislead the youth. I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. This withdrawal and marginalization of the church has had devastating consequences for our attempt to produce vibrant, confident disciples and to penetrate our culture with a Christian Worldview and the gospel of Christ. These consequences are very evident. We should train business people to develop a Christian understanding of economic theory, capitalism, business ethics, or moral issues in the employer/employee relationship. The mystery of the future and the mystery of the past are untied in the mystery of the present. Our time, the time we have, is the time in which we have “presence.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

However, how can we have “presence”? When we think of it, is not the present moment gone? Is not the present the ever-moving boundary line between past and future? However, a moving boundary is not a place to stand upon. If nothing were given to us expect the “no more” of the past and the “not yet” of the future, we would not have anything. We could not speak of the time that is our time; we would not have “presence.” The mystery is that we have a present; and even more, that we have our future also, because we remember it in the present. In the present our future and our past are ours. However, if we think of the never-ending flux of time, there is no “present.” The riddle of the present is the deepest of all the riddles of time. Again, there is no answer except from that which comprises all time and lies beyond it—the eternal. Whenever we say “now” or “today,” we stop the flux of times for us. We accept the present and do not care that it is gone in the moment we accept it. We live in it and it is renewed for us in every new “present.” This is possible because every moment of time reaches into the eternal. It is the eternal that stops the flux of time for us. It is the eternal “now” which provides for us a temporal “now.” We live so long a “it is still today”—in the words of the letter to the Hebrews. Not everybody, and nobody all the time, is aware of this “eternal now” in the temporal “now.” However, sometimes it breaks powerfully into our consciousness and gives us the certainty of the eternal, of a dimension of time which cuts into time and gives us our time. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

People who are never aware of this dimension lose the possibility of resting in the present. As the letter to the Hebrews describes it, they never enter into the divine rest. They are held by the past and cannot separate themselves from it, or they escape toward the future, unable to rest in the present. They have not entered the eternal rest which stops the flux of time and gives us the blessing of the present. Perhaps this is the most conspicuous characteristic of our period, especially in the New World and particularly in this country. It lacks the courage to accept “presence” because it has lost the dimensions of the eternal. “I am the beginning and the end.” This is said to us who live in the bondage of time, who need a present to stand upon. Each of the modes of time has its peculiar mystery, each of them carries its peculiar anxiety. Each of time drives us to an ultimate question. There is one answer to these questions –the eternal. There is one power that surpasses the all-consuming power of time—the eternal: He Who was and is and is to come, the beginning and the end. He gives us forgiveness for what has passed. He gives us courage for what is to come. He is God and God gives us rest in His eternal Presence. The activity of the senses discloses their chief function: they are reporters. As is true of all motion, sensory action is in response to the stimulus of surrounding things. The reports consist of information from sources external to the organ and they are made available to the mind of beings. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Indeed, it is from the sense that all knowledge in nature must be sought, unless humans mean to go mad. Thus the sense, sound, sight, touch, taste, and smell provide for human’s guidance the materials of knowledge and counsel with which the understanding, reason, and imagination must work. Among the reporters, the sense of sight had the chief office in giving information. Volition, or choice, is the exercise of will, the capacity of the person to originate things and events that would not otherwise be or occur. By “originate” where we mean to include two of the things most prized in human life: freedom and creativity. When properly understood, these are really two aspects of the same thing, which is power to do what is good—or evil. The power in question belongs to individuals alone. Nothing makes them originate the good (or evil) they do. It is possible for them to not do it. Or to do it. Although a free action has many conditions, those conditions do not an action make. If it is our act, there must be added to those conditions the inner and always unforced “yes” or “no” by which the person responds to the situation. This response is our unique contribution to reality. It is ours, it is us, as nothing else is. Without the inner “yes” there is no sin, for only that “yes” (or “no”) is just us. The thought of sin is not sin and is not even temptation. Temptation is the thought plus the inclination to sin—possibly manifested by linger overt the thought or seeking it out. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

