Randolph Harris II International Institute

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Of Luxuries Bright, Milky Soft and Rosy– Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth do Right?

ImageI want you to go to New York. New York is the capitol of the World. And I want you to go to school there. You are to have other companions now, good, decent security guards who will keep you safe. I want you to have the finest education. Remember, whatever you have suffered, no matter how bad it has been, you can use that, use that to be a stronger person. Once people believed that the World was flat; however, science has proved that the World is round. Now in spite of that, one still believes that life is flat and goes from birth to death. However, life is probably round and much superior in extension and capacity to the hemisphere known to us at present. Future generations will probably enlighten us on this so interesting subject; and then science itself might arrive—willy0nilly at conclusions relation to the other half of existence. We respect the voyager, the explorer, the climber, the cosmonaut. It makes far more sense to me as a valid project—indeed, as a desperately and urgently required project for our time—to explore the inner space and time of consciousness. In over 100 cases where we studied the actual circumstances around the social event when one person comes to be regarded as schizophrenic, it seems to us that without exception the experience and behavior that get labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

ImageSchizophrenia can be a potential breakthrough as well as breakdown. Some schizophrenics are exceptionally bright and sensitive. They cannot dismiss the lies and distortions that beset them (indeed, all of us). They are extremely vulnerable, therefore, and experience full range of degradations. At the same time, they cannot tolerate these degradations. They do not know how to handle or rechannel them. So they build massive defenses against them, withdrawing, dissociating, or exploding. Yet, these excesses are also potentialities. They can, if properly integrated, signify the awakenings of freer minds. They can point beyond stifling patterns and pave the way to more creative, flexible lifestyles. Roman clap-trap? To the contrary. Consider such luminaries as Blake, Van Gogh, and Nietzsche. Consider numerous studies of the creative process. I believe that the key to significant life change is to be found in recovering one’s centering of life in one’s subjective vision. Genuine insight is to my mind is inner-sight, subjective vision. So-called insight that is chiefly derived from the therapist’s perceptions and interpretations is not inward-seeing; it is objective information about the person the patient has been, but is not evocative of one’s present being. I have always wanted to be one of the right people, always since my earliest recollections. My mother was a great admirer of cultured people. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

ImageVery early I somehow got the idea that cultured people had a different skin texture than most people—maybe it was because another favorite word of hers described cultured people as finer. Being right is so important and so easily lost. Obviously, being right means pleasing the teachers. Clearly, being right means being like Dad, who is loving and dependable. And so the explorations go. In some ways, I get confirmation of being right—recognitions, offices, approval. However, always the secret self must be hidden, that I know it right. It is shameful because it is emotional and unpractical, because it really wants to play many times when I force it to work, because it likes to daydream instead of being realistic. To selves: gradually one becomes more public, the other more hidden. We discover with how crippled and stifled a life can be when it is half-lived, half-listened to, and half-searched. Attending to the process of becoming aware, of inner searching, is another healing process. It is the capacity to reinterpret what cannot be denied. It might also be simply called the capacity for creative change. Such capacity means turning one’s dual nature into rewarding personal and professional activity, including enjoying one’s family, teaching and practicing psychotherapy. For clients and many of us, creative change also means a wealth of personal and career transformations with fresh ways to reunite and reframe our lives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

ImageSomething more has emerged from the explorations of my awareness…Something has been created. New meanings, new perceptions, new relationships, new possibilities now exit where they were not to be found before. In short, my inner vision is a creative process that does more than observe what is already at hand; it brings into being fresh possibilities. This is the astonishing and creative possibility latent in our being. Life that is searched and found choice, that chose and found change, that changed and found power. Again and again, I find that those to whom I speak or write take other—and to me, lesser—point as more fresh or meaningful. And yet, it is this very knowing as distinct from knowing about, which must be taken seriously; it is the World which so often calls out to be bridged. It is our lost sense, the inner awareness that has the potential to let each of us live in wholeness and with true realization of his or her unique nature. [And] it is our avenue toward the most profound meaning of life and the Universe. It is a plausible assumption that the working-class boy whose status is low in middle-class terms cares about that status, that this status confronts him with a genuine problem of adjustment. To this problem of adjustment there are a variety of conceivable responses, of which participation in the creation and the maintenance of the delinquent subculture is one. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

ImageWhat does the delinquent response have to offer? Let us be clear, first, about what this response is. The hallmark of the delinquent subculture is the explicit and wholesale repudiation of middle-class standards and the adoption of their very antithesis. The corner-boy culture is not specifically delinquent. Where it leads to behavior which may be defined as delinquent, for instance, truancy, it does so not because nonconformity to middle-class norms defines conformity to corner-boy norms, but because conformity to middle-class norms interferes with conformity to corner-boy norms. The corner-boy plays truant because he does not like school, because he wishes to escape from a dull and unrewarding and perhaps humiliating situation. However, truancy is not defined as intrinsically valuable and status-giving. The member of the delinquent subculture plays truant because good middle-class (and working-class) children do not play truant. Corner-boy resistance to being herded and marshaled by middle-class figures is not the same as the delinquent’s floating and jeering of those middle-class figure and active ridicule of those who submit. The corner boy’s ethic of reciprocity, his quasi-communal attitude toward the property of in-group members, is shared by the delinquent. However, this ethic of reciprocity does not sanction the delinquent and malicious violation of the property rights of persons outside the in-group. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

ImageWe have observed that the differences between the corner-boy and the college-boy or middle-class culture are profound but that in many ways they are profound differences in emphasis. We have remarked that the corner-boy culture does not so much repudiate the value of many middle-class achievements as it emphasizes certain other values which make such achievement improbable. In short, the corner-boy culture temporizes with middle-class morality; the full-fledged delinquent subculture does not. It is precisely here, we suggest, in the refusal to temporize, that the appeal of the delinquent subculture is possessed. Let us recall that it is characteristically American, not specifically working-class or middle-class, to measure oneself against the widest possible status Universe, to seek status against all comers, to be as good as or better than anybody—anybody, that is, within one’s own age and gender category. As long as the working-class corner-boy clings to a version, however attenuated and adulterated, of the middle-class culture, he must recognize his inferiority to working-class and middle-class college-boy. The delinquent subculture, on the other hand, permits no ambiguity of the status of the delinquent relative to that of anybody else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

ImageIn terms of the norms of the delinquent subculture, defined by this negative polarity to the respectable status system, the delinquent’s very nonconformity to middle-class standards sets one above most exemplary college boy. Another important function of the delinquent subculture is the legitimation of aggression. We surmise that a certain amount of hostility is generated among working-class children against middle-class persons, with their airs of superiority, disdain or condescension and against middle-class norms, which are, in a sense, the cause of their status-frustration. TO infer inclinations to aggression from the existence of frustration is hazardous; we know that aggression is not an inevitable and not the only consequence of frustration. Nevertheless, despite our imperfect knowledge of these things, we would be blind if we failed to recognize that bitterness, hostility and jealousy and all sorts of retributive fantasies are among the most common and typically human responses to public humiliation. However, for the child who temporizes with middle-class morality, overt aggression and even the conscious recognition of one’s own hostile impulses are inhibited, for one acknowledges the legitimacy of the rules in terms of which one is stigmatized. For the child who breaks clean with the middle-class mortality, on the other hand, there are no moral inhibitions on the free expression of aggression against the sources of frustration. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

ImageMoreover, the connection we suggest between status-frustration and the aggressiveness of the delinquent subculture seems to us more plausible than many frustration-aggression hypotheses because it involves no assumptions about obscure and dubious displacement of aggression against substitute targets. The targets in this case is the manifest cause of the status problem. It seems to us that the mechanism of reaction-formation should also play a part here. Its hallmark is an exaggerated, disproportionate, abnormal intensity of response, inappropriate to the stimulus which seems to elicit it. The unintelligibility of the response, the overreaction, becomes intelligible when we see that it has the function of reassuring the actor against an inner threat to one’s defenses as well as the function of meeting an external situation on its own terms. Thus we have the mother who compulsively shows inordinate affection upon a child to reassure herself against her latent hostility and we have the male adolescent whose awkward and immoderate masculinity reflects a basic insecurity about one’s own gender-role. In like manner, we would expect the delinquent boy who, after all, has been socialized in a society dominated by a middle-class mortality and who can never quite escape the blandishments of middle-class society, to seek to maintain one’s safeguards against seduction. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

ImageReaction-formation, in his case, should take the form of irrational, malicious, unaccountable hostility to the enemy within the gates as well as without: the norms of the respectable middle-class society. Any genuine symbol, with its accompanying ceremonial rite, becomes the mirror the reflects insight, new possibilities, new wisdom, and other psychological and spiritual phenomena that we do not dare experience on our own. We cannot for two reasons. The first is our own anxiety: the new insights often—and, we could even say, typically—would frighten us too much were we to take fully and lonely responsibility for them. In the age of ferment such insights may come frequently, and they require more psychological and spiritual responsibility than most individuals are prepared to bear. In dreams people can let themselves do things that would normally be too outrageous to think or say in ordinary speech. The second reason is we escape hubris. The value of the dreams, like these divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. The philosopher came to the conclusion that it meant one is wisest because one had admitted one’s own ignorance. Ecstasy is a time honored method of transcending our ordinary consciousness and a way of helping us arrive at insights we could not attain otherwise. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

ImageAn element of ecstasy, however slight, is part and parcel of every genuine symbol and myth; for if we genuinely participate in the symbol or myth, we are for that moment taken out of and beyond ourselves. The humanity of the rebel is possessed in the fact that civilization rises from one’s deeds. The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores and the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls oneself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel. Civilization begins with a rebellion. Prometheus, one of the Titans, steals fire from the gods on Mount Olympus and brings it as a gift to beings, marking the birth of human culture. For this rebellion Zeus sentences him to be chained to Mount Caucasus where vultures consume his lover during the day and at night it grows back only to be again eaten away the next day. This is a tale of the agony of the creative individual, whose nightly rest only resuscitates him so that he can endure his agonies the next day. However, note also that Prometheus is released from his sufferings only when an immortal renounces his immortality in Prometheus’ favor. This Chiron does. What a vivid affirmation of human life, one of the essential characteristics of which is that each one of us will some day die! #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

ImageIt is saying: “I willingly give up immortality to affirm humanity; I am willing to die in order to affirm human civilization.” It is death which humanizes us. And the fact that we die is intimately bound up with our rebellion and our creating civilization. This is a truth which can be known in its full force only by the rebel. A similar rebellion and a similar acceptance of mortality are central in another account of the beginning of civilization, that of the story of Adam and Eve. The essence of their deed is rebellion—with prompting from that daimonic element in nature, the snake. The remarkable parallel in the stories of Prometheus and Adam is that the gods are pictured as the enemies of humans; they seek to keep humans perpetually subordinated. Yahweh is worried least Adam and Eve, having eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, will also eat of the tree of eternal life. Again, the fact of being’s mortality is brought in as a necessary prerequisite for creativity and civilization. True, we yearn for immortality, we struggle to form symbols of it, and we smart under the necessity of dying. Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light. However, if we did not know that we will die we would create no more than did the gods, lolling away their endless days on Mount Olympus, a boring succession of tomorrow and tomorrow relieved only by occasional pleasures of the flesh affairs with mortals. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

ImageConsciousness itself, which includes anxiety, guilt, and a sense of responsibility, is born when Adam and Eve are ejected from Eden. And all this happens in an act of rebellion. This is not foreign to psychology: there is no meaningful “yes” unless the individual could also have said “no.” Consciousness requires the exercise of the individual’s counterwill; it is called forth, inspired, and developed by the conflicts that occur in every individual’s life which force one to wonder and to call on power one did not know one possessed. Consider also he tale of Orestes. This is a representation of beings assuming responsibility for one’s own life, likewise a prerequisite of civilization. It is similar to the story of Prometheus and that f Adam and Eve in the sense that it depicts the taking of a giant step forward in the humanization of beings; and the fact that Orestes identifies with his father should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the myth emphasizes even more profoundly that an individual’s existence must start with a rebellion against his mother, to whom he is tied at birth by the umbilical cord. After Orestes’ assassinates his mother, and his cutting himself loose from Mycenae, he endures persecution by the Erinyes, who drive him to virtual insanity. Likewise many persons in psychotherapy struggle, on the brink of psychosis, toward autonomy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

ImageThe stages of the dramas are Orestes’s act, his guilt and atonement, his assuming responsibility for his deed, and his ultimate forgiveness in the Eumenides, the final play of Aeschylus’ trilogy, by a court composed of men, not gods. It is a portrayal of the importance of rebellion for the capacity to assume responsibility for one’s own and one’s fellow’s lives. We also note that startling regularity through history with which society martyrs the rebel in one generation and worships him in the next. Sokrates, Jesus, Prince Lestat, William Blake—the list is as endless as it is rich. It we look more closely at the first two, we shall see how the rebel typically challenges the citizenry with his visions. Jesus’ dictum was: “It was said unto you of old, but I say unto you.” Although Sokrates refused to evade the law, he challenged it: “Men of Athens, I shall obey God rather than you, and so long as I live I shall never cease from the teaching of philosophy.” Both are introductions to frank espousal of rebellious teachings; they are challenges to the structure and stability of the society. Society can tolerate only a certain amount of threat to its mores, laws, and established ways. However, if civilization has only its own mores and no input to fertilize its growth—that is, has only its established ways—it stagnates in passivity and apathy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

ImageThe adaptation that has been worked out is to martyr the rebel during the time in which he or she lives and then, when he or she is dead and there is no chance for one to alter one’s message (it is now established), disinter one, apotheosize one, and finally worship one. If the gods are occupied with keeping beings subordinate, why do not we simply say: “Away with them!” Then we could, as rationalist through the ages have tried to do, simply accept Jesus and Sokrates and Prince Lestat as the sensitive human beings they were. However, that is to misunderstand the function of the gods. Gods are, culturally speaking, symbols of our ideal yearnings and visions. (Symbols encompasses diverse stands of reality and participates in the reality itself.) God is the symbol of the power human beings year for but do not have. We are always enlarging our insights and visions. To simply deny the god function in human life is to impoverish our lives, specifically our ideals and our visions. However, as we enlarge and purify our insights (say about justice) and our visions (say of a better World), we also enlarge our symbols of the gods. This is why one reads in the Old Testament of the curious phenomenon of Abraham arguing with God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, saying: “Far be that from Thee! Shall not the judge of all the Earth do right?” (Genesis 18.25). #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

ImageAbraham takes God to task for not living up to his own principles. God in terms of his new vision of what God ought to be and stand for. This curious phenomenon—source of much gymnastics among theologians—makes no sense when we define God as the all-perfect, purely ineffable. However, it makes entire sense when we see God, as I believe the higher religions have always seen Him, as the confluence of the Ground of Being (the given aspect of life) and being’s own capacity for spiritual insight (the autonomous aspect of the individual being). The highest function of rebellion is the rebellion in the name of “God above God.” Everyone at one time or another finds oneself in a situation where one must decide whether one shall use or avoid the name of God, whether one shall talk with personal involvement about religion matters, either for or against them. Making such a decision is often difficult. We feel that we should remain silent in certain groups of people because it might be tactless to introduce the name of God, or even to talk about religion. However, our attitude is not unambiguous. We believe we are being tactful, when actually we may be cowardly. And then sometimes we accuse ourselves of cowardice, although it is really tact that prevents us from speaking out. This happen not only to those who would speak out for God, but also to those who would speak out against God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

ImageWhether for or against Him, God’s name is on our lips and we are embarrassed because we feel that more is at stake than social tact. So we keep silent, uncertain as to whether we are right or wrong. The situation itself is uncertain. Perhaps we might isolate ourselves or seem ridiculous by even mentioning the divine name, affirming or denying it. However, there might also be another present for whom the mention of the divine name would produce a first experience of the Spiritual Presence and a decisive moment in one’s life. And again, perhaps there may be someone for whom a tactless allusion to God would evoke a definite sense of repulsion against religion. One may now think that religion as such is an abuse of the name of God. No one can look into the hearts of others, even if one converses with them intimately. We must risk now to talk courageously and now to keep silent tactfully. However, in one case should we be pushed into a direct affirmation or denial of God which lacks the tact that is born of awe. The sublime embarrassment about His real Presence in and through His name should never leave us. When they have had to teach their children the divine name, many persons have felt the pain of this embarrassment, and others have felt it perhaps when they tried to protect their children against a divine name that they considered an expression of dangerous superstition. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

ImageIt seems natural to teach child about most objects in nature and history without embarrassment, and there are parents who think it is equally natural to teach them divine things. However, I believe that many of us as parents in this situation feel a sublime embarrassment. We know as Jesus knew that children are more open to the divine Presence than adults. It may well be, however, that if we use the divine name easily, we may close this openness and leave our children insensitive to the depth and the mystery of what is present in the divine name. However, if we try to withhold it from them, whether because we affirm or because we deny it, emptiness may take hold of their hearts, and they may accuse us later of having cut them off from the most important thing in life. A Spirit inspired tact I necessary in order to find the right way between these dangers. No technical skill or psychological knowledge can replace the sublimely embarrassed mind of parents or teachers, and especially of teachers of religion. There is a form of misuse of the name of God that offends those who hear it with a sensitive ear, just because it did not worry those who misused it without sensitivity. I speak now of a public use of the name of God which has little to do with God, but much to do with human purpose—good or bad. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

ImageThose of us who are grasped by the mystery present in the name of God are often stung when this name is used in governmental and political speeches, in opening prayers for conferences and dinners, in secular and religious advertisements, and in international war propaganda. Often the frequent use of the name of God is praised, as this is an indication that we are a religious nation. Ans one boasts of this, comparing one’s nation with others. Should this be condemned? It is hard not to do so, but neither is it easy. If the divine name is used publicly with full conviction, and therefore with embarrassment and Spiritual tact, it may be used without offense, although this is hardly ever so. It is usually taken in vain when used for purposes that are not t the glory of His name. Through the process of learning to respect God and his name, one will begin to unlock the deeper mysteries of the Holy Ghost. You will gain greater knowledge in regard to your own divine power and creation itself. It will become clear that through perception we can turn power n and off and will come to understand that gaining power is not really about obtaining something we do no have. It is more about learning to perceive what already dwells within the soul. The soul with allow us to experience God and the vast power of the concept through a continual process of becoming. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

ImageMany are worshipping a false divine blueprint drawn upon the collective mind of humanity which binds individual desire to guilt and evil, syphoning the minds of people turning them into slaves, and this is destroying the ability to love self. Evil is a power which cuts down love. This separation from God is the impetus which forces humankind to give up their power of loving, faith and adoring the divine source leaving a black hole of hatred within that cases prejudice, spite, and lack of compassion for the totality. It is not empowering, but separating human beings from the inherent power. “And now behold, we desire to know the cause of this exceedingly great neglect; yea, we desire to know the cause of your thoughtless state. Can you think to sit upon your thrones in a state of thoughtless stupor, while your enemies are spreading the work of death around you? Yea, while they are murdering thousands of your people?” reports Alma 60.6-7. “And now behold, I say unto you, I fear exceedingly that the judgments of God will come upon this people, because of their exceeding slothfulness, yea, even the slothfulness of our government, and their exceedingly great neglect toward their brethren, yes, towards those who have been slain,” report Alma 60.14. The other ways were not without their usefulness and helpfulness, of course, but they lost that value the moment they were turned into substitute for the interior way, which is unique and without a second because each one of us is unique. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

ImageEach person gets one’s own special experience of life, makes one’s own special set of contact with other persons, and meets one’s own particular destiny. In one’s reactions to and dealings with all this, one is really reacting to and dealing with oneself. One is showing quarrelsomeness, or trying to conquer it; ne is losing oneself in the day’s activity, or saving oneself from it in a half-hour retreat. One is letting negative thoughts or feelings stay in one’s heart, or trying to drive them out of it. One is practicing a larger relationship and a kindlier attitude toward those one encounters in one’s day-to-day business, or one is failing to recognize why they—and not others who are quite different—have been put into one’s path by the Infinite Intelligence (God). Our environment is really a testing-place and a disciplinary school. Speech is no longer a means to express internal power and raise one’s vibrational frequency via the vibrations of the tonal sound. It is no longer a tool to speak our reality into existence. It is through God’s angelic force that words of power are reserved for the few. Speech is not used for mere conversation even though its power really serves a much deeper and greater purpose. “When a person speaks by power of the Holy Ghost, that power carries it unto hearts,” reports 2 Nephi 33.1. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Nature Keeps Her Equilibrium by Bringing in Counter Forces, or Complementary Ones, to Correct or Balance Any Condition where to Much has Gone too Far!

ImageYou know why this disconcerts you so very much? I will tell you why! Because you never admitted to yourself that what you did in writing your books, in writing your songs, in singing your songs…you never admitted that it was all for us. You always pretended it was some great gesture to humankind and for their benefit. Wipe us out. Really! You never admitted that you were one of us, talking to the rest of us, and what you did, you as part of us! It may be argued that the working-class boy does not care what middle-class people think of him, that he is ego-involved only in the opinions of his family, his friends, his working-class neighbors. A definitive answer to this argument can come only from research designed to get at the facts. This research, in our opinion, is yet to be done. There is, however, reason to believe that most children are sensitive to some degree about the attitudes of any persons with whom they are thrown into more than the most superficial kind of contact. The contempt or indifference of others, particularly of those like schoolmates and teachers, with whom we are constrained to associate for long hours every day, is difficult, we suggest, to shrug off. It poses a problem with which one may conceivably attempt to cope in a variety of ways. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

ImageOne of the ways we may attempt to deal with the problem is by making an active effort to change oneself in conformity with the expectations of others; one may attempt to justify or explain away one’s inferiority in terms which will exculpate one; one may tell oneself that one really does not care what these people think; one may react with anger and aggression. However, the least probable response is simple, uncomplicated, honest indifference. If we grant the probable truth of the claim that most American working-class children are most sensitive to status sources on their own level, it does not follow that they take lightly rejection, disparagement and censure from other status sources. Even on their own social level, the situation is far from simple. The working class, we have repeatedly emphasized, is not culturally homogeneous. Not only is there much diversity in the cultural standards applied by one’s own working-class neighbors and kin so that it is difficult to find a working-class milieu in which middle-class standards are not important. In addition, the working-class culture we have described is, after all, an ideal type; most working-class people are culturally ambivalent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

ImageDue to lack of capacity, of the requisite character structure or of luck, they may be working-class in terms of job and income; they may have accepted this status with resignation and rationalized it to their satisfaction; and by example, by class-linked techniques of child training and by failure to support the middle-class agencies of socialization they may have produced children deficient in the attributes that make for status in middle-class terms. Nevertheless, all their lives, through all the major media of mass indoctrination—the school, the movies, the radio, the newspapers and the magazines—the middle-class powers-that-be that manipulate these media have been trying to sell them on middle-class values and middle-class standards of living, for the most part. However, TV News has become nothing but reports of crime, destruction, and anchored by talking heads who are pushing for rebellion and an abortion of American family values. Nonetheless, there is the propaganda of the deed, the fact that the middle-class powers-that-be have seen with their own eyes working-class contemporaries get ahead and make the grade in the middle-class World. In consequence of all this, we suspect that few working-class parents unequivocally repudiate as intrinsically worthless middle-class objectives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

ImageThere is good reason to believe that the modesty of working-class aspirations is partly a matter of trimming one’s sails to the available opportunities and resources and partly a mater of unwillingness to accept the discipline which upward striving entails. However complete and successful one’s accommodation to an humble status, the vitality of middle-class goals, of the American Dream, is nonetheless likely to manifest itself in one’s aspirations for one’s children. One’s expectations may not be grandiose, but ne will want one’s children to be better off than one is. Whatever one’s own work history and social reputation may be, one will want one’s children to be steady and respectable. One may exert few beneficial pressures to succeed and the experiences one provides one’s children may even incapacitate them for success; one may be puzzled at the way they turn out. However, whatever the measures of one’s own responsibility in accounting for the product, one is not likely to judge that product by unadulterated corner-boy standards. Even corner-boy parents, although they may value in their children such corner-boy virtues as generosity to friends, personal loyalty and physical prowess, are likely also to be gratified by the recognition by middle-class representatives and by the kinds of achievement for which the college-boy want of life is a prerequisite. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

ImageEven in the working-class milieu from which one acquired his incapacity for middle-class achievement, the working-class corner-boy may find himself at a status disadvantage as against his more upwardly mobile peers. Lastly, of course, is that most ubiquitous and inescapable status of sources, oneself. Technically, we do not call the person’s attitudes towards oneself status but rather self-esteem, or, when the quality of the self-attitude is specifically moral, conscience or superego. The important question for us is this: To what extent, if at all, do boys who are typically working-class and corner-boy in their overt behavior evaluate themselves by middle-class, college-boy standards? For our overt behavior, however closely it conforms to one set of norms, need not argue against the existence of effectiveness of alternative and conflicting norms. The failure of our own behavior to conform to our own expectations is an elementary and commonplace fact which gives rise to the tremendously important consequences of guilt, self-recrimination, anxiety and self-hatred. The reasons for the failure of self-expectations and overt conduct to agree are more complex. One reason is that we often internalize more than one set of norms, each of which would dictate a different course of action in a given life situation; since we can only do one thing at a time, however, we are forced to choose between them or somehow to compromise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

ImageIn either case, we fall short of the full realization of our expectations and must somehow cope with the residual discrepancy between those expectations and our overt behavior. The love of violence is, to me, the ancient and symbolic gesture of beings against the constraints of society. Vicious beings can exploit impulse as vicious. For no society is strong which does not acknowledge the protesting being; and no being is human who does not draw strength from the natural animal. Violence is the sphinx by the fireside, and she has a human face. In Truffaut’s film The Wild Child, we see a re-enactment of an actual event that took place in the eighteenth century but which has special poignancy for us here. A doctor tries to teach a savage boy who was found in the forest living as an animal to see if he can be brought back to the human condition. The affectionate Victor, as Truffaut has named the boy, learns to speak and to count in rudimentary fashion. However, these small successes and failures only add up to ambiguity. In a moment of discouragement, Truffaut as the doctor resolves to stake all on one unambiguous test to find out whether Victory is human—will the boy fight back when he is punished? Knowing that Victory accepts punishment—being shut in a closet—when he has made a mistake, Truffaut tried to shut him in the closet when he had correctly done the task he was assigned. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

ImageVictory puts up a fight because he did nothing wrong and is being shoved in a closet. With a glad sigh of recognition the doctor stats that there is present in the boy the central element which constitutes the human being. What is this element? It is the capacity to sense injustice and take a stand against it in the form of I-will-be-destroyed-rather-than-submit. It is a rudimentary anger, a capacity to muster all one’s power and asset it against what one experiences as unfair. However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguished characteristic of human beings. It is, in short, the capacity to rebel. In the present day, when multitudes of people are caught in anxiety and helplessness, they tend psychologically to freeze up and to cast out the city walls whoever would disturb their pretended peace. Ironically, it is during just those periods of transition when they most need the replenishing that the rebel can give them that people have the greatest block in listening to him. However, in casting out the rebel, we cut our own lifeline. For the rebel function is necessary as the life-blood of culture, as the very roots of civilization. First I must make the important distinction between the rebel and the revolutionary. One is in ineradicable opposition to the other. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

ImageThe revolutionary seeks an external political change, the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another. The origin of the term is the World revolve, literally meaning a turnover, as the revolution of a wheel. When the conditions under a given government are insufferable some groups may seek to break down that government in the conviction that any new form cannot but be better. Many revolutions, however, simply substitute one kind of government for another, the second no better than the first—which leaves the individual citizen, who has had to endure the inevitable anarchy between the two, worse off than before. Revolution may do more harm than good. The rebel, on the other hand, is one who opposes authority or restraint: one who breaks with established custom or tradition. His distinguished characteristic is his perpetual restlessness. He seeks above all an internal change, a change in the attitudes, emotions, and outlook of the people to whom he is devoted. He often seems to be temperamentally unable to accept success and the ease it brings; he kicks against the pricks, and when one frontier is conquered, he soon becomes ill-at-ease and pushes on to the new frontier. He is drawn to the unquiet minds and spirits, for he shares their everlasting inability to accept stultifying control. He may, as Sokrates did, refer to himself as the gadfly for the state—the one who keeps the state for settling down into complacency, which is the first step toward decadence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

ImageNo matter how much the rebel gives the appearance of being egocentric or of being on an ego trip, this is a delusion; inwardly the authentic rebel is anything but bash. True to the meaning of the rebel as one who renounces authority, he seeks primarily not the substitution of one political system for another. He may favor such political change, but it is not his chief goal. He rebels for the sake of a vision of life and society which he is convinced is critically important for himself and his fellows. Every act of rebellion tacitly presupposes some value. Whereas the revolutionary tends to collect power around himself, the rebel does not seek power as an end and has little facility for using it; he tends to share his power. Like the resistance fighters in France during the last World war, the rebel fights not only for the relief of his fellow men and women but also for his personal integrity. For him these are but two sides of the same coin. The enslaved being who kills one’s master is an example of the revolutionary. He can then only take his master’s place and be killed in turn by later revolutionaries. However, the rebel is the one who realizes that the master is as much imprisoned, if not as painfully, as he is by the institution for slavery; he rebels against that system which permits slaves and masters. His rebellion, if successful, saves the master also from the indignity of own slaves. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

ImageWe can see in the superb statues of Apollo carved at this time of Greek opulence—the archaic figure with his strong, straight form, his calm beauty of head, his ordered features which are eloquent with controlled passion, even down to the slight knowing smile on the almost straight mouth—how this god could be the symbol in which the Greek artists as well as other citizens of that period perceived their longed-for order. There is a curious feature in these statues that I have seen: the eyes are dilated, made more open than is normal in the head of living man or in classical Greek statues. If you walk through the archaic Greek room of the National Museum in Athens, you will be struck by the fact that the dilated eyes of the marble figures of Apollo give an expression of great alertness. What a contrast to the relaxed, almost sleepy eyes of the familiar fourth-century head of Hermes by Praxiteles. These dilated eyes of the archaic Apollo are characteristic of apprehension. They express the anxiety—the excessive awareness, the looking about on all sides least something unknown might happen—that goes with living in fomenting age. There is a remarkable parallel between these eyes and the eyes in the figures Michelangelo painted in another formative period, the Renaissance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

ImageAlmost all of Michelangelo’s human beings, powerful and triumphant as they appear at first glance, have on closer inspection, the dilated eyes which are a telltale sigh of anxiety. And as if to demonstrate that he is expressing the inner tensions not only of his age but of himself as a member of his age, Michelangelo in his self-portraits paints eyes that are again markedly distended in the way that is typical of apprehension. The poet Rilke also was struck by Apollo’s prominent eyes with their quality of seeing deeply. In his “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” he speaks of “…his legendary head in which the eyeballs ripened,” and then continues “…But his torso still glows like a candelabrum in which his gaze, only turned low, holds and gleams. Else could not the curve of the breast blind you, nor in the slight turn of the loins could a smile be running to that middle, which carried procreation. Else would this stone be standing maimed and short under the shoulders’ translucent plunge nor flimmering like the fell of beasts of prey nor breaking out of all its countours like a star: for there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.” In this vivid picture we note how well Rilke catches the essence of controlled passion—not inhibited or repressed passion, as was to be the goal during the later Hellenistic age of the Greek teachers who had become afraid of vital drives. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

ImageThese early Greeks, who wept and made love and killed with zest, gloried in passion and Eros and the daimonic. (Persons in  therapy nowadays, considering the strange spectacle in ancient Greece, remark on the fact that it is the strong person like Odysseus or Achilles who weeps.) However, the Greeks knew also that these drives had to be directed and controlled. It was the essence, they believed, of a man of virtue (arete) that he chooses his passions rather than be chosen by them. In this lies the explanation of why they did not need to go through the self-castrating practice of denying Eros and the diamonic, as modern Western beings do. The sense of the archaic period is shown even in Rilke’s curious last sentence, which seems at first (but only at first) to be a non sequitur: “You must change your life.” This is the call of passionate beauty, the demand that beauty makes on us by its very presence that we also participate in the new form. Not all moralistic (the class has nothing whatever to do with right or wrong), it is nevertheless an imperious demand which grasps us with the insistence that we take into our own lives this new harmonious form. Christianity actually entered the confusion of the Roman World in order to simplify it and to lighten the terrible burdens of the miscarried sexual era. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

ImageChristianity was seen as the era of the son in revolt against the oppressions and inequalities of the era of the family. Under Christianity the spiritual fatherhood of Christ took the place of biological fatherhood of the family. Christ poses a totally new and radical question: “Who are my mother and brothers?” The son was now completely independent; he could freely choose his own spiritual father and was no longer bound by the fatalities of heredity. The individual could fashion his or her own salvation, independent of any Earthly authority. Christianity was a great democratization that put spiritual power right back into the hands of the single individual and in one blow wiped away the inequalities of this dispossessed and the slaves that had gradually and inexorably developed since the breakup of the primitive World and that had assumed such grotesque proportions in the mad drivenness of the Mediterranean World. As many historical scholars have pointed out, Christianity in this sense dipped back into paganism, into primitive communalism, and extended it beyond the tribe. Christianity was seen as a new form of democratic, universal, magical self-renewal. The person recaptured some of the spiritual integrity that the primitive had enjoyed. But as in all things human, the whole picture is ambiguous and confused, far different from the ideal promise. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

ImageActually Christianity was harnessed by the state, and its power was infused into the institution of kingship to keep its authority; the attack on the fatality of biology, the accidents of heredity, was put into the service of the ideology of the family, and it reinforced patriarchy. We still see this in Roman Catholic countries today. In other words, Christianity failed to establish the universal democratic equality that it had promised historically—the reinstitution of the sacred primitive community plus a valuation of the individual person that had no existed before. Such a revolution in thought and in social forms would have kept everything that was best in the primitive World view, and at the same time it would have liberated the person from the dead weight of communal constraints and conservatism that choked off individual initiative and development. Obviously, this failure of Christianity was intimately tied up with the general problem of class, slavery, real economic inequality. This had been the tragedy that Rome herself was unable to resolve. Rome created a new type of citizen but failed to carry through and create the necessary economic equality of the families, which was the only thing that could guarantee the new structure. After all, if each being was a king in one’s own family, one had to be an equal king with all others; otherwise the designation lost all meaning. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

ImageTheoretically, the state was dedicated to this kind of democracy because it arrogate to itself the power to hid everything in balance, to checkmate competing powers and to protract the citizens against each other. In the earlier chiefdoms, the kin group still kept their power, and there was no one to keep them from feuding among themselves. The chief’s kin group was usually the strongest, and he could punish those who attacked him, but he did not monopolize force as the later state did; he could not, for example, compel the people to go to war. The crucial characteristic of the state, and the hallmark of its genuine power and tyranny, was that it could compel its subjects to go to war. And this was because the power of each family was given over to the state; the idea was that this would prevent the social misuse of power. This made the state a king of power-bank, but the state never used this power to abolish economic inequalities; as a result it actually misused the social power entrusted to it by the families and held them in unequal bondage. Christianity, too, perpetuated this economic inequality and slavishness of the would-be free, democratic citizen; and there never has been, historically, any fundamental change in the massive structure of domination and exploitation represented by the sate after the decline of primitive society. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

ImageThe Reformation was a late attempt to reassert the promise of early Christianity—true individual power and equality—but it too failed by being absorbed in the unequal state scramble. It was not until World War I that the whole stricture finally crumbled, after the rumbling blow given by the French Revolution: the patriarchal family, divine monarchy, the dominance of the Church, the credibility of the democratic state in its promise of true equality. The Soviets alone pushed several of these down a mine shaft along with the czar. We are struggling today in the mire of this very discredit of all overlapping traditional immortality symbols. The struggle actually began at the time of the Roman Empire, and we have still not resolved it. We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans, elbow others to get a breath-quickening glimpse of the queen in her ritual procession, and confess to the priests and attend church. And we wonder why, with all this power capital drawn from many sources, we are deeply anxious about the meaning of our lives. The reason is plain enough: none of these, nor all of them taken together, represents an integrated World conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

ImageNot that promise of the ancient World and of Christianity failed completely. Something potentially great did emerge out o them: the era of psychological man. We can look at it as a development out of the era of the son. It took the form of a new kind of scientific individualism that burst out of the Renaissance and the Reformation. It represented a new power candidate for replacing all the previous ideologies of immortality, but now an almost completely and unashamedly secular one. This was a new Faustian pursuit of immortality through one’s own acts, one’s own works, one’s own discovery of truth. This was a kind of secular-humanist immortality based on the gifts of the individual. Instead of having one hero chieftain leading a tribe or a kingdom or one hero savior leading all humankind, society would not become the breeding ground for the development of as many heroes as possible, individual geniuses in great number who would enrich humankind. This was the explicit program of Enlightenment thinkers and of the ideology of modern Jeffersonian democracy. But alas it has been our sad experience that the new scientific austian being too has failed—in two resounding ways. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

ImageThese two ways of failure were represented almost all by themselves sum up the crisis of the end of our century. For one thing, modern democratic ideology simply repeated the failure of Rome and Christianity: it did not eliminate economic inequality. And so it was caught in the same fundamental and tragic contradictions as its predecessors. Second, the hope of Fustian beings was the they would discover Truth, obtain the secret to the workings of nature, and so assure the complete triumph of beings over nature, one’s apotheosis on Earth. Not only have Faustian beings failed to do this, but one is actually ruining the very theater of one’s own immortality with one’s own poisonous and madly driven works; once one had eclipsed the sacred dimensions, one had only the earth left to testify to the value of one’s life. This is why, I think, even one-dimensional politicians and bureaucrats, in both capitalist and communist countries, are becoming anxious about environmental collapse; the Earth is the only area of self-perpetuation in the new ideology of Faustian beings. “Hello, son, you are ready to come into the end? We cannot wait to hold you and rock you to sleep in your rocking chair. Before you know it, you will be standing, crashin ‘round the house like bandits, all day. You cannot get in to too much trouble, nothing gonna stop me from loving you always. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Image“My wild, wild son, run free. Oh, you will know it when you are were you are supposed to be. Oh, my wild, wild, son, run free. Oh, you will know it when you are living out your dream. Someday when you leave the house and the open road calls, just know your heart will not lie to you if you learn to listen close. When you meet your queen, go, get her make sure that she knows you will love her always, ‘fore you know it, your own child’s standing. You can crash around with them like bandits all day,” (Wild, Wild Son by Armin van Buuren). When you power is developed and accumulated it can then transmute and purify the energy of others so that it can be harnessed and channeled according to intent. We study God’s word to make sure that we have been adequately conditioned to raise our own store of personal power, and that way we are less likely to become a parasite. This kind of work should be employed strategically to take power from people who abuse power to level the playing field a bit. With the grace of God you will enhance your chances of success in your health, career, family, and education and in all things your power focuses on will be greatly intensified. “And he hath said: Repent all ye ends of the Earth, and come unto me, and be baptized in my name, and have faith in me, that ye may be saved,” reports Moroni 7.34. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19Image

Cresleigh Homes

Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch | Residence 2

Welcome to #BrightonStation Residence 2 at #CresleighRanch located in Rancho Cordova! Join Abbie Johnson as she walks through this beautiful single-story floor plan.