However, sin itself is when we inwardly say “yes” to the temptation, when we would do the deed, even though we do not actually do it. Similar distinction must be drawn with reference to doing what is good and right. These distinctions with reference to volition or choice will turn out to be very important later in our discussion. Now we need to be very clear on this point: the capacity for volition, and the acts of wiling in which it is exercised, from the spirit in beings. In this narrow and focused sense, the spiritual is not just the nonphysical, but it is the central core of the nonphysical part in beings. In us there is much that is not physical that also is not spirit—that is, not of the will. There is, then, a spirit in beings—a spirit that is one’s spirit. It is this that is the human spirit. And if we are to understand spiritual formation, we must understand what the spirit of the human being is. Spirit is, in general, that which is self-initiating and self-sustaining. Only God is purely spiritual, pure creative will and character. Only God can truly say, “I am that I am,” reports Exodus 3.14. God is, in his fundamental and overall nature, unbodily, personal power. Human beings have only some small element of spirit—unbodily, personal power—right at the center of who they are and who they become. It is, above all, this spirit (or will) that must be reached, cared for, and transformed in spiritual formation. The human will is primarily what must be given a Godly nature and must then proceed to expand its Godly governance over the entire personality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Thus will or spirit is also the heart in the human system: the core of its being. That is why we have the biblical teaching that human good and evil are matters of the heart. It is the heart and spirit that God looks at in relating to humankind, and in allowing us to relate to him. When we are able to free the individual from defensiveness, so that one is open to the wide range of one’s own needs, as well as the wide rage of environmental and social demands, one’s actions may be trusted to be beneficial, forward-moving, constructive. We do no need to ask who will socialize one, for one of one’s own deepest needs is for affiliation and communication with others. As one become more fully oneself, one will become more realistically socialized. We do not need to ask who will control one’s aggressive impulses; for as one becomes more open to all of one’s impulses, one’s need to be liked by others and one’s tendency to give affection will be as strong as one’s impulses to strike out or to seize for oneself. One will be aggressive in situations in which aggression is realistically appropriate, but there will be no runaway need for aggression. One’s total behavior, in these and other areas, as one moves toward being open to all one’s experience, will be more balanced and realistic, behavior which is appropriate to the survival and enhancement of highly social terrestrial beings. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

I have little sympathy with the rather prevalent concept that beings are basically irrational, and that one’s impulses, if not controlled, will lead to destruction of others and self. Human’s behavior is exquisitely rational, moving with subtle and ordered complexity toward the goals of one’s organism is endeavoring to achieve. The tragedy for most of us is that our defenses keep us from being aware of this rationality, so that consciously we are moving in one direction, while organismically we are moving in another. However, in our person who is living the process of the good like, there would be a decreasing number of such barriers, and one would be increasingly a participant in the rationality of one’s organism. The only control of impulses which would exist, or which would prove necessary, is the natural and internal balancing of one need against another, and the discovery of behaviors which follow the vector most closely approximating the satisfaction of all needs. The experience of extreme satisfaction of one need (for aggression, or pleasures of the flesh, and so forth) in such a way as to do violence to the satisfaction of other needs (for companionship, tender relationship, and so forth)—an experience very common in the defensively organized person—would be greatly decreased. One would participate in the vastly complex self-regulatory activities of one’s organism—the psychological as well as physiological thermostatic controls—in such a fashion as to live in increasing satisfaction and harmony in society. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

In this process of living the good life, it also involves a wider range, a greater richness, than the constricted living in which most of us find ourselves. To be part of this process means that one is involved in the frequently and frightening satisfying experience of a more sensitive living, with greater range, greater variety, greater richness. It seems to me that clients who have moved significantly in therapy live more intimately with their feelings of pain, but also more vividly with their feelings of ecstasy; that anger is more clearly felt, but so also is love; that fear is an experience they know more deeply, but so is courage. And the reason they can thus live fully in a wider range is that they have this underlying confidence in themselves as trustworthy instruments for encountering life. I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even through the person in this process would experience each one of these feelings at appropriate times. However, the adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one’s potentialities. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Living the good life also involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, one chooses as the good life this process of becoming. Even when we were fill of transgression, because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ. It is by grace we have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the Heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. Jesus Christ has already paid for every blessing you and I will ever receive from God the Father. God’s salvation for Christ’s sake carries with it all the provisions we need, not only for eternity but for all this life as well. “Train yourself to be Godly. For physical training is of some value, but Godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come,” reports 1 Timothy 4.7-8. Whether or not we have disciplined ourselves will make a huge difference in this life. We are all members of one another, and we are each either elevated or depressed by the inner lives of one another. Some of us affect others like a joyous tide, lifting them upward, but some of us are like undertows to the Body of Christ. Spiritual discipline holds huge promise for this present life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