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There is an Invisible Mechanism within the Universe and an Intelligent Mind (God) Directing this Mechanism!

ImageMaybe it is time I discovered what is going on here for myself. Now listen to me. I want you to go belowstairs and stay there. If someone benighted emissary of the thing should crash-land on our wintry little paradise, you will be sage from it down there. Stay there till I return. This is the same precaution being taken by others the World over. Belowground you are safe. And if this thing talks to you, this Voice, well, try to learn more about it. In the settlement houses and other adult-sponsored and managed recreational agencies similar conflicts may often be seen between the middle-class values of the adults in charge and the working-class values of the children for whose benefit the institution ostensibly exist. Such organizations smile upon neat, orderly, polite, personable, mannerly children who want to make something of themselves. The sponsor, directors and group work leaders find it a pleasure to work with such children, whose values are so like their own, and make them feel welcome and respected. They do indeed feel a special responsibility toward the boy whose family and neighborhood culture have not equipped him with those values, the rough boy, the dirty boy, the bum who just hangs around with the gang on the corner, in the pool hall or in the candy store. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

ImageHowever, the responsibility they feel toward him is to encourage him to engage in more worthwhile activities, to join and to be a responsible member of some wholesome adult-supervised club or other group, to expurgate one’s language and, in general, to participate in the constructive program of the institution. Indeed, like the school, it functions to select potentially upwardly mobile working-class children and to help and encourage them in the upward climb. It is common experience of such organizations that they are very successful and do a lot of good but do not seem to get children who need them most. The reason is that here, as in the school, it is almost impossible to reward one or quite openly, punishing its absence or its opposite. The corner boy quickly senses that he is under the critical or at best condescending surveillance of people who are foreigners to his community and who appraise him in terms of values which he does no share. He is aware that he is being invidiously compared to others; he is uncomfortable; he finds it hard to accommodate himself to the rules of the organization. To win the favor of the people in charge he must change his habits, his values, his ambitions, his speech and his associates. Even were these things possible, the game might not be worth the candle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

ImageSo, having sampled what they have to offer, he returns to the street or to his clubhouse in a cellar where facilities are meager but human relations more satisfying. Not only in terms of standards of middle-class adults but in terms of their children’s standards as well, the working-class culture is likely to be a failure. Despite the existence among middle-class children of a youth culture which may differ in significant ways from the culture of their parents, the standards these children apply are likely to relegate to an inferior status their working-class peers. Gradually the group became more critical of prospective members. A process somewhat evident from the beginning became more obvious. In general only boys who measured up to the group’s unwritten, unspoken and largely unconscious standards were ever considered. These standards, characteristics of their middle-class homes, required the suppression of the impulsive disorderly behavior and put a high value on controlled cooperative attitudes. Hence even these normally healthy and boisterous boys were capable of rejecting schoolmates they considered too wild and boisterous. Coincident with this was an emphasis on intellectual capacity and achievement. They preferred smart as contrasted with dumb prospects. The boys seemed to use their club unconsciously to express and reinforce the standards learned in their homes and the community. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

ImageNot only teachers but schoolmates, in evaluating the character of other children, tend to give the highest ratings to the children of the higher social levels, although the correlation between social class and character reputation is far from perfect. Beneficial correlations between various indices of social class status of the home and social status in the schools as measured by pupils’ choices have been found. We have seen how social class and the behavior and personality associated with social class membership operate to determine prestige and clique and date patterns among high school boys and girls. This process operates in all classes, but it is especially noticeable in contacts with class V [lower-lower]. This class is so repugnant socially that adolescents in the higher classes avoid clique and dating ties with its members. Furthermore, working-class children are less likely to participate, and if they participate are less likely to achieve prominence, in extra-curricular activities, which are an important arena for the competition for status in the eyes of the students themselves. In the area of organized athletics the working-class boy is perhaps least unfitted for successful competition. Even here, however, he is likely to be at a disadvantage. Adherence to a training regimen and a schedule does not come to him as easily as to the middle-class boy and, unless he chooses to loosen his ties to his working-class friends, he is likely to find some conflict between the claims of the gang and those of his athletic career. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

ImageFinally, although we must not minimize the importance of athletic achievement as a status-ladder, it is, after all, granted to relatively few, of whatever social class background, to achieve conspicuously in this area. In summary, it may confidently be said that the working-class boy, particularly if his training and values be those we have here defined as working-class, is more likely than his middle-class peers to find himself at the bottom of the status hierarchy whenever he moves in a middle-class to which he values middle-class status, either because he values the good opinion of middle-class persons or because he had to some degree internalized middle-class standards himself, he faces a problem of adjustment and is in the market for a solution. The delinquent subculture, we suggest, is a way of dealing with the problems of adjustment we have described. These problems are chiefly status problems: certain children are denied status in the respectable society because they cannot meet the criteria of respectable status system. The delinquent subculture deals with these problems by providing criteria of status which these children can meet. We remarked earlier that our ego-involvement in a given comparison with others depends upon status universe. Whom do we measure ourselves against? #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

ImageIn some other societies virtue may consist in willing acceptance of the role of peasant, low-born commoner or member of an inferior caste and in conformity to the expectations of that role. If others are richer, more nobly-born or more able than oneself, it is by he will of an inscrutable Providence and not to be imputed to one’s own moral defect. The sting of status inferiority is thereby removed or mitigated; one measures oneself only against those of like social position. We have suggested, however, that an important feature of American democracy, perhaps of Western European tradition in general, is the tendency to measure oneself against all comers. This means that, for children as for adults, one’s sense of persona worth is at stake in status comparisons with all other persons, at least of one’s own age and gender, whatever their family background or material circumstances. It means that, in the lower levels of our status hierarchies, whether adult or juvenile, there is a chronic fund of motivation, conscious or repressed, to elevate one’s status position, either by striving to climb within the established status system or by redefining the criteria of status so that one’s present attributes become status-giving assets. To manage private loves and hates is to participate in an intricate private emotional system. When elements of that system are taken into the marketplace and sold as human labor, they become stretched into standardized social forms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

ImageIn these forms, a person’s contribution of feeling is thinner, less freighted with consequence but at the same time it is less seen as coming less from the self and being less directed to the other. For that reason it is more susceptible to estrangement. I followed emotion work into the job market via two routes. First I entered the World of the flight attendant. As a point of entry, I chose American Airlines for several reasons: it puts a higher premium on service than other airlines do; its in-flight training program is perhaps the best in the World; its service has been ranked very high; and it has some of the best uniforms for flight attendants and pilots. For all these reasons, American’s company demands are higher and its work demands are met with success. Thus American fulfills the demands they put on flight attendants. It also gives sharper point to the general case about emotion work in public life. When emotional labor is put into the public marketplace, it behaves like a commodity: the demand for it waxes and wanes depending upon the competition with the industry. I gathered information at American in various ways. First, I watched. The head of American Airlines Training and Conference Center in Fort Worth, Texas, a gentle young man called Jim Thomas, allowed me to attend classes there. I watched recruits learning passenger landing and meal service in the mock cabin. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

ImageI got to know the trainers, who patiently explained their work to me. They were generous with their time on duty and off; one trainer invited me home to dinner, and several repeatedly invited me to lunch. Over countless other breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, and in the airport bus, I talked with students doing Initial Training and with experienced flight attendants attending the mandatory Recurrent Training sessions. I interviewed twenty American officials, from the executive vice-president, training, sales, and billing. I held a group interview with seven supervisors. I interviewed four advertising agents employed by the firm commissioned to promote American Airlines and its flight attendants, and I looked through microfilms of thirty years of American Airlines advertising. Finally, I also interviewed the two public relations officials who were in charge of handling me. It is an elite occupation, it is difficult to find one of these prestigious careers. Flight attendants do emotion work to enhance the status of the customer and entice further sales by their friendliness, there is another side of the corporate show, represented by the bill collectors who are taught to deflate the anger and frustration of customers, so they are more likely to pay their bills on time. Therefore, some emotional labor principles apply to very different jobs and very different feelings. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

ImageA nineteenth-century child working in a challenging Lincrusta-Walton wallpaper factory and a well-paid twenty-first century American flight attendant have something in common: in order to survive in their jobs, they must mentally prepare themselves—the factory worker from his own body and physical labor, and the flight attendant from his or her own feelings and emotional labor. I am interested in telling the flight attendant’s story in order to promote a fuller appreciation of the costs of what one does. And I want to base this appreciation on a prior demonstration of what can happen to any of us when we become estranged from our feelings and the management of them. We feel. But what is a feeling? I would define feeling, like emotion, as a sense, like the sense of hearing or sight. In a general way, we experience it when bodily sensation are joined with what we see or imagine. Like the sense of hearing, emotion communicates information. Anxiety is a signal function. From feeling we discover our own viewpoint on the World. We often say that we try to feel. However, how can we do this? Feelings are not stored inside us, and they are not independent of acts of management. Both the act of getting in touch with feeling and the act of trying to feel may become part of the process that makes the thing we get in touch with, or the thing we manage, into a feeling or emotion. In managing feeling, we contribute to the creation of it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

ImageIf this is so, what we think of as intrinsic to feeling or emotion may have always been shaped to social form and put to civic use. Consider what happens when young men roused to anger go willingly to war, or when followers rally enthusiastically around their king, or mullah, or football team. Private social life may always have called for the management of feelings. They party guest summons up a gaiety owed to the host, the mourner summons up a proper sadness for the funeral. Each offers up a feeling as a momentary contribution to the collective good. What gives social patterns to our acts of emotion management? I believe that when we try to feel, we apply latent feeling rules. We say, “I should not feel so angry at what she did,” or “given our agreement, I have no right to feel jealous.” Act of emotion management are not simply private acts; they are used in exchanges under the guidance of feeling rules. Feeling rules are standards used in emotional conversation to determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of feeling. Through them, we tell what is due in each relation, each role. We may tribute to each other in the currency of the managing act. In interaction we pay, overpay, underpay, play with, acknowledge our dues, pretend to pay, or acknowledge what is emotionally due another person. In these ways, we make our try at sincere civility. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

ImageBecause the distribution of power an authority is unequal in some of the relations of private life, the managing acts can also be unequal. The myriad momentary acts of management compose part of what we summarize in the terms relation and role. Like the tiny dots of Seurat painting, the microcates of emotion management compose, through repetition and change over time, a movement of form. Some forms express inequality, others equality. Now what happens when feeling rules, like rules of behavioral display, are established though private negotiation but by company manuals? What happens when social exchanges are not, as they are in private life, subject to change or termination but ritually sealed and almost inescapable? What happens when the emotional display that one person owes another reflects a certain inherent inequality? The airline passenger may choose not to smile, but the flight attendant is obliged not only to smile but to try to work up some warmth behind it. What happens, in other words, when there is a transmutation of the private ways we use feeling? One sometimes needs a grand word to point out a coherent pattern between occurrences that would otherwise seem totally unconnected. My word is “transmutation.” When I speak of the transmutation of an emotional system, I mean to point out a link between a private act, such as attempting to enjoy a party, and a public act, such as summoning up good feeling for a customer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

ImageWhat is it that we do privately, often unconsciously, to feelings that nowadays often fall under the sway of large organization, social engineering, and the profit motive. Trying to feel what one wants, expects, or thinks one ought to feel is probably no newer than emotion itself. Conforming to or deviating from feeling rules is also hardly new. In organized society, rules have probably never been applied only to observable behavior. “Crimes of the heart,” have long been recognized because proscriptions have long guarded the preactions of the heart; the Bible say not to covet your neighbor’s wife, not simply to avid acting on that feeling. What is new in our time is an increasingly prevalent instrumental stance toward out native capacity to play, wittingly and actively, upon a range of feelings for a private purpose and the way in which that stance is engineered and administered by large organizations. This transmutation of the private use of feeling affects the two genders and the various social classes in distinctly different ways. Emotion management has been better understood by professionals because they have to create the emotional tine of social encounters: expressing joy at the Christmas presents others open, creating the sense of surprise at birthdays, or displaying alarm at the car speeding down the road. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

ImageNow given the fact that others are likely to check up on the more controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable, one can expect that sometimes the individual will try to exploit this very possibility, guiding the impression one makes through behavior felt to be reliably informing. For example, in gaining admission to a tight social circle, the participant observer may not only wear an accepting look while listening to an informant, but may also be careful to wear the same look when observing the informant talking to others; observers of the observer will then not as easily discover where one actually stands. When a neighbor dropped in to have a cup of tea, he would ordinarily wear at least a hint f an expectant warm smile as he passed through the door into the Cresleigh home. Since lack of physical obstructions outside the home and beautiful trees around the home, it usually made it possible to observe the visitor unobserved as he approached the house, islanders sometimes took pleasure in watching the visitor drop whatever expression he was manifesting and replace it with a sociable one just before reaching the door. However, some visitors, in appreciating this examination was occurring, would blindly adopt a social face a long distance from the house, thus ensuring the projection of a constant image. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

ImageThis kind of control upon the part of the individual reinstates the symmetry of the communication process, and sets the stage for a kind of information game—a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery. It should be added that since the others are likely to be relatively unsuspicious of the presumably unguided aspect of the individual’s conduct, he can gain much by controlling it. The others of course may sense that the individual is manipulating the presumably spontaneous aspects of his behavior, and seek in this very act of manipulation some shading of conduct that the individual has not managed to control. This again provides a check upon the individual’s behavior, this time his presumably uncalculated behavior, thus re-establishing the asymmetry of the communication process. Here I would like to add the suggestion that the arts of piercing an individual’s effort at calculated unintentionality seems better developed than our capacity to manipulate our own behavior, so that regardless of how many steps have occurred in the information game, the witness is likely to have the advantage over the actor, and the initial asymmetry of the communication process is likely to be retained. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

ImageWhat is of great interest in this development is the intimate unity of patriarchal family ideology with that of kingship. The king represented the new fountainhead of spiritual power in which the subjects were nourished. In primitive society the entire group had created magical power by means of the jointly celebrated ritual. However, with the gradual development of specialized ritualists and priests, the power to create power often fell to a special class and was no longer the possession of the whole collectivity. Where this happened it helped to turn the average man into an impotent subject. In many agrarian societies the priests went on to develop astronomy, calendars, and rituals of power for the control of nature via magic, whereas previously each person had helped exercise such control via the communal rituals. Without the priests’ calendar, how would the farmer know the auspicious days for planting? With their astronomy the priests accrued the tremendous prestige of predicting eclipses; and then they exercised the fantastic power of brining back the Sun out of the clutches of darkness. Not only did they save the World from chaos in such ways, but in some places they possessed the secret ritual for the creation of the kind’s power. Often the kings and priests were solidly allied in a structure of domination that monopolized all sacred power; this completed the development for the tribal level where the shaman would sometimes ally with the chief. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

ImageAll the less affluent subject could do in these societies was to grovel to the king and bring food to the priests in order to get a mite of magical protective power. The fathers imitated the kings so as to reenact the divine plan in their own homes; in this way they got a reflection of the king’s powers. If the gentlemen and ladies observed proper ritual behavior, the kingdom would flourish. So long as everyone in the kingdom copied the king, fathered sons, married off daughters, kept order in the family, and observed the household rituals, the balance of nature would not be upset in the divine household. All this took place in the divine cities, which themselves were eternal, connected to Heaven (Babylon equals Gate of the Gods), and protected and regenerated by the priestly rituals. Each city with its pyramidal temples and towers rose like a spire to penetrate the sky, the dimensions of invisible power, and to bathe itself in it. We can still feel this Gothic cathedral which penetrated Heaven and was bathed in the light of powers of Heaven. Rome is called the eternal city not because today tourists can always go back and find her as she was when they first visited her a few decades ago, but because she was regenerated in ancient times by centennial rituals, and was thought to have so much power sustaining her that she would never falter. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

ImageOne of the strong impetuses to the triumph of Christianity was the increasing sackings of Rome by the barbarians, which showed everyone that something was wrong with the old powers and some new magical sources had to be tapped. The divine king in the sacred city bathing the holy empire—these were a power tool in which the fathers nourished themselves while they assured their own perpetuation in the person of their sons. We can see that this represents a new kind of unification experience, with a focal point of power, that in its own way tries to recapture the intense unity of primitive society, with its focus of power in the clan and the ancestral spirits. The emperors and kings who proclaimed themselves divine did not do so out of mere megalomania, but out of a real need for a unification of experience, a simplification of it, and a rooting of it in a secure source of power. The leader, like the people, senses a need for a strongly focused moral unity of the sprawling and now senseless diversity of the kingdom, and he tries to embody it in his own person: By proclaiming themselves gods of empire, Sargon and Rameses wished to realize in their own persons that mystic or religious unity which one constituted the strength of the clan, which still maintained the unity of the kingdom, and which could alone form the tie between all the peoples of an empire. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

ImageAlexander the Great, the Ptolemies, and the Caesars, will, in their turn, impose upon their subjects the worship of the sovereign, not so much out of vanity as to consolidate moral unity…And so through its mystic principle the clan has survived in the empire. I must also warn that many will seem to have disdain for you because they are beings of false light. Their connection to divinity has been served due to a strategic plan of enslavement. Therefore, the masses will likely shun and reject you. However, you will cyclically being to attract others who align with your perfectly through time. This is not a path of severe loneliness, but rather a means to realize just how badly the human race has been shackled. We must awaken to this in order to see the truth of the lie and perceive the lie of truth. Do not take it personally. People are naturally God fearing and will as a result feel threatened by your power. “And it came to pass that they did break forth, all as one, in singing, and praising their God for the great thing which we had done for them, in preserving them from falling into the hands of their enemies. Blessed be the name of the Lord God Almighty, the Most High God. And their hearts were swollen with joy, unto the gushing out of many tears, because of the great goodness of God in delivering them out of the hands of their enemies; and they knew it was because of their repentance and their humility and that they had been delivered from an everlasting destruction,” reports 3 Nephi 4.30-33. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

ImageIndeed, the Cosmic Vision, which revealed the Presence of Infinite Intelligence throughout life, throughout the Universe and throughout history, which explained so many of the Higher Laws to me, came incongruously enough while I was sitting in a Cresleigh Hub Apartments in Folsom, California. With this humbling insight, the need to go abroad disappeared. And I then saw that it was really an ancient complex—a kind of auto-suggestion—inherited from my own far, reincarnatory past. Indeed, I found out that if I had remained loyal to the inward direction I had originally travelled, I need never have gone overseas at all, nor to those other Asiatic countries where I sought for Truth. What I needed could be very well found within myself. However, I had accepted the suggestion our of my past as well as out of the lips and writings of other persons. And so I deviated from the inward way. The shortcut, which the journeys to Asia offered, turned out to be a long way, for I traveled beautiful roads, and, in the end, had to return, as well as all have, to my own road. Indeed, there was nowhere else to go, and my Quest ended there. As this change occurs within, the external corporeal reality also begins to reflect that change. This is how the shackles of limitation will be broken and humankind will be liberated. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

ImageThis great work forces the physical plane to conform to and align with the plane of unlimited possibility by destroying the imposed limits of the false egregores of social, political and religion control. Then human beings, even those in high places, will come to be conscious of exactly how immortal they are not. If you are a God, why would you need to steal $1,000,000.00 USD from a child? As the World elevates to a higher level of thinking, then humankind can take back their sovereign right to rule over their own life. These are the true Olympians, not the mythic beings of human creation. Not until the light one has received becomes stabilized as a permanent thing can one be regarded as a master, and not until it is also full and complete can one be regarded as a sage. Sage is someone who is not only wide and dispassionate but who is also ready to proffer counsel out of one’s superior wisdom. One may dwell apart from humanity, if one chooses, but one’s Olympian aloofness will not be such that you cannot get a word of guidance out of one’s shy shut lips. Somehow we feel, and rightly, that the anchorite who has lost compassion or grown wholly self-centered may be pure and peaceful—but one cannot be a sage. One is a true messenger who seeks to keep one’s ego out of one’s work, who tries to bring God and beings together without oneself getting in between them. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20Image

One Who Knows Not the World-Order, Knows Not One’s Own Place therein!

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There were the films of symphony performances, the full-scale operas, the unending virtuous concerts! I thought I would go mad with the beauty of it—witnessing in living color and mesmerizing detail the London Philharmonic play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or the great Itzhak Perlman racing through the Brahms Concerto with an orchestra surrounding me. One of the situations in which children of all social levels come together and compete for status in terms of the same set of middle-class criteria and in which working-class children are most likely to be found wanting is in the schooled. American educators ae enamored of the idea of “democracy” signifies the fullest realization of the individual’s potentialities, the development of skills to an optimal level, the development of character and the abilities which can be bound by others, preparation for effective participation in the adult vocational World. Despite reservations such as with due regard to individual differences, this conception of democratic education implies that a major function of the schools is to promote, encourage, motivate, stimulate, in brief, reward middle-class ambition and conformity to middle-class expectations. However sincerely one may desire to avoid odious comparisons and to avoid, thereby, injury to the self-esteem of those who do not conform to one’s expectations, it is extremely difficult to reward, however subtly, successful conformity without at the same time, by implication, condemning and punishing the non-conformist. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

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That same teacher who prides oneself on one’s recognition and encouragement of deserving work-class children dramatizes, by that very show of pride, the superior merit of the college-boy or college-girls working-class child to one’s less gifted or [street] corner-boy and corner-girl working-classmates. There are three goof reasons why status in the school, insofar as it depends upon recognition by the teacher, should be measured by middle-class standards. First, the teacher is hired to foster the development of middle-class personalities. The middle-class board of education, the middle-class parents whom they represent and, it is to be presumed, many of the working-class parents as well expect the teacher to define one’s job as the indoctrination of middle-class aspirations, character, skills and manners. Second, the teacher oneself is almost certain to be a middle-class person, who personally values ambition and achievement and spontaneously recognizes and rewards these virtues in others. The third relates to the school itself as a social system with certain structural imperatives of its own. The teacher’s textbooks in education and one’s own supervisors may stress individualization and consideration for the needs, limitations and special problems of each student. Nonetheless, the teacher actually handles 20, 30, or 40 students at a time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

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Regardless of what one conceives one’s proper function to be, the teacher necessarily looks with favor on the quiet, cooperative, well-behaved pupils who make one’s job easier and with disapproval and vexation on the lusty, irrepressible boisterous youngsters who are destructive of order, routine and predictability in the classroom. Furthermore, the teacher is like to be upwardly mobile or at least anxious about the security of one’s tenure in one’s present job. One is motivated, therefore, to conform to the criteria in terms of which one’s superiors evaluate one. Those superiors may themselves be progressive and in teacher meetings preach democracy in the classroom and individualization and indeed genuinely believe in those goals. However, the degree to which a teacher tries to achieve these goals or succeeds in doing so is not highly visible and readily determined. On the other hand, grades, performance and standardized examinations, the cleanliness and orderliness of the classroom and the frequency with which the children are sent to the front office are among the most easily determined and objective bases for the evaluation of teacher performance. A good rating, then, by one’s supervisors is possible only if the teacher sacrifices to some degree the very individualization and tolerance which those same supervisors may urge upon one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

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Research on the kinds of behavior which teachers regard as the most problematical among their pupils gives results consistent with our expectations. The most serious problems, from the standpoint of the teacher, are those children who are restless and unruly, who fidget and squirm, who annoy and distract, who create discipline problems. The good children are the studious, the obedient, the docile. It is precisely the working-class children who are most likely to be problems because of their relative lack of training in order and discipline, their lack of interest in intellectual achievement and their lack of reinforcement by the home in conformity to the requirements of the school. Both in terms of conduct and in terms of academic achievement, the failures in the classroom are drawn disproportionately from the lower social class levels. The child has little or no choice in selecting the group within which one shall compete for status and one is evaluated against the total range of the ability distribution. It is here that, day after day, most of the children in the lower fourth of the distribution have their sense of worth destroyed, develop feelings of insecurity, become frustrated and lose confidence in their ability to learn that which they are capable of learning. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

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In dialogue, each experiences the other as a person, as the origin and source of one’s intentional acts. Each participant aims to show one’s being to the other as it is for the individual. Transparency, not mystification, is one of the goals. It matters little whether the dialogue is nonverbal or verbal; whether it occurs between a philosopher and one’s pupil, a therapist and one’s patient, a parent and child, or two friends. The aim is to show oneself in willful honesty before the other and to respond to the other with an expression of one’s experience as the other has affected it. Dialogue is like mutual unveiling, where each seeks to be the experienced and confirmed by the other as the one he or she is for oneself. Such dialogue is most likely to occur when the two people believe each is trustworthy and of goodwill. The threat that motivates people to conceal their intentions and experience in manipulative encounters is absent in dialogue. The aims that makes the action of each intelligible to other will be fully revealed. Now, I would like to examine the relationship between an experimenter and one’s subject in the light of those analyses of the two kinds of encounter. The usual encounter between a psychological researcher and one’s subject has more in common with the example of the young being on the make than it has with dialogue. The experimenter wants something from the subject, but one wants to keep the individual partly mystified as to what it is. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

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Moreover, one does not want to frighten the subject away; so the psychological researcher often cloaks one’s intentions with camouflage. If one tips one’s hand, one may influence the subject and bias one’s findings. One tells the subject as little as one can when the latter appears in the laboratory. Actually, in some ways a research psychologist tries to impersonate a machine by depersonalizing oneself. One tries to be invisible or to be constant. One seldom tries to fin out from one’s subject just how that person experiences one, the researcher, either perceptually or in one’s fantasy. When an individual appears before others one’s actions will influence the definition of the situation which they come to have. Sometimes the individual will act in a thoroughly calculating manner, expressing oneself in a given way solely in order to give the kind of impression to others that is likely to evoke from them a specific response one is concerned to obtained. Sometimes the individual will be calculating in one’s activity but be relatively unaware that this is the case. Sometimes one will intentionally and consciously express oneself in a particular way, but chiefly because the tradition of one’s group or social status require this kind of expression and not because of any particular response (other than vague acceptance or approval) that is likely to be evoked from those impressed by the expression. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

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Sometimes the traditions of an individual’s role will lead one to give a well-designed impression of a particular kind and yet one may be neither consciously nor unconsciously disposed to create such an impression. The others, in their turn. May be suitably impressed by the individual’s efforts to convey something, or may misunderstand the situation and come to conclusions that are warranted neither by the individual’s intent nor by the facts. In any case, in particular impressions, we may take a functional or pragmatic view and say that the individual has effectively projected a given definition of the situation and effectively fostered the understanding that given state of affairs obtains. There is one aspect of the others’ response that bear special comment here. Knowing that the individual is like to present oneself in a light that is favorable to one, the others may divide what they witness into two parts; a part that is relatively easy for the individual to manipulate at will, being chiefly one’s verbal assertions, and a part in regard to which one seems to have little concern or control, being chiefly derived from the expressions one gives off. The others may then use what are considered to be the ungovernable aspects of one’s expressive behavior as a check upon the validity of what is conveyed by the governable aspects. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

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In this fundamental asymmetry is demonstrated in the communication process, the individual presumably being aware of only one stream of the individual’s communication, the witnesses of this stream and one other. For example, in Shetland Isle one crofter’s wife, in serving native dishes to a visitor from the mainland of Britain, would listen with a polite smile to his polite claims of liking what he was eating; at the same time she would take note of the rapidity with which the visitors lifted one’s fork or spoon to one’s mouth, the eagerness with which one passed food into one’s mouth, and the gusto expressed in chewing the food, using these signs as a check on the stated feelings of the eater. The same woman, in order to discover what one acquaintance (A) actually thought of another acquaintance (B), would wait until B was in the presence of A but engaged in conversation with C. No being in conversation with B, and not being directly observed by him, A would sometimes relax usual constraints and tactful deceptions, and freely express what one was actually feeling about B. This Shetlander, in short, would observe the unobserved observer. Those who discuss labor often comment that nowadays most jobs call for a capacity to deal with people rather than with things, for more interpersonal skills and fewer mechanical skills. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

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The fact that individuals now talk to other individuals, rather than interact with a machine, is the fundamental fact about work in the post-industrial society. There is a continual subdivision of work in many branches of the economy. Complex tasks in which a craftsman used to take pride are divided into simpler, more repetitive segments, each more boring and less well paid than the original job. Work is deskilled and the worker belittled. However, celebrants and critics alike have not inspected at close hand or with a social-psychological eye what it is that people jobs actually require of workers. They have not inquired into the actual nature of this labor. Some do not know exactly what, in the case of emotional labor, becomes deskilled. A second discourse, closer to the person and more remote from the overall organization of work, concerns the display of feelings. There are many minor traffic rules of face-to-face interaction as they emerge at a card game, in an elevator, on the street, or at the dining table of an insane asylum. We cannot dismiss the small as trivial by show how small rules, transgression, and punishments add up to form the longer strips of experience we call work. At the same time, it is hard to explain, for example, why companies train flight attendants in smiling, or how emotion tone is supervised, or what profit is ultimately tied to emotional labor. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

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It is hard, in other words, to draw on this discourse alone and see how display work fits into the larger scheme of things. The third discourse takes pace in a quiet side street of American social science; it deals with the timeless issues of what an emotion is and how we can manage it. To uncover the heart of emotional labor, to understand what it takes to do it and what it does to people, it is important to realize that certain events in economic history cannot be fully understood unless we pay attention to the filigreed patterns of feeling and their management because the details of these patterns are an important part of what may men and women do for a living. Because such different traditions are joined here, my inquiry will have a different relevance for those who do the work it describes—the flight attendants. However, most of us have jobs that require some handling of other people’s feelings and our own, and in this sense we are all partly flight attendants. One who has realized truth according to the Secret Doctrine may continue to follow the same vocation which one was practising before. That is, a king may remain a king and a carpenter may continue one’s carpentering. There is no law or rule which may be laid down as to the kind of work an illuminate may perform or abstain from performing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

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Similarly, the illuminate is not to be judged by one’s practice of or one’s omission to practise asceticism. The secretary who creates a cheerful office that announces her company as friendly and dependable and her boss as up-and-coming, the waitress or the waiter who creates an atmosphere of pleasant dining, the tour guide or hotel receptionist who makes us feel welcome, the social worker whose look of solicitous concern makes the client feel cared for; the salesman who creates the sense of a hot commodity, the bill collector who inspires fear, the funeral parlor director who makes the bereaved feel understood, the minister who creates a sense of protective outreach but even-handed warmth—all of them must confront in some way or another the requirements of emotional labor. Emotional labor does not observe conventional distinctions between types of jobs. By my estimate roughly 33 percent of American workers today have jobs that subject them to substantial demands for emotional labor. Moreover, of all women working, roughly 50 percent have jobs that call for emotional labor. As traditionally more accomplished managers of feeling in private life, women more than men have put emotional labor on the market, and they know more about its personal costs. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

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Any functioning society makes effective use of its members’ emotional labor. We do not think twice about the use of feeling in the theater, or in psychotherapy, or in forms of group life that we admire. It is when we come to speak of the exploitation of those at the lower level of the hierarchy by those at the higher levels in any society that we become morally concerned. In any system, exploitation depends o the actual distribution of many kinds of profits—many, authority, status, honor, well-being. It is not emotional labor itself, therefore, but the underlying system of recompense that raises the question of what the cost of it is. In the primitive World, we might say, the child had been the bearer of the collective immortality, since it was through him or her that the souls of the ancestors reentered the World. This is one reason why many primitives handled their children so gently: the child was actually in the process of giving birth to himself or herself with the help of the ancestral spirit; if one was mean to the child, the spirit might be upset and withdraw from the World. Under the ideology of the patriarchal family, the child becomes the individual successor to his father—actually, then, merely, the son of a father, and is no longer the independent mediator of the spirts from the ancestral World. However, this now the only spiritual lineage in which the on can perpetuate himself in turn. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

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This is why, too, fathers could be despotic with their children: they were merely objects to whom one had oneself given life. Today we are shocked when we read of the ancient Greek who blinded his sons for disobeying him and going off to war—but their lives were literally his personal property, and he had this authority and used it. Considering that science is widely regarded as the highest value in contemporary industrial society, it is very difficult for the average person to believe that what science commands could be wrong or immortal. If the Lord had not told Abraham not to kill his son, Abraham would have done it, like millions of parents who practiced child sacrifice in history. For the believer neither God nor his modern equivalent, Science, can command anything that is wrong. For this reason, the high degree of obedience is not more surprising than that 35 percent of the group refused at some point to obey; in fact this disobedience of more than a third might well be considered more surprising—and encouraging. People remove the awareness of the conflict by renationalization, and the conflict manifests itself only unconsciously in increased stress, neurotic symptoms, or feeling guilty for the wrong reasons. Subjects are in a conflict situation because they are caught between obedience to authority and behavior patterns learned from childhood on: not to harm other people. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

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However, is this really so? Have we learned not to harm other people? That may be what children are told in Sunday school. In the realistic school of life, however, they learn that they must seek their own advantage even if other people are harmed. It seems 65 percent of the subjects could be conditioned to behave cruelly, but a reaction of indignation or horror against this sadistic behavior was clearly present in most of them. Apparently they had little or no feeling of opposition to the cruel acts they were performing. Possibly this is because they enjoyed the suffering of others and felt no remorse when their behavior was sanctioned by authority. Another possibility is that they were such highly alienated or narcissistic people that they were insulted against what went on in other people: or they might be psychopaths, lacking in any kind of mortal reaction. As for those in whom the conflict manifested itself in various symptoms of stress and anxiety, it should be assumed that they are people who do not has a sadistic or destructive character. (If one had undertaken and even could have made an educated guess as to how people would behave.) However, we cannot forget in more people the presence of conscience, and their pain when obedience made them act against their conscience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