As for the life to come, spiritual discipline builds the enduring architecture of one’s soul on the foundation of Christ—gold, silver, and precious stones which will survive the fires of judgment and remain a monument to Christ for eternity. Some many minimize the importance of spiritual discipline now, but it is part of living the good life. Godliness has value for all things! The disciplined Christian gives and gets the best of both Worlds—the World now and the World to come. The word discipline may raise the feeling of stultifying constraint in some minds—suggesting a claustrophobic, restricted life. Nothing could be farther from the truth! The obsessive, almost manic discipline of Mike Singletary liberated him to play like a wild man on the football field. Hemingway’s angst over the right word freed him to leave a mark on the English language second only to Shakespeare. The billion sketched of the Renaissance great set Michelangelo free to create the skies of the Sistine Chapel. Churchill’s painstaking preparation freed him to give great impromptu speeches and brilliant ripostes. The disciplined drudgery of the musical greats like Armin van Burren and Ruben de Ronde released their genius. And, brothers and sisters in Christ, spiritual discipline frees us from the gravity of this present age and allows us to soar with the saints and Angels. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

This doctrine of faith is especially based upon statements from authority, inasmuch as its principles are obtained by revelation: thus we ought to believe on the authority of those whom the revelation has been made. Nor does this take away from the dignity of this doctrine, for although the argument from authority based on human reason is the weakest, yet the argument from authority based on divine revelation is the strongest. However, sacred doctrine makes use even of human reason, not, indeed, to prove faith (for thereby the merit of faith would come to an end), but to make clear other things that are put forward in this doctrine. Since therefore grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, natural reason should minister to faith as the natural bent of the will ministers to charity. Hence the Apostles says: “Bringing into captivity every understanding unto the obedience of Christ,” reports 2 Corinthians 10.5. Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Eternal King of all, that being purified by the sacred fast, we may come with sincere minds to partake of Thy holy things; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord, that renewing our sacred observations with annual devotion, we may please Thee both in body and soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, that our earnest devotion may become fruitful through Thy grace; for then shall our fast be profitable to us, if it is well-pleasing to Thy loving-kindness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Lord, high and holy, meek and lovely, Thou hast brought me to the valley of vision, where I live in the depths but see thee in the heights; hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold thy glory. Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up, that to be low is to be high, that the broken heart is the healed heart, that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit, that the repenting soul is the victorious soul, that to have nothing is to possess all, that to bear the cross is to wear the crown, that to give is to receive, that the valley is the place of vision. Lord, in the daytime stars can be seen from deepest wells, and the deeper the wells the brighter thy stars shine; let me find thy light in my darkness, thy life in my death, thy joy in my sorrow, thy grace in my sin, thy riches in my poverty, thy glory in my valley. “And when he had said these words, behold, the Lord showed himself unto him, and said: Because thou knowest these things ye are redeemed from the fall; therefore ye are brought back into my presence; therefore I show myself unto you. Behold I am he who was prepared from the foundation of the World to redeem my people. Behold, I am Jesus Christ. I am the Father and the So. In me shall all humankind have life, and that eternally, even they who shall believe on my name; and they shall become my sons and daughters,” reports Ether 3.13-14. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Character is ultimately who we are expressed in action, in how we live, in what we do, and so the children around us know: they absorb and take stock of what they observe, namely us—we adults living and doing things in a certain spirit, getting along with one another in various ways. Our children add up, imitate, file away what they have observed and so very often later fall in line with the particular moral counsel we wittingly or quite unself-consciously have offered them.

EJN0elGVUAM6FQQ The charming homes in Cresleigh Ranch, offer graceful designs, with open floor plans for those who enjoy a casual lifestyle. The kitchen, breakfast area, and cozy keeping area with fireplace (optional) are all one large room. The home hub is such a versatile space. Make it an office, a studio a playroom—the choice is yours when you live at Cresleigh Ranch. Some plans also have a first-floor master suite with walk-in closet, which offers both convenience and quiet seclusion, which allows parents to have control over the first floor of the house. The upstairs, which comes with additional bedrooms, bathroom(s), and loft can be a retreat for the youth. https://cresleigh.com/find-a-home/

Randolph Harris II International Institute

Category Archives: veteran

Sometimes an Angel Has to Fall to Know One Was in Heaven—Are You Living?

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

You are My Sunshine, My Only Sunshine, You Make Me Happy When Skies are Gray!

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

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

CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the low $400’s

Now Selling!

I Should Have Known You were Temptation, You Smiled, Luring Me on and My Heart was Gone!

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

But I Never Forget Dear Your Sweet Memory—If You Really Love Me be Honest with Me!

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

An Apple for the Teacher that Seems the thing to do Because I Want to Learn About Romance from You!

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

There is Always a Moment in Life When the Doors Open and Lets the Future in!

Post navigation