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Thus, while it may seem there is proof of the easy dehumanization of beings, the subjects’ reactions show rather the contrary—the presence of intense forces within them that find cruel behavior intolerable. We have to consider not only cruel behavior but the—often unconscious—guilty conscience of those who obey authority. (The Nazis had to use an elaborate system of camouflage of atrocities in order to cope with the conscience of the average being.) Another attitude in the striving for power is that of never giving in. Agreeing with an opinion or accepting advice, even if they are considered right, is felt as a weakness, and the mere idea of doing so provokes rebellion. Persons for whom this attitude is important are inclined to lean over backward and, out of sheer fear of giving in, compulsively take the opposition stand. The most general expression of this attitude is the neurotic’s secrete insistence that the World should adapt itself to one instead of adapting oneself to the World. One of the basic difficulties in psychoanalytic therapy comes from this source. The ultimate reason for a patient’s analysis is not the gaining of knowledge or insight, but the use of this insight in order to change one’s attitudes. In spite of recognizing that a change would be for one’s own good, a neurotic of this type abhors this prospect of changing because in implies for one a final giving in. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

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The incapacity to do his has implications also for love relationship. Love, whatever else it may mean, always implies surrender, giving in to the lover as well as to one’s own feelings. The more a person, whether man or woman, is incapable of such giving in, the more unsatisfactory will be one’s love relationships. This same factor may have a bearing also on frigidity, inasmuch as having a climax presupposes just this capacity of completely letting go. The influence which we have seen that the striving for power has on love relations allows us to understand more completely many of the implications of the neurotic need for affection. Many of he attitudes involved in the striving for affection cannot be wholly understood without considering the part that is play in them by the striving for power. It is impossible to present the basic conflict by simply showing it in operation in a number of individuals. Because of its disruptive power the neurotic builds a defensive structure around it which serves not only to bolt it from view but so deeply imbeds it that it cannot be isolated in pure form. The result is that what appears on the surface is more the various attempts at solution than the conflict itself. A simple detailing of case histories, therefore, would not bring all its implications and nuances to full relief; the presentation would necessarily be too circumstantial and give too untransparent a picture. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

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When we look at the complaint type of personality, it manifests all the traits that go with moving toward people. One shows marked need for affection and approval and an especial need for a partner—that is, a friend, lover, husband or wife who is to fulfill all expectations of life and take responsibility for good an evil, one’s successful manipulation becoming the predominant task. These needs have the characteristics common to all neurotic trends; that is, they are compulsive, indiscriminate, and generate anxiety or despondence when frustrated. They operate almost independently of the intrinsic worth of the others in question, as well as of the person’s real feelings toward them. However, these needs may vary in their expression, they all center around a desire for human intimacy, a desire for belonging. Because of the indiscriminate nature of one’s needs, the complaint type will be prone to overrate one’s congeniality and the interests one has in common wit those around one and disregard the separating factors. One’s misjudging of people this way is not due to ignorance, stupidity, or the inability to observe, but is determined by one’s compulsive needs. One feels-as illustrated by a patient’s drawing—like a baby surrounded by strange and threatening animals. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

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There she stood, tiny and helpless, in the middle of the picture, around her a huge bee ready to sting her, a dog that could bite her, a cat that could jump at her, a bull that could gore her. Obviously, then, the real nature of other beings does not matter, expect in so far as the more aggressive ones, beings the more frightening, are the ones whose affection is the most necessary. In sum, this type needs to be liked, wanted, desired, loved; to feel accepted, welcomed, approved of, appreciated; to be needed, to be of importance to others, especially to one particular person; to be helped, protected, taken care of, guided. When in the course of analysis the compulsive character of these needs is pointed out to be a patient, one will be likely to assert that all these desires are quite natural. And, of course, here one is on defensible ground. Except for persons whose whole being has become so warped by sadistic trends that the desire for affection is choked beyond all possibility of functioning, it is safe to assume that everyone dos not to feel liked, to belong, to be helped, and so on. Where the patient errs is in claiming that all one’s frantic beating about for affection and approval is genuine, while in reality the genuine portion is heavily overshadowed by one’s insatiable urge to feel safe. Only when a being finds out one’s correct relation to the Universe and to one’s fellow creatures will one find one’s own well-being. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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The Presence of the Divine in the Name of Demands a Shy and Trembling Heart that Glance so Brightly at the New Sun-Rise!

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Silent entangler of beauty’s tresses! Most happy listener when the morning blesses thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes. The streets of Cresleigh Mills Station with their giant homes, were soothing to him. Soon he was shopping in brightly lighted emporiums for decent clothes. And in his comfortable parlor from midnight till dawn he watched television, learning all about this modern World in which he had emerged, how things were done, how things had to be. A steady stream of dramas, soap operas, news broadcast, and documentaries soon taught him everything. He lay back in his large overstuffed easy chair marveling at the blue skies and the brilliant Sun he saw before him on the large television screen. He watched sleek and powerful Germany automobiles speeding on mountain roads and over prairies. He watched s somber bespectacled teacher speak in sonorous tones of “the ascent of man.” What is it about the structure of American society that produces delinquency in certain sectors of that society? We believe that problems of adjustment to social class play a vital role in the genesis of the delinquent subculture. First and most obviously, the working class child stares the social class status of one’s parents. In the status game, then, the working-class child starts out with a disadvantage and, to the extent that one cares what middle-class person think of one or has internalized the dominant middle-class attitudes toward social class position, one may be expected to feel some shame. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

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The one area of one’s occupational life in which one might be free to act, the area of one’s own personality, must now also be managed, must become the alert yet obsequious instrument by which goods are distributed. “When he was seven years old, I used to carry him [to work] on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to work 16 hours a day…I have often knelt down to feed him, as he stood by the machine, for he could not leave it or stop.” Fed meals as he worked, as a steam engine is fed coal and water, this child was an instrument of labor. We should be concerned with the fundamental: the cost of becoming an instrument of labor. Shame is felt perhaps most strongly over the failures of other people, especially one’s parents, who have not been successful, who have not worked hard enough to have a large and beautiful house, or a new BMW M750Li automobile, Cadillac Escalade, Chevy Impala, Ford F350, or Honda Accord, or to send one to a private school, to live on the right street, on the right side of the river, or go to the right church. As class is an expression of economic success, then it follows that to belong as a child or an adolescent in a class below others is a statement that one’s parents have failed, they did not make it good. This is bad enough when they have not risen, unbearable if they have stated to fall even lower. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

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Deeper than our disapproval of any breaking of then ten commandments possesses our conviction that a failure to keep moving is unforgiveable sin. Furthermore, people of status tend to be people of power and property. They have the means to make more certain that their children will obtain respect and other rewards which have status significance even where title in terms of deserving middle-class conduct is dubious. One me stress that throughout the importance of parental status in obtaining special consideration in school activities and on the job through “connections” and other means of exerting pressure. Finally, parents of good standing in the class system can usually provide their children with money, Betty Crocker desserts, clothes, cars, Cresleigh homes and other material amenities which not only function as external trappings and insignia of status, but which serve also as a means and avenue to activities and relationships which confer status. Like one’s parents, a child is unlikely to be invited to participate in activities which require a material apparatus one cannot afford; if invited, one is less likely to accept for fear of embarrassment; and if one accepts, one is less likely to be in a position to reciprocate and therefore to sustain a relationship premised on a certain among of reciprocity. It seems reasonable to assume that out of all this there arise feelings of inferiority and perhaps resentment and hostility. It is remarkable, however, that there is relatively little research explicitly designed to test this assumption. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

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However, invidious status distinctions among young people are, after all, a result of individual differences in conformity to a set of conduct norms as well as simple functions of their parents’ social status. Variations in character reputation scores cannot be explained simply as a result of social class membership. The existence of “achieved” as well as “ascribed” criteria of status for children makes it possible for some working-class children to “rise above” the status to which the social class position of their parents would otherwise consign them. However, this does not make the situation psychologically any easier for those of their brethren who remain behind, or rather, below. Low achieved status is no pleasanter than low ascribed status, and very likely a good deal more unpleasant, for reasons we have indicated earlier; it reflects more directly on the personal inadequacy of the child and leaves one with fewer convenient rationalizations. The young trainee sitting next to me wrote on her digital note pad, “Important to smile. Do not forget to smile.” The admonition came from the speaker in the front of the room, a crew cut pilot in his early fifties, speaking in a Southern drawl: “Now girls, I want you to get out there and really smile. Your smile if your biggest asset. I want you to go out there and use it. Smile. Really smile. Really lay it on.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

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The pilot spoke of the smile as the flight attendant’s asset. However, as novices like the one next to me move through training, the value of a personal smile is groomed to reflect the company’s disposition—its confidence that its planes will not crash, its reassurance the departures and arrivals will be on time, its welcome and its invitation to return. Trainers take it as their job to attach to the trainee’s smile an attitude, a viewpoint, a rhythm of feeling that is, as they often say, “professional.” This deeper extension of the professional smile is not always easy to retract and the end of the workday, as one worker in her first year at American Airlines noted: “Sometimes I come off a long trip in a state of utter exhaustion, but I find I cannot relax. I giggle a lot, I shatter, I call friends. It is as if I cannot release myself from an artificially created elation that kept me ‘up’ on the trip. I hope to be able to come down from it better as I get better at the job.” As the Public Service Announcement jingle says, “Our smiles are not just painted on.” Our flight attendants’ smiles, the company emphasizes, will be more human than the phony smiles you are resigned to seeing on people who are paid to smile. There is a smile like strip of paint on the nose of plane. Indeed, the plane and the flight attendant advertise each other. The radio advertisement foes on to promise not just smiles and service but a travel experience of real happiness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

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As in any industry such as banking, real estate, fashion, sales or retail, politeness and a smile are seen in one way, this is no more than delivering a service. Also, workers know their own smiles and convinces provided to customers is part of the on-the-job behavior, which is part of professionalism, dollar bills, and bitcoins that have intervened between the smiler and the smiled upon, and the extra effort it takes to invoke this spontaneous warmth makes it possible to exist in uniform—and companies now advertise spontaneous warmth, too. Customers call to inform departments that not only would they like educational material, but they would also like it to make them happy as well as inform them, and when your goal is to please the customer or member, you have to comply to their wishes. Nonetheless, at first glance, it might seem that the circumstances of the nineteenth-century factory child and the twentieth-century flight attendant could not be more different. To the boy’s mother, to Karl Marx, to the members of the Children’s Employment Commission, perhaps to the manager of the wallpaper factory, and almost certainly to the contemporary reader, the boy was a victim, even a symbol, of the brutalizing conditions of his time. We might imagine that he had an emotional half-life, conscious of little more than fatigue, hunger, and boredom. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

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On the other hand, the flight attendant enjoys the upper-class freedom to travel, and she participates in the glamour she creates for others. She is the envy of clerks in duller, less well-paid jobs. However, a close examination of the differences between the two can lead us to some unexpected common ground. On the surface there is a difference in how we know what labor actually produces. How could the worker in the wallpaper factory tell when his job was done? Count the rolls of Lincrusta-Walton wallpaper; a good had been produced. How can the flight attendant tell when her job is done? A service has been produced; the customer seems content. In the case of the flight attendant, the emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself, in a way that loving or hating wallpaper is not part of producing wallpaper. Seeming to love the job become part of the job; actually trying to love it, and to enjoy the customers, helps in this effort. You ever notice when you shop at a corporate store, where the manager is polite and acts like they own the business, care about the presentation of the products and inventory, and wants you to be satisfied, not only does it make your more confident in their abilities, but it makes it more likely that you will purchase products from the brand or business again in the future. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

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In processing people, the product is a state of mind. For instance, in real estate, people are greeted not only with a smile, but with concerned enquiry such as, “Would you also like to tour residence 3 today and hear about the options, Miss?” The atmosphere is that of a civilized party—with the guest, in response, behaving like civilized community members. Once or twice our inspectors tested the employees by being deliberately exacting, but they were never roused, and at the end of the tour they lined up to say farewell with undiminished brightness. Potential buyers are quick to detect strained or forced smiles, and they come to view the property wanting to enjoy the tour and get an idea of what it will be like to live in the home and community. The customers look forward to signing the contract and buying the house because it was a pleasant experience. Surely that is how it ought to feel. This is an emotional labor. Emotional labor is the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefore has an exchange value. This labor requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mine in others—in this case, the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place. This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to out individuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

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Beneath the difference between physical and emotional labor there is possessed a similarity in the possible cost of doing the work: the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self—either the body or the margins of the soul—that is used to do the work. The factory boy’s arm functioned like a piece of machinery used to produce wallpaper. His employer, regarding that arm as an instrument, claimed control over its speed and motions. In this situation what was the relation between the boy’s arm and his mind? Was his arm in any meaningful sense his own? The real estate agent does physical work when she gives tours, and she does mental work when she prepared for and actually organizes sales. And his is also part of an emotional labor. This is an old issue, but as the comparison with the real estate agency suggest, it is still very much alive. If we can become alienated from service in a service-producing society, we can become alienated from the service in a service-producing society. We need to characterize American society of the twenty first century in more psychological terms, for now the problems that concerns us mist order on the psychiatric. For the real estate agent, the smiles are part of her work, a part that requires her to coordinate self and feeling so that the work seems to be effortless. To show that enjoyment takes effort is to do the job poorly. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

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Similarly, part of the job is to disguise fatigue and irritation, for otherwise the labor would show in an unseemly way, and the product—buy contentment—would be damaged. It suggests what costs even happy workers under normal conditions pay for this labor without a name. The speed-up of demand has sharpened the ambivalence many workers feel about how much of oneself to give over to the role and how much of oneself to protect from it. Because it is easier to disguise fatigue and irritation if they can be banished altogether, at least for brief periods, this feat calls for emotional labor. It is also good to remember some people are really curious about products and for them, seeing a new house could be like being exposed to an advanced trigonometry class—they have no idea what they are looking at, how they will fit into it, or what designs will go well in the space. There have always been public-service jobs, of course; what is new is that they are now socially engineered and thoroughly organized from the upper levels. Though a real estate agents job is no worse and in many ways better than other service jobs, it makes the worker more vulnerable to the social engineering of one’s emotional labor and reduces one’s control over that labor. Emotional labor is potentially good. No customer wants to deal with a surly waiter, a crabby member service representative, or a cashier who avoids eye contact in order to avoid getting a request. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

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Lapses in courtesy by those paid to be courteous are very real and fairly common. What they show us is how fragile public civility really is. We are brought back to the question of what the social carpet actually consists of and what it requires of those who are supposed to keep it beautiful. The laggards and sluff-offs of emotional labor return us to the basic questions. What is emotional labor? What do we do when we manage emotion? What, in fact, is emotion? What are the costs and benefits of managing emotion, in private life and at work? What one cannot do in the beginning, one may be able to do in the middle of one’s journey. One should not let misgivings about one’s capacity to travel far stop one from travelling at all. Those who already possess a flair for emotional labor will naturally advance more easily and more quickly than those who do not. However, there is no reason for the one who is new to learning about emotional labor to adopt a defeatist attitude and negate the quest altogether. One’s weaknesses may come in the way of one’s seeking, yet one still remains an authentic seeker. If one lets one’s thoughts become negative, the quest would have to be entered with a realization of all its complexity and with a comprehension that one’s good intentions could be frustrated by adverse circumstances. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

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A being needs to know his or her limitations and to accept them. However, one need not accept them as absolutes. There is always the mysterious miracle, the second wind, the untapped unpredictable resources. One should fit one’s aspiration to one’s estimated capacity but, in order not to miss unknown possibilities which might yet emerge to the surface, one should do so loosely and not rigidly. It is true that enlightenment is to be found wherever it is earnestly sought. However, one’s own desire and needs will provide one with a source of direction; and it may be that these will indicate that one’s individual progress may be hastened or better served by a journey to some particular location. No matter what the personal circumstances of a being may be, no matter whether one be rich or poor, well or ill, mature or young, educated or illiterate, there is no point in one’s life where some part at east of the quest may not be introduced. Would they have done better to have stayed home, rather then to have gone off looking for gurus in the news media? The answer must vary from seeker to seeker. From a long-range point of view, is anyone really “lost”? It is sometimes consoling to remember that we have Eternity before us, and we can only do what we are capable of at a given time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

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Individuals who present themselves before others may wish them to think highly of them, or to think that one thinks highly of them, or to perceive how in fact one feels toward them, or to obtain no clear-cut impression; one may wish to ensure sufficient harmony so that the interaction can be sustained, or to elude them, get rid of, confuse, mislead, antagonize, or insult them. Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of one’s motive for having this objective, it will be in one’s interests to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of one. This control is achieve largely by influencing the definition of the situation which the others come to formulate, and one can influence this definition by expressing oneself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with one’s own plan. Thus, when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for one to mobilize one’s activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in one’s interest to convey. If some acknowledge and accept the responsibility which accompanies their spiritual eminence, others prefer to leave humankind in God’s keeping and to themselves! Some illuminates are willing, even eager, to get involved with individuals but others are not. If they prefer to live quietly, unnoticed, this does not make them more selfish and less holy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

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If one attains enlightenment, it is not possible to predict with precision what a being would do. With some persons, force of habit or innate tendencies may lead to the continuance of the same outer life which one led before enlightenment. So an individual leading a solitary withdrawn life may still do so whereas another may start a preaching crusade to the mass of people. For, with the personal self subdued by God, the latter is then the operative factor. And the spirit is like the wind which blows as it listens. However, we must go forward with the process of evocation of the Holy Ghost for the sake of communicating with these powers to gain insight, or compelling them to create beneficial Changes. When one reaches a level of spiritual maturity through substantial contact with the powers of God and the discipline of Jesus Christ (these things are mutually dependent) and has been infernally empowered by the Rite of Preparing for the Grace of God, we can see reality through unveiled eyes. This will change us in incredible ways forever. One will begin to trump the physical decay, and the desire to gain power and strength will intensify as one grows tired of being tired. As a result, the individual will begin to integrate more practical techniques of grounding this power within to growth in physical and spiritual strength. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

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Though the physical body may be at its weakest, your will shall start to be exercised and developed in very intense ways. Keep that in mind. The power of God are keys that open up the soul and perception through their spiritual eyes. God will grant you the infernal blessing of seeing through your eyes. Tear down the limits of the flesh and allow the Lord to dwell within you are you dwell within him. Remember to stay centered in your own God Self to prevent being deceived and led toward self-destruction. “And then I will remember my covenant which I have made unto my people, and I will bring my gospel unto them,” reports 3 Nephi 16.11. Not long ago, an intellectual leader was reported as saying, “I hope for the say when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.” These words, seriously meant, deserve thoughtful consideration, especially in view of the fact that the last sixty-five years have brought to this country an immense increase in the willingness to use the name of God—an unquestionable and astonishing revival, if not of religion, certainly of religious awareness. Do we hop that this will lead us to a state in which the name of God will be used without sublime embarrassment, without the restriction imposed by the fact that in the divine name there is more present than the name? Is an unembarrassed use of the divine name desirable? Is unembarrassed religion desirable? Certainly not! For the Presence of the divine in the name of demands a shy and trembling heart. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

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Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Cresleigh Home’s newest solar home community in Rancho Cordova. Offering four distinct floorplans with unique exterior elevations, homeowners will have their choice of both single and two-story layouts ranging from three to five bedrooms including one plan with the Master Bedroom on the first floor!

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 Home Owner Association (HOA) fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.

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There Will be No Time and Place Immediately Available for Eating the Pudding that the Proof can be Found in!

ImageOnly wondering. In my room I told myself that all beauty was contained in the ever changing waves of the sea. I had to believe it. But oh, the great World is such a wilderness of marvels. I am very happy. And my soul is not on guard. And I am free. Moral obliquity and consequently lack of good sense; for it has long been accepted that lack of good sense is due to no other cause than moral obliquity. Put it to the test and cast your eyes upon the history of humankind. What will you see? It is a grand spectacle? Grand, if you like. Take the Colossus of Rhodes, for instance, that is worth something. With good reason Mr. Anaevsky testifies of it that some say that it is the work of human hands, while others maintain that it has been created by Nature herself. Is it many-colored? It may be it is many-colored, too: if one takes the dress uniforms, military and civilian, of all peoples in the ages—that alone is worth something, and if you take the undress uniforms you will never get to the end of it; no historian would be equal to the job. Is it monotonous? It may be it is: it is fighting and fighting; they are fighting now, they fought first and they fought last—you will admit that it I almost too monotonous. In short, one may say anything about this history of the World—anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

ImageThe only thing one cannot say is that it is rational. The very word sticks in one’s throat. And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity, who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbors simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this World. And yet we all know that these very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you: what can be expected of a being since one is being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon one every Earthly blessing, drown one in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give one economic prosperity, such that one should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy oneself with the continuation of one’s species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, beings would play you some nasty trick. One would even risk one’s cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all the beneficial good sense one’s fatal fantastic element. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Image It is just one’s fantastic dreams, one’s vulgar folly, that one will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to oneself—as thought that were so necessary—that beings still are beings and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that son one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if this were proved to one by natural science and mathematics, even then one would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain one’s point! One will launch a curse upon the World, and as only beings can curse (it is one’s privilege, the primary distinction between one and other animals) it may be by one’s curse alone one will attain one’s object—that is, convince oneself that one is a being and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated—chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself—then beings would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain one’s point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of beings really seems to consist in nothing but proving to oneself every minute that one is a human and not a piano-Key! #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

ImageIt may be at the cost of one’s skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we do not know? You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good Heavens, gentlemen and ladies, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two makes four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that! Gentlemen and ladies, I am joking, and I know myself that my jokes are not brilliant, but you know one cannot take everything as a joke. I am, perhaps, jesting against the grain. Gentlemen and ladies, I am tormented by questions; answer them for me. You, for instance, want to cure men and women of their old habits and reform their will in accordance with science and good sense. However, how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also that it is desirable, to reform beings in that way? And what leads you to the conclusion that being’s inclinations need reforming? In short, how do you know that such a reformation will be the benefit to beings? #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

ImageAnd to go to the root of the matter, why are you so absolutely convinced that not to act against one’s real normal interests guaranteed by the conclusions of reason and arithmetic is certainly always advantageous for beings and must always be a law for humankind? So far, you know, this is only your supposition. It may be the law of logic, but not the law of humanity. You think, gentlemen and ladies, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to defend myself. I agree that beings are pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering—that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead. However, the reason why one want sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that one is predestined to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the “direct” practical being may be, the thought sometimes will occur to one that the road almost most always does lead somewhere, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices. Beings like to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. How why have such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also? Tell me that! #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

ImageBut on that point, I want to say a couple of words myself. May it not be that one loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that one does sometimes love it) because one is instinctively afraid of attaining one’s object and completing the edifice one is constructing? Who knows, perhaps one only loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps one only loves building it and does not want to live in it, but will leave it, when completed, for the use of les animaux domestiques—such as the ants, the sheep, and so on. Now the ants have quite a different taste. They have a marvelous edifice of that pattern which endures for ever—the ant-heap. With the ant-heap the respectable race of ants began and with the ant-heap they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to their perseverance and good sense. However, beings are a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess-player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on Earth to which humankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as absolute as twice two makes four, and such absoluteness is not life, gentlemen and ladies, but is the beginning of death. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

ImageAnyway, beings have always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that beings does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, one traverses oceans, sacrifices one’s life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, one dreads, I assure you. One feels that when one has found it there will be nothing for one to look for. When workmen and women have finished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station—and there is occupation for a week. However, where can beings go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about one when one has attained such objects. One loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, beings are a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. However yet, mathematical certainty is, after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

ImageAnd why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the absolute—in other words, only what is conducive to the welfare—is for the advantage of the being? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Do not being, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps one is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to one as well-being? Beings are sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a being and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to be absolutely ill-bred. Whether it is good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things, so I am told. I hold no brief for suffering nr for well-being either. I am standing for…my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the “Palace of Crystal” it is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a “Palace of Crystal” if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I think beings will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. Though I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the greatest misfortune for beings, yet I know being prize it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

ImageConsciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five sense and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing. You believe in a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed—a palace at which one will not be able to put out one’s tongue or make a long nose on the sly. And perhaps that is just why I am afraid of this edifice that it is of crystal and can never be destroyed and that one cannot put one’s tongue out at it even on the sly. You see, if it were not a palace, but a hen-house, I might creep into it to avoid getting wet, and yet I would not call the hen-house a palace out of gratitude to it for keeping me dry. You laugh and say that in such circumstances a hen-house is as good as a Cresleigh mansion. Yes, I answer, if one had to live simply to keep out of the rain. However, what is to be done if I have taken it into my head that that is not the only object in life, and that if one must live one had better live in a Cresleigh mansion. That is my choice, my desire. You will only eradicate it when you have changed my preference. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

ImageWell, do change it, allure me with something else, give me another ideal. However, meanwhile I will not take a hen-house for a mansion. The palace of crystal may be an idle dream, it may be that it is inconsistent with the laws of nature and that I have invented it only through my own stupidity, through the old-fashioned irrational habits of my generation. However, what does it matter to me that it is inconsistent? That makes no difference since it exists in my desires, or rather exists as long as my desires exist. Perhaps you are laughing again? Laugh away; I will put up with any mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry. I know, anyway, that I will not be put off with a compromise, with a recurring zero, simply because it is consistent with the laws of nature and actually exists. I will not accept as the crown of my desires a block of buildings with tenements for the poor on a lease of a thousand years, and perhaps with a sign-board of dentist hanging out. Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you. You will say, perhaps, that is not worth your trouble; but in that case I can give you the same answer. We are discussing things seriously; but if you will not deign to give me your attention, I will drop your acquaintance. I can retreat into my underground hole. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

ImageHowever, while I am alive and have desires I would rather my hand were withered off than bring one brick to such a building! Do not remind me that I have just rejected the palace f crystal for the sole reason that one cannot put out one’s tongue at it. I did not say that because I am so fond of putting my tongue out. Perhaps the thing I resented was, that of all your edifices there has not been one at which one could not put out one’s tongue. On the contrary, if things could be so arranged that I should lose all desire to put it out, I would let my tongue be cut off out of gratitude. It is not my fault that things cannot be so arranged, and that one must be satisfied with model flats. Then why am I made with such desires? Can I have been constructed simply in order to come to the conclusion that all my construction is a cheat? Can this be my whole purpose? I do not believe it. However, you know what: I am convinced that we underground fold ought to be kept on a curb. Though we may sit forty years underground without speaking, when we do come out into the light of day and break out we talk and talk and talk…When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about one or to bring into play information about one already possessed. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

ImageThey will be interested in one’s general socioeconomic status, one’s conception of self, one’s attitude toward them, one’s competence, one’s trustworthiness, and so forth. Although some of this information seems to be sought almost as an end in itself, there are usually quite practical reasons for acquiring it. Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what one will expect of them and what they may expect of one. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to all forth a desired response from one. For those resent, many sources of information become accessible and many carriers (of “sign-vehicles”) become available for conveying this information. If unacquainted with the individual, observers can glean clues from one’s conduct and appearance which allow them to apply their previous experience with individuals roughly similar to the one before them or, more important, to apply untested stereotypes to one. They can rely on what the individual says about oneself or on a documentary evidence one provides as to who and what one is. If they know, or know of, the individual by virtue of experience prior to the interaction, they can rely on assumptions as to the persistence and generality of psychological traits as a means of predicting one’s present and future behavior. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

ImageHowever, during the period in which the individual is in the immediate presence of others, few events may occur which directly provide the others with the conclusive information they will need if they are to direct wisely their own activity. Many crucial facts are possessed beyond the time and place of interaction or are possessed concealed within it. For example, the “true” or “real” attitudes, beliefs, and emotions of the individual can be ascertained only indirectly, through one’s avowals or through what appears to be involuntary expressive behavior. Similarly, if the individual offers the others a product or service, they will often find that during the interaction there will be no time and place immediately available for eating the pudding that the proof can be found in. They will be forced to accept some events as conventional or natural signs of something not directly available to the senses. The individual will have to act so that one intentionally or unintentionally expresses oneself, and the others will in turn have to be impressed in some way by one. However, an attitude that may characterize a neurotic in one’s striving for power is the desire to have one’s own way. If others do not do exactly what one expects of them and exactly at the time one expects it, it may be a constant source of acute irritation to one. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

ImageThe attitude of impatience is closely connected with this aspect of the striving for power. Any kind of delay, any enforced waiting, even if only for traffic lights, will become a source of irritation. More often than not the neurotic oneself is not aware of the existence, or at least of the extent, of one’s bossing attitude. It is a fact definitely to one’s interest not to recognize it and not to change it, because it has important protective functions. Nor should others recognize it, because if they do there is a danger of losing their affection. This lack of awareness has important implications for love relationships. If a lover or husband does not exactly live up to expectations, of one is late, does not telephone or text message or email, goes out of town, a neurotic woman feels that one does not love her. Instead of recognizing that what she feels is a plain anger reaction to a lack of compliance with wishes of her own, which as often as not are inarticulate, she interprets the situation as evidence that she is unwanted. This fallacy is very frequent indeed in our culture, and it contribute greatly to the feeling of being unwanted which is often a crucial factor in neuroses. As a rule it is learned from parents. A dominating mother feeling resentment about a child’s disobedience will believe, and declare, that the child does not love her. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

ImageA queer contradiction often arises on this basis which may considerably frustrate any love relationships. Neurotic girls cannot love a “weak” man because of their contempt for any weakness; but neither can they cope with a “strong” man because they expect their partner always to give in. Hence what they secretly look for is the hero, the superstrong man, who at the same time is so weak that he will bend to all their wishes without hesitance. If we want to see how conflict develops, we must not focus too sharply on the individual trends but rather take a panoramic view of the main directions in which a person can and does move under these circumstances. Though we lose sight for a while of details we shall gain a clearer perspective of the essential moves made to cope with the environment. At first a rather chaotic picture may present itself, but out of in time three main lines crystallize: a being can move toward people, against them, or away from them. When moving toward people one accepts one’s own helplessness, and in spite of one’s estrangement and fears tries to win affection of others and to lean on them. Only in this way can one feel safe with them. If there are dissenting parities in the family, one will attach oneself to the most powerful person or group. By complying with them, one gains a feeling of belonging and support which makes one feel less weak and less isolated. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

ImageWhen one moved against people one accepts and takes for granted the hostility around one, and determines, consciously or unconsciously, to fight. One implicitly distrusts the feelings and intentions of others toward oneself. One rebels in whatever ways are open to him or her. One wants to be the stronger and defect them, partly for one’s own protection, partly for revenge. When one moves away from people one wants neither to belong nor to fight, but keeps apart. One feels one has not much in common with them, they do not understand one anyhow. One builds up a World of one’s own—with nature, with one’s dolls, one’s books, one’s dreams. In each of these three attitudes, one of the elements involved in basic anxiety is overemphasized: helplessness in the first, hostility in the second, and isolation in the third. However, the fact is that the individual cannot make anyone of these moves wholeheartedly, because under the conditions in which the attitude develop, all are bound to be present. What we have seen from our panoramic view is only the predominant move. In a predominantly learning and complying type of person we can observe aggressive propensities and some need for detachment. A predominantly hostile personas a complaint strain and needs detachment too. And a detached personality is not without hostility or a desire for affection. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

ImageThe predominant attitude, however, is the one that most strongly determines that actual conduct. It represents those ways and means of coping with others in which the particular person feels most at home. Thus a detached person will as a matter of course use all unconscious techniques for keeping others at a safe distance because one feels at a loss in any situation that requires close association with them. Moreover, the ascendant attitude is often but not always the one most acceptable to the person’s conscious mind. This does not mean that the less conspicuous attitudes are less powerful. It would often be difficult to say, for instance, whether in an apparently dependent, compliant person the wish to dominate is of inferior intensity to the need for affection; one’s ways of expressing one’s aggressive impulses are merely more indirect. That the potency of the submerged tendencies may be very great is evidenced by the many instances in which the attitude accorded predominance is reversed. We can see such reversal in child,  but it occurs in late life as well. A good illustration is  how a girl formerly tomboyish, ambitious, rebellious, when she falls in love may turn into a compliant, dependent woman, apparently without ambition. Or, under pressure of crushing experiences, a detached person may become morbidly dependent. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

ImageChanges like these, it should be added, throw some light on the frequent question whether later experience counts for nothing, whether we are definitely channeled, condition once and for all, by our childhood situation. Looking at neurotic development from the point of view of conflicts enables us to give a more adequate answer than is usually offered. These are the possibilities: If the early situation is not too prohibitive of spontaneous growth, later experiences, particularly in adolescence, can have a molding influence. If, however, the impact of early experiences has been powerful enough to have molded the child to a rigid pattern, no new experience will be able to break through. In part this is because one’s rigidity does not leave one open to any new experience: one’s detachment, for instance, may be too great to permit of anyone’s coming close to one, or one’s dependence so deep-rooted that one is forced always to play a subordinate role and invite exploitation. In part it is because one will interpret any new experience in the language of one’s established pattern: the aggressive type, for instance, meeting with friendliness, will view it either as a manifestation of stupidity or an attempt to exploit one; the new experience will tend only to reinforce the old pattern. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

ImageWhen a neurotic does adopt a different attitude it may look as if later experiences had brought about a change in personality. However, the change is not as radical as it appears. Actually what has happened is that combined internal and external pressures have forced one to abandon one’s predominant attitude in favor of the other extreme—but this change would not have taken place if there had been no conflict to begin with. From the point of view of the normal person there is no reason why the three attitudes should be mutually exclusive. One should be capable of giving in to others, of fighting, and keeping to oneself. The three can complement each other and make for a harmonious whole. If one predominates, it merely indicates an overdevelopment along one line. However, in neurosis there are several reasons why these attitudes are irreconcilable. The neurotic is not flexible; one is driven to comply, to fight, to be aloof, regardless of whether the move is appropriate in the particular circumstance, and one is thrown into a panic if one behaves otherwise. Hence, when all three attitudes are present in any strong degree, one is bound to be caught in a severe conflict. Another factor, and one that considerably widens the scope of the conflict, is that the attitudes do not remain restricted to the area of human relationships but gradually pervade the entire personality, as a malignant tumor pervades the whole organic tissue. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

ImageThey end by encompassing not only the person’s relation to others but also one’s relation to oneself and to life in general. If we are not fully aware of this all-embracing character, the temptation is to think of the resulting conflict in categorical terms, like love versus hate, compliance versus defiance, submissiveness versus domination, and so on. That, however, would be as misleading as to distinguish fascism from democracy by focusing on any single opposing feature, such as their difference in approach to religion or power. These are differences certainly, but exclusive emphasis upon them would serve to obscure the point that democracy and fascism are Worlds apart and represent two philosophies of life entirely incompatible with each other. It is not accidental that a conflict that starts with our relation to others in time affect the whole personality. Human relationships are so crucial that they are bound to mold the qualities we develop, the goals we set for ourselves, the values we believe in. All these in turn react upon our relations with others and so are inextricably interwoven. My contention is that the conflict born of incompatible attitudes constitutes the core of neurosis and therefore deserves to be called basic. And let me add that I use the term core not merely in the figurative sense of its being significant but to emphasize that fact that it is the dynamic center from which neuroses emanate. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

ImageThis contention is the nucleus of a new theory of neurosis whose implications will become apparent in what follow. Broadly considered, the theory may be viewed as an elaboration of my earlier concept that neuroses are an expression of a disturbance in human relationships. The quest says one is not so helpless as one thinks one is. Why give oneself up so unresisteningly to the tendencies one finds in one’s heart, to the thoughts one find in one’s mind, to the inward domination of one’s possession and passion? Why be do soft-willed as to refrain from making any effort at all on the plea that one must accept oneself as one finds oneself? When you come out of the other side of this experience and you make your way out of the cage your whole perception of life and this World will have changed. These Hell realms will at this point no longer be focal points of initiation. They will have become steps upon the manifestation of desire and the path of ascent. Earth will become the path to the fulfillment of your purpose and personal divine plan. It is at this point you will be empowered to mold eternal darkness which permeates all into divine light. This is to Become a Living God. “See how I love your precepts; preserve my life, O LORD, according to your love. All your words are true; all your righteous laws are eternal,” reports Psalm 119.15-16. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21Image

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The True Mentor Will Possess a Penetrating Insight into One’s Pupils’ Needs!

ImageYou know how much I love you. Yes, you know how much I want you, and to slip away with you, away from anyone who could divide us, yes, you know. What are mortal lives to me after all? You have made your mortal life magnificent. You turned your soul inside out to do it. And that simply cannot be ignored. Ha! Ha! Ha! But you know there is no such thing as choice in reality, say what you like, you will interpose with a chuckle. Since has succeeded in so far analyzing beings that we know already that choice and what is called freedom of will is nothing else than—stay gentlemen and ladies, I meant to begin with that. I confess, I was rather frightened. I was just going to say that the devil only knows what choice depends on, and that perhaps that was a very good thing, but I remembered the teaching of science…and pulled myself up. And here you have begun upon it. Indeed, if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices—that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is, a real mathematical formula—then, mostly, beings will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, one will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rules? #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

ImageBesides, without free will, one will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the sort; for what is a being without desires, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ? What do you think? Let us reckon the chances—can such a thing happen or not? H’m! you decide. Our choice is usually mistake from a false view of our advantage. We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage. However, when all that is explained and worked out on paper (which is perfectly possible, for it is contemptible and senseless to suppose that some laws of nature beings will never understand), then certainly so-called desires will no longer exist. For if a desire should come into conflict with reason we shall then reason and not desire, because it will be impossible retaining our reason to be senseless in our desires, and in that way knowingly act against reason and desire to injure ourselves. And as all choice and reasoning can be really calculated—because there will some day be discovered the law of our so-called free will—so, joking apart, there may one day be something like a table constructed of them, so that we really shall choose in accordance with it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

ImageIf, for instance, someday they calculate and prove to me that I made a long nose at someone because I could not help making a long nose at one and that I had to do it in that particular way, what freedom is left me, especially is I am a learned being and have taken my degree somewhere? Then I should be able to calculate my whole life for thirty years beforehand. In short, if this could be arranged there would be nothing left for us to do; anyway, we should have to understand that. And, in fact, we ought unwearyingly to repeat to ourselves that at such and such a time and in such and such a circumstance Nature does not ask our leave; that we have got to take her as she is and not fashion her to suit our fancy, and if we really aspire to formulas and tables of rules, and well, even…to the chemical retort, there is no help for it, we must accept the retort  too, or else it will be accepted without our consent. Yes, but here I come to stop! Gentlemen and ladies, you must excuse me for being over-philosophical; it is the result of forty years underground! Allow me to indulge my fancy. You are, gentlemen and ladies, reason is an excellent thing, there is no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of being’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

Imagend although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one-twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; tis is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives. I suspect, gentlemen and ladies, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me again that an enlightened and developed being, such, in sort, as the future being will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous to oneself, that that can be proved mathematically. I thoroughly agree, it can—by mathematics. However, I repeat for the hundredth time, there is one case, one only, when beings may consciously, purposely, desire what is injurious to oneself, what is stupid, very stupid—simply in order to have the right to desire for oneself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is sensible. Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen and ladies, more advantageous for us than anything else on Earth, especially in certain cases. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

ImageAnd in particular it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us obvious harm, and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage—for in any circumstances it preserves for us what is most precious and most important—that is, our personality, our individuality. Some, you see, maintain that this really is the most precious thing for humankind; choice can, of course, if it chooses, be in agreement with reason; and especially if this be not abused but kept within bounds. It is profitable and sometimes even praiseworthy. However, very often, and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly opposed to reason…and…and…do you know that that, too, is profitable, sometimes even praiseworthy? Gentlemen and ladies, let us suppose that being are not stupid. (Indeed one cannot refuse to suppose that, if only from the one consideration, that if a being is stupid, then who is wise?) However, if one is not stupid, one is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of human being is the ungrateful biped. However, that is not all, that is not one’s worst defect; one’s worst defect is one’s perpetual moral obliquity—perpetual, from the days of the Flood to the Schleswig-Holstein period. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

ImageThe image of beings that emerges from traditional experimental psychology is of a determined being, subject to the controlling influence of assorted variables. This is not at all an image of beings with which we can gladly identify. Indeed, one of the aims of a humanistic science of psychology is to liberate beings from the constraining or inciting pressures of determiners. A humanistic psychologist, like one’s less humanistic colleague, is concerned to identify factors that affect being’s experience and action; but one’s aim is not to render the being predictable to, and controllable by, somebody else. Rather, one’s aim is to understand how determining variables function in order that a being might be liberated from their impact as on pursues one’s own free projects. Ultimately, we come to know something of somebody if that being shows itself to us. If we are dealing with stones, animals, stars, or scientific experiments, the problem of knowing calls first for making contact with the object of study, then devising means of getting it to disclose its mysteries. Natural scientists have shown incredible ingenuity at this task. They have devised gadgets that reveal previously inaccessible accepts of the being of all kinds of phenomena: X-rays, telescopes and microscopes, transducers, and recorders of light, sound, and movement. Technological equipment has enabled scientists to find answers to questions they pose about being of things, objects, and processes in the World.  #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

ImageTo know the being of human is a different problem. Existentialists have said that humans are the beings whose being is in question, not fixed. Human choose their projects and thereby produce their own being. One chooses one’s way in the World, and upon how one has chosen to be will depend the aspects of one’s being that one will show to anyone who happens to be looking. One choice open to the individual is whether one will show oneself at all or whether one will choose to hide in a cave. Another option is whether one will aim to reveal one’s experience, one’s “being-for-oneself” to another person, or whether one will seek to conceal and misrepresent it. If a being chooses to be fully known, one will show oneself freely to another being, in all possible ways. One’s behavior, which is the “outside” of one’s being-for-oneself (one’s experience), is unintelligible, however, unless one provides the observer with the key. Behavior is actually a code, or better, a cipher, analogous to Etruscan writing or Egyptian hieroglyphics. It is the embodiment of a meaning assigned to it by the one who behaves. The observer can guess at this meaning, but the key rests with the behaver oneself. For one, the behavior carries out one’s intentions, one’s goals, one’s projects. It is the goal of the action that gives meaning to the action. Yet it is precisely aims and goals that people tend most strongly to conceal from others, fearing that if the intentions were known, the other person might interfere. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

ImageMachiavelli knew intentions could be manipulated when he advised his Prince to conceal his ultimate aims from his subjects. They were to be kept mystified. People will disclose their aims and the ways they construe the World only to those whom they have reason to trust. Without trust and goodwill, a person will conceal or misrepresent one’s experience, hoping thus to mystify the other and to get one to misconstrue the action that is visible. Suppose a young man is attracted to a pretty young lady. At first, she is indifferent to his display of manly charms. He then tries to change her experience of him, in the hope that she will ultimately change her behavior toward him. What one does before her is the expression of his intent: “I want her to tumble for me.” However, he does not directly say this to her. If he did, it might frighten her away. Instead, he pretends he has no such wishes. He tries to appear as the kind of young man in whose physical presence she will want to stay. Once he wins her attention, he may start the next stage of his secret project. He will speak of jazz and Bach, philosophy and baseball. Then, he may remark about her lovely complexion and hair. His hand, apparently by accident, brushes against her shoulder; and she does not pull away. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

ImageNext, the young man will suggest they go somewhere for a drink. There, he invites her to tell about herself; and he seems to listen to every word with rapt attention. If a third person watched this relationship develop, one would infer that the young man is “on the make.” This might be a possible meaning one could make of the sequence of one’s acts. Suppose the third person asks the young man point-blank, “Are you trying to seduce this young lady?” The young man would probably deny such crass motivation. If he denies it, then his behavior, no matter how accurately it has been observed and recorded, is at odds with his words. It only becomes intelligible when he reveals his intention. Without this disclosure, we have only a string of responses that could mean anything. If we wish to understand the action, we must know what it means to him. Viewed from an abstract perspective, this encounter between the boy and the girls is a mystifying one. He tries to mislead her as to his intentions. He is “one the make,” and he tries to manipulate her experience and action so that she will behave in the service of his goals, not her own. When a person is thus “on the make,” one will show aspects of oneself that aim at persuading or influencing the other. The other person has been reduced from the status of a person to the status of an object, a manipulandum, something to be used if it is useful and neutralized or changed if it is not. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

ImageHistory in itself is nothing but applied psychology. Hence we must look to theoretical psychology to give us the clew to its true interpretation. Humans want what all organisms want: continuing experience, self—perpetuation as a living being. However, humans have a conscious that their lives come to an end here on Earth; and so they have to devise another way to continue their self-perpetuation, a way of transcending the World of flesh and blood, which is a perishable one. This they did by fixing on a World which was not perishable, by devising an invisible-project that would assure their immortality in a spiritual rather than physical way. This way of looking at things gives beings a direct key to the unlocking of history. We can see that what people want in any epoch is a way of transcending their physical fate, they want to guarantee some kind of indefinite duration, and culture provides them with the necessary immortality symbols or ideologies; societies can be seen as structure of immortality power. Life all boils down to the principle of immortality striving. It is a universal principle firmly anchored in each individual person, no matter who one is; it is present in each culture, no matter how varied its beliefs might seem, or how much humankind itself seems to change from epoch to epoch. Beliefs are not fixed and final realities; they vary from period to period, from one social form to another. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

ImageWhat is fixed is the principle of a dominant immortality-ideology. In each historical period or social group, beings thought that they lived absolute truth because one’s social life gave expression to one’s deepest innate hunger. Every conflict over truth is in the last analysis just the same old struggle over immortality. If anyone doubts this, let one try to explain in any other way the life-and-death viciousness of all ideological disputes. Each person nourishes one’s immortality in the ideology of self-perpetuation to which one gives one’s allegiance; this gives one’s life the only abiding significance it can have. No wonder beings go into a rage over fine points of belief: if your adversay wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible. History, then, can be understood as the succession of ideologies that console for death. Or, more momentously, all cultural forms are in essence sacred because they seek the perpetuation and redemption of the individual life. Culture means that which is supernatural; all culture has the basic mandate to transcend the physical, to permanently transcend it. All human ideologies, then, are affairs that deal directly with the sacredness of the individual or the group life, whether it seems that way or not, whether they admit it or not, whether the person knows it oneself or not. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

ImageWhat does history look like viewed from this angle? We already have seen what the primitive World looked like. It was characterized by archaic beings and they attained immortality by assimilation into the fund of ancestral souls, out of which comes each generation and into which they return. This eternal cycle of rebirth was self-renewing if helped with the proper communal rituals. The group, then, guaranteed its own self-perpetuation. Its duty was to strengthen the life force by fulfilling ritual obligations. The group alone conferred immortality—which is why the individual immersed oneself so completely it its ideology, and why duty took precedence over everything else. Only in this way can we understand the willing self-denials of beings in society; one accepts the social limitations on one’s appetite of all, the hunger for the continuation of life. Why would human being put infants through the torture of lip plug, subject themselves to circumcisions and repeated subincisions, perforated nasal septums, neck rings, holes in the tongue, torn flesh, joint, muscles—why would they even willingly die—if not for the ultimate stake: immortality, the triumph over the extinction of the body and its insignificance. Humans were willing to barter their bodies for higher spiritual values, for more life, and it was abandoned, not because of fear of the fathers, but ironically because of love of life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

ImageBesides, if the individual is willing to renounce life, to shrink back from it in order to preserve, then one would also need society to map out safe pleasures of the flesh for them. Primitive social organization did not so much restrict the individual pleasures of the flesh as actually make it possible for one to have pleasure of the flesh in that that one had already been neurotically ready to sacrifice for the same of one’s personal immortality. The primitive beings embraced the institution of kingship because it was equated with prosperity; from the beginning beings renounced some dimensions of life in order to open up others, and this is what made it easy for monolithic historical structures of power to take shape and to choke out life still more. All that these new structures had t do was to promise the same immortality, only now in different forms. The challenges you face in your own life experience will be trying to say the least. You may suffer through circumstances that make it seems as if the structure of your life has been hit with a freight train. All hope, and light will be restored as your faith grows. It is a great work that must become the focus. Do not be distracted by the torment. Do the work you know you need to do. This is to seek the face of God within. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Image Realize that all you view as you is nothing but an imposed definition of what society thinks you should be. It has nothing to do with your eternal self. What is being destroyed are merely the attachments and social predispositions that act as anchors for your personal weaknesses and limitations. Utilize the power gained through the exploration of your soul to hardness your will. This will ignite the divine light within. This will empower you beyond your imagination. You have made it this far. Do not stop a block before the finish line. It may seem impossible, but it is not. The wise do not make invidious comparisons between the great Prophets of God. Only the unenlightened attempt to show that one ranks higher than another in ethical reach. Such do not know that the teachers who give out religion to a people or race always consider the circumstances and mentality of the people before preaching their new doctrine. What is not releveled or taught is kept back because it is not needed at the time, never because it is unknown. If some enlightened souls are given a mission to stir the World to higher ideals, others feel no such duty and remain quiescent or even saturninely. “God presides in the great assembly; he gives judgment among the gods,” reports Psalm 81.1. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14Image

The Challenges You Face in Your Own Life Experience Will be Trying, to Say the Least, for it Has a Glory and Naught Else Can Share it!

ImageI have guest here! Where exactly did you come from? It is once in a blue Moon a boat ties up at my dock. However, you are most welcome. We are very private here, you understand, I cannot invite you to stay. But these are all golden dreams. On, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that beings only do nasty things because one does not know one’s own interests; and that if one were enlightened, if one’s eyes were opened to one’s real normal interests, beings would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding one’s real advantage, one would see one’s own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one being can, consciously, act against one’s own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, one would begin doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when beings have acted only from their own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that beings, consciously, that is, fully understanding their real interest, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

ImageSo, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage…Advantage! What is advantage? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of beings consists? And what, if it so happens that a being’s advantage, sometimes, not only may, but even must, consist in one’s desiring in certain cases what is harmful to oneself and not advantageous. And if so, there can be such a case, the whole principle falls into dust. What do you think—are there such cases? You laugh; laugh away gentlemen, but only answer me: have being’s advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty? Are there not some which not only have been included but cannot possibly be included under any classification? You see, you gentlemen and ladies have, to the best of my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the averages of statistical figures and political-economical formulas. Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace—and so on, and so on. So that the being who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in opposition to all that list would, to your thinking, and indeed mine too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute mad person: would not one be? However, you know, this is what is surprising: when they reckon up human advantages, why does it so happen that all these statisticians, sages, and lovers of humanity invariably leave out one? #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

ImageThey do not even take it into their reckoning in the form in which it should be taken and the whole reckoning depends upon that. It would be no great matter, they would simply have to take it, this advantage, and add it to the list. However, the trouble is, that this strange advantage does not fall under any classification and is not in place in any list. I have a friend for instance…Ech! Gentlemen and ladies, but of course he is your friend, too; and indeed there is no one, no one, to whom he is not a friend! When he prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with the laws of reason and truth. What is more, he will talk to you with excitement and passion of the true normal interest of humans; with irony he will upbraid the short-sighted fools who do not understand their own interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and, within a quarter of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through something inside one which is stronger than all one’s interests, one will go off on quite a different track—that is, act in direct opposition to what one just been saying about oneself, in opposition to the laws of reason, in opposition to one’s own advantage—in fact, in opposition to everything…I warn you that my friend is a compound personality, and therefore it is difficult to blame him as an individual. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

ImageThe fact is, gentlemen and ladies, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every being than one’s greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for the sake of which a being if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity—in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only one can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. “Yes, but it is advantage all the same” you will retort. However, excuse me, I will make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of humankind for the benefit of humankind. In fact, it upsets everything. However, before I mention this advantage to you, I want to compromise myself personally, and therefore I boldly declare that all these fine systems—all these theories for explaining to humankind their real normal interests, in order that inevitably striving to pursue these interests they may at once become good and noble—are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises! Yes, logical exercises. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

ImageWhy, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of humankind by means of the pursuit of one’s own advantage is to my mind almost the same thing as…as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle, that through civilization humankind becomes softer, and consequently less bloodthirsty, and less fitted for warfare. Logically it does not seem to follow from one’s arguments. However, beings have such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that one is ready to distort the truth intentionally, one is ready to deny the evidence of one’s senses only to justify one’s logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring instance of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams, and in the merriest ways, as though it were champagne. Take the whole of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon—the Great and also the present one. Take North America—the eternal union. Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein…And what is it that civilization softens in us? The only gain of civilization for humankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations—and absolutely noting more. And through the development of this many-sidedness beings may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to them. Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

ImageIn any case civilization has made humankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely blood-thirsty. In old days one saw justice in bloodshed and with one’s conscience at peace exterminated those one thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though beings have now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, one is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. However, yet you are fully convinced that one will be sure to learn when one gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then beings will cease from intentional error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set one’s will against one’s normal interests. That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach beings (through to my mind it is a superfluous luxury) that one never has really had any caprice or will of one’s own, and that one is something of nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, an that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything one doe is not done by one’s willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

ImageConsequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and beings will no longer have to answer for their actions and life will become exceedingly easy for one. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the World. Then—this is all what you say—new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the “Palace of Crystal” will be built. Then…In fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing (this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated?), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Beings are stupid, but one is so ungrateful that you could not find another like one in all creation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

ImageI, for instance, if all of a sudden, apropos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: “I say, gentlemen, had not we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to sent these logarithms to the devil and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!”, I would not be in the least surprised. That again would not matter; but what is annoying is that one would be sure to find followers—such is the nature of beings. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that beings everywhere and at all times, whoever one may be, has preferred to act as one chose and not in the least as one’s reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests, and sometimes one absolutely ought (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice—however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that beings want a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that beings must want a rationally advantageous choice? #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

ImageWhat beings want is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice. For some time now I have been talking to people who have served as subjects (Ss) in psychologists’ experiments. They have told me of their experience, and it has troubled me. I want to share my concern with my colleagues. The letter that follows is my effort to consolidate the attitudes and feelings of the people to whom I talked. Dear E (Experimenter): My name is S. You do not know me. I have another name my friends call me by, but I drop it, and become S number 27 as soon as I take part in your research. I serve in your surveys and experiments. I answer your questions, fill out questionnaires, let you wire me up to various machines that record my physiological reactions. I pull levers, flip switches, track moving targets, trace mazes, learn nonsense syllables, tell you what I see in inkblots—do the whole barrage of things you ask me to do. I have started to wonder why I do these things for you. What is in it for me? Sometimes you pay me to serve. More often I have to serve, because I am a student in a beginning psychology course, and I am told that I will not receive a grade unless I take part in at least two studies; and if I take part in more, I will get extra points on the final exam. I am part of the Department’s “subject-pool.” When I have asked you what I will get out of your studies, you tell me that, “It is for Science.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

ImageWhen you are running someone particular study, you often lie to me about your purpose. You mislead me. It is getting so I find it difficult to trust you. I am beginning to see you as a trickster, a manipulator. I do not like it. In fact, I lie to you a lot of the time, even on anonymous questionnaires. When I do not lie, I will sometimes just answer at random, anything to get through with the hour, and back to my own affairs. Then, too, I can often figure out just what it is you are trying to do, what you would like me to day or do; at those times, I decide to go along with your wishes if I like you, or foul you up if I do not. You do not actually say what your hopes or hypotheses are; but the very setup in your laboratory, the alternatives you give me, the instruction you offer, all work together to pressure me to day or do something in particular. It is as if you are whispering in my ear, “When the light comes on, pull the left switch,” and then you forget to deny that you have whispered. However, I get the message. And I pull the right or the left one, depending on how I feel toward you. You know, even when you are not in the room—wen you are just the printed instructions on the questionnaire or the voice on the tape recorder that tells me what I am supposed to do—I wonder about you. I wonder who you are, what you are really up to. I wonder what you are going to do with the “behavior” I give you. Who are you going to show my answers to? Who is going to see the marks I leave on your response-recorders? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

ImageDo you have any interest at all in what I think, feel, and imagine as I make the marks you are so eager to study and analyze? Certainly, you never ask me what I mean by them. If you asked, I would be glad to tell you. As a matter of fact, I do tell my roommate or my girl friend what I thought your experiment was about and what I meant when I did what I did. If my roommate could trust you, he could probably give you a better idea of what your data (my answers and responses) mean than the idea you presently have. God knows how much good psychology has gone down the drain, when my roommate and I discuss your experiment and my part in it, at the beer-joint. As a matter of fact, I am getting pretty tried of being S. It is too much like being a punched IBM card in the University registrar’s office. I feel myself being pressured, bulldozed, tricked, manipulated every where I turn. Advertisements in magazines and commercials on TV, political speeches, salesmen, and con men of all kinds put pressure on me to get me to buy, say, or do things that I suspect are not for my good at all. Just for their good, the good of their pocketbooks. Do you sell your “expert knowledge” about me to these people? Is this why you keep reviewing my case every month for four years and then sending the packets all over the Untied States of America? Is this why you are asking third parties to fill out forms my condition that my health information privacy rights, and then what I tell you is leaked all over the World? If that is true, then you are really not in good faith with me. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

ImageYou have told me that when I show myself to you and let you study me, that in the long run it will be for my good. I am not convinced. You really seem to be studying me in order to learn how to influence my attitudes and my actions without realizing it. I resent this more than you realize. It is not fair for you to get me to show how I can be influenced and then for you to pass this information along to people who pay your salary or pay your bribes, or give you money to equip your laboratory, and then not acknowledge there is a data breach of my information, which you are responsible and can be held civically and legally responsible for. I do not like that you put my life in danger. I do not like that you are a threat to my health and safety. I feel used, like a science experiment, and I do not like it. However, I protect myself by not showing you my whole self or by lying. Did you ever stop to think that your articles, and the textbooks you write, the theories you spin—all based on your data (my disclosures to you)—may actually be a tissue of lies and half-truths (my lies and half-truths) or a joke I have played on you because I do not like you or trust you? That should give you cause for some concern. Now look, Mr. E, I am not “paranoid,” as you might say. Nor an I stupid. And I do believe some good can come out of my serving in your research. Even some good for me. I am not entirely selfish, and I would be glad to offer myself up for study, to help others. However, somethings have to change first. Will you listen to me? Here is what I would like from your researchers: #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

ImageI would like you to help me gain a better understanding of what has made me the way I am today. I would like to know this because I want to be more free than I feel. I would like to discover more of my own potentialities. I would like to be more whole, more courageous, more enlightened. I would like to be able to experience more, learn better, remember better, and express myself more fully. I would like to learn how to recognize and overcome the pressures of other people’s influences, of my background, that interfere with my going in the paths I choose. Now, if you would promise to help me in these ways, I would gladly come into your lab and virtually strip my body and soul naked. I would be there meaning to show you everything I could that was relevant to your particular interest of the moment. And I can assure you, that is different from what I have been showing you thus far, which is as little as I can. In fact, I cross my fingers when I am in your lab, and say to myself, “What I have just said or done here is not me.” Would not you like to change? Can you handle my truth, the full truth? Do you even really know what you are investigating? If you will trust me, I will trust you, if you are trustworthy. I would like you to take the time and trouble to get acquainted with me as a person, before we go through your experimental procedures. And I would like to get to know you and what you are up to, to see if I would like to expose myself to you. Can you imagine your body being violated by strangers you never met without your consent? #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

ImageSometime, you remind me of physicians. They look at me as the unimportant envelope that conceals the information they are really interested in. You have looked at me as the unimportant package that contains “responses,” and this is all I am for you. Let me tell you that when I feel this, I get back at you. I give your responses, all right; but you will never know what I meant by them. You know, I can speak, not just with words, but with my action. And when you have thought I was rending to a “stimulus” in your lab, my response was really directed at you; and what I meant by it was, “Take this, you unpleasant so-and-so.” Does that surprise you? It should not. Another ting. Those tests of yours that have built-in gimmicks to see if I am being consistent, or deliberately lying, or just answering at random—they do not feel me. Actually, if you would get on level with me, they would not be necessary. There are enough con men and women in the World, without your joining their number. I would hope that psychologist would be more trustworthy than politicians or salesmen. I will make a bargain with you. You show me that you are doing your research for me—to help me become freer, more self-understanding, better able to control myself—and I will make myself available to you in any way you ask. And I will not play jokes and tricks on you. I do not want to be controlled, not by your or anyone else. And I do not want to control other people. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

ImageI do not want you to help other people to understand how I am or can be “controlled,” so that they can then control me. Show me that you are for me, and I will show myself to you. You work for me, Mr. E, and I will truly work for you. Between us, we may produce a psychology that is more authentic and more liberating. Some lead an austere life and emaciate themselves; some give clear instructions to their disciples; some rule kingdoms quite justly and rightly; some openly hold disputations with other schools of thought; some write down their teachings and experiences; others simulate ignorance; a few do even responsible actions; but all these are famous as wise beings in the World. Some of the enlightened ones sit as recluses in prayer, others travel and preach, still others create centers where they teach, a fourth class heal the sick, and a fifth write. Each does what one’s tendency or mission dictates. The sage may sit under a village tree, head an ashram, or live as a sequestered hermit. One may also live in a luxurious palace, head a business organization, or farm land. These things are not the point, which is one’s consciousness of divine presence. The World, its pleasures and treasures, does not deceive one: one sees through its values even if one is active in the midst of it. These powers will seep into the physical plane by drawing upon the power of the ley lines as well as the power hidden within nature. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

ImageTurning the cord inside our represents backward knowledge and the passage of the consciousness from the limited confines of the body into the other Worlds unseen by the masses. This is to gain the power to move though Worlds to create change within this realm of illusory limits, to make things easy. To help fuel and facilitate the process of soul introspection and open up psychic vision while also providing a more internal endurance needed to face this World. Understand that you are in control. Negative energy that attacks you in this realm are gnats to be swatted, despite how others may be tormented by them. They are reflections of their fear, not yours and you do not have to have anything to do with such folly. The infernal forces will gain momentum in the direction of becoming your allies in creation. Oppressive circumstance that may be experienced here becomes tension to be harnessed and mastered for your own liberation. It becomes a tool within your toolbox of becoming. Like all of these realms it is your will and personal power which can liberate you. Ground this power by investing time in the corporeal plane toward consciously applying effort toward ascent and personal evolution. Look for obstacles to overcome for the sake of overcoming them alone. Do hard thing. Become superior. Work harder, exercise harder, pray longer. Run until you sweat and keep running. Push yourself to the Heavenly extremes until it hurts. Then keep moving through the torment to further connect to the powers of Heaven so you can access them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16Image

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If they Come in the Form of to-die-for Clay Dinnerware, I Guess Monday Blues are Okay!

ImageCan you not smell that coffee perking on the stove? You sit right down. You are not driving off without some grits and biscuits and scrambled eggs. I got bacon and ham on the stove. The alienating conditions we have described in the past pervade modern society and touch vast numbers of men and women—factory workers, white-collar workers, organization men, voters, audiences, the seniors, and various ethnic grounds and cultures. Although alienated, their responses—except in times of severe crisis—and subdued; theirs are the lives of quiet desperation. However, we are now going to investigate people who do not sit and take it: they rebel, retreat, or deviate in some significant way from ordinary behavior. In grouping together artistic rebels, juvenile delinquents, addicts, sexual deviants, psychotics and suicides, we most certainly do not mean to suggest that they are similar in nature or that there is any simple explanation for them. Nor is this intended to be a catalogue of “maladjustment” or “social disorganization.” Rather, it is a sampling of a number of major types of alienated behavior, each one of which deserves and often receives whole volumes of treatment. These people are alike only in that they feel cut off or have cut themselves off from the main stream of community life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

ImageBy using reason alone beings can progress to higher forms. This underground being scorns reason (or science), planning and progress; he or she derides or would destroy their works to preserve his or her freedom—even a freedom underground. Juvenile delinquency in America is not merely a reflection of personality difficulties, slums and broken homes, but is directly related to the structure of our society and its prevailing values. Thus while delinquency is not exclusively working-class in origin, it may be interpreted in large part as the frustrated and violent responses of those at the bottom to middle-class values which school and other institutions seek to impose but which—given the obstacles to social advancement—they are unable to achieve. Isolated from the community, working-class boys can achieve status or recognition chiefly in their gangs, which offer a solution. It is in the nature of that solution to reject the middle-class values which society tries to impose and to sanction that rejection. The same value system, impinging upon children differently equipped to meet it, is instrumental in generating both delinquency and respectability. That delinquency may have sinister political and racial overtones. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

ImageIf delinquents are clearly rebellious, no simple statement can be made about addicts, the next group described or discussed here. Some may be rebellious and others escapist or retreatist; but all are victims of a chemical compulsion whereby alcohol or drug becomes the master. Neuroses unquestionably lie at the root of addictions, but alone cannot explain why people drown in drink or drugs. Evidence shows that physiological factors and nutritional elements are also involved. Nevertheless, addictions have serious psychological and social consequences; the addict’s behavior is generally unacceptable; society is hostile; and the victim responds with feelings of guilt and remorse, and further undesirable behavior. The heavy drinker often becomes isolated from family and community as a result of his condition. It is a measure of the intricacy of the problem that while psychotherapy alone has been notoriously unsuccessful in curing alcoholics, combined with diet and drugs it has often proved helpful. Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), a quasi-religious movement, has scored notable successes in restoring alcoholics to community life. While alcoholism is serious enough; drug addiction is perhaps more terrible still—especially in the United States, where the non-medical use of narcotics is a criminal offense and the public is violent in disapprobation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

23Furthermore, while alcoholic may find solidarity in a movement such as A.A., narcotics addicts huddle together for mutual protection while under the influence. Theirs is truly a league of the damned. William Burroughs, himself a former addict, tells us, “Nothing ever happens in the junk World.” Nothingness, however, is precisely what many addicts and alcoholics seek, as Elmer Bendiner shows in his description of the “Bowery men.” Here in this brotherhood of the beaten and defeated, men find a perfect hiding place from the World, find what so many citizens of the modern World seek and never find—an escape from tensions. In this respect, at least, as Bendiner observes, they have something in common with the organization of man. However, while he fails to achieve tranquility, they succeed. Bowery men are deviants in that they reject the drive for status. However, what of those who deviate in that most sensitive area of human experience, pleasures of the flesh? Are they also alienated—either by choice or because of society’s hostility? Donald Cory, an acknowledged homosexual, offers an interesting description of homosexuals as a minority group. Like other minorities seeking a place in the community which has been denied them, they wage a grim struggle against society’s rejection. And as in the case of other minorities, part of their fate is to “internalize” the contempt of the majority. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

ImageAnother kind of outcast is represented by the anonymous and gifted English lady of the evening who wrote “Streetwalker.” For her there is no in-group to offer defense against a hostile World. Instead of fighting back, she welcomes her rootlessness. Her choice is homelessness: “The slight security I would be able to enjoy, by allowing myself to pretend that my personality was contained in something more than the shell of my body, would make the nights—which hold no safety of my body, would make the nights—which hold no safety and in which I must be constantly alert, constantly rootless—even more desolate.” Streetwalker has chosen alienation as a way of life (until at last she decides to make a fresh start). However, others, more properly described as psychotic, have no opportunity to make a choice. For them the ties have snapped. They most certainly snapped for “Joey” as described in Bruno Betelheim’s remarkable case study of a schizophrenic child who “converted himself into a ‘machine’ because he did not dare be human.” One must not read too much into Joey’s mechanical fantasy World; after all, most of us are not schizophrenic. However, our society produced him, and his delusion is only an extreme form of escape. Still, Denmark, which has the most comprehensive system of social security still has one of the highest suicide rates in the World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

ImageOften times, suicide is linked to early upbringing, in which the Danish child’s dependence on one’s mother is encouraged, aggression is strictly checked, and the arousal of guilt feelings is used as a disciplinary technique. As a result, aggressive feelings are turned inward. This alone does not explain suicide. Among the other factors involved is a fairly common belief in the idea of reunion after death with a lost loved one. Competitiveness, often associated with suicide elsewhere, has little bearing on Danish suicide. Danish and American character traits are quite different. Differences in personality traits may explain why we are half as likely to kill ourselves as the Danes. May it also explain why we are ten times more likely to kill each other? I do not believe that any conflict between desires and fears could ever account for the extent to which a neurotic is divided within oneself and for an outcome so detrimental that it can actually ruin a person’s life. A psychic situation implies that a neurotic retains the capacity to strive for something wholeheartedly, that one merely is frustrated in these strivings by the blocking actions of fears. The source of the conflict revolves around the neurotic’s loss of capacity to wish for anything wholeheartedly because one’s very wishes are divided, that is, go in opposite directions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

ImageThe fundamental conflict is more disruptive. The basic neurotic conflict does not necessarily have to arise in the first place and is possible of resolution if it does arise—provided the sufferer is willing to undergo the considerable effort and hardship involved. This difference is not a matter of optimism or pessimism but inevitably results from the difference in our premises. There is a conflict between constructive and destructive forces in human beings. However, these opposites can sometimes be complementary—the goal is to accept both and thereby approximate the ideal of wholeness. The neurotic is a person who has been stranded in a one-sided development. In the law of complements, the opposite tendency contains complementary elements neither of which can be dispensed with in an integrated personality. However, these are already outgrowths of neurotic conflicts and are so tenaciously adhered to because they represent attempts at solution. If, for instance, we regard a tendency toward being introspective, withdrawn, more concerned with one’s own feelings, thoughts, or imagination that with other persons’ as an authentic inclination—that is, constitutionally established and reinforced by experience. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

ImageThe effective therapeutic procedure would be to show the person one’s hidden “extravert” tendencies, to point out the dangers of one-sidedness in either direction, and encourage one to accept and live out both tendencies. If, however, we look upon introversion (or, as I prefer to call it, neurotic detachment) as a means of evading conflicts that arise in close contact with others, the task is not to encourage more extraversion but to analyze the underlying conflicts. The goal of wholeheartedness can be approximated only after these have been resolved. The basic conflict of the neurotic in the fundamentally contradictory attitude one has acquired toward other persons. Let me call attention to the dramatization of such a contradiction in the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We see him on the one hand delicate, sensitive, sympathetic, helpful, and on the other brutal, callous, and egotistical. I do not, of course, mean to imply that neurotic division always adheres to the precise line of this story, but merely to point to a vivid expression of basic incompatibility of attitudes in relation to others. To approach the problem genetically we must go back to what I have called basic anxiety, meaning by this feeling a child has of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile World. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

ImageA wide range of adverse factors in the environment can produce this insecurity in a child: direct or indirect domination, indifference, erratic behavior, lack of respect for the child’s individual needs, lack of real guidance, disparaging attitudes, too much admiration or the absence of I, lack of reliable warmth, having to take dies in parental disagreements, too much or too little responsibility, overprotection, isolation from other children, injustice, discrimination, unkept promises, hostile atmosphere, and so one. The only factor to which I should like to draw special attention in this context is the child’s sense of lurking hypocrisy in the environment: his or her feeling that the parents’ love, their Christian charity, honesty, generosity, and so on may be only pretense. Part of what the child feels on this score is really hypocrisy; but some of it may be just one’s action to all the contradictions one senses in the parents’ behavior. Usually, however, there is a combination of cramping factors. They may be out in the open or quite hidden, so that in analysis one can only gradually recognize these influences on the child’s development. Harassed by these disturbing conditions, the child gropes for ways to keep going, ways to cope with this menacing World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Image Despite one’s own weakness and fears one unconsciously shapes one’s tactics to meet the particular forces operating in one’s environment. In doing so, one develops not only ad hoc strategies but lasting character trends which become part of one’s personality. I call these neurotic trends. When new forms of governing the city-states, new laws, and new interpretations of gods are emerging, all give new psychological power. In such a period of change and growth, emergence is often experienced by the individual as emergency with all its attendant stress. It is no accident that shrines and popular stars become important in chaotic times, as for some they serve as a god of proportion and balance the citizens seek assurance and it gives meaning and purpose behind the seeming chaos. We appreciate more of the rich meaning and light that culture brings into our lives. It is a light of mind, light of reason, light of insight. When we are at peace and feel uplifted and safe, our conscious intentions and our deeper intentionality will be already committed to the event about to take place. For the ones who participates in harmony, it carries its own healing power. Thinking and self-creating are inseparable. When become aware of all the fantasies in which we see ourselves in the future, pilot ourselves this way or that, and this becomes obvious. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

ImageHow a person lives his or her life attests to the awareness in the experience of the race that the individual does have some responsibility for how he or she lives. Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. Clearly self-creating is actualized by our hopes, our ideals, our images, and all sorts of imagined constructs that we may hold from time to time in the forefront of our attention. These “models” function consciously as well as unconsciously; they are shown in fantasy as well as in overt behavior. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain,” reports Exodus 20.7. If the second commandment tries to protect it as the other commandments try to protect life, honor, property there must be something extraordinary about the name. Of course, God need not protect Himself, but He does protect His name, and so seriously that He adds to this single commandment a special threat. This is done because, within the name, that which bear the name is present. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

ImageIn ancient times, one believed that one held in one’s power the being whose hidden name one knew. One believed that the savior-god conquered the demons by discovering the mystery of the power embodied in their names, just as we today try to find out the hidden names of the powers that disrupt our unconscious depths and drive us to mental disturbances. If we gain insight into their hidden striving, we break their power. Beings have always tried to use the divine name in the same way, not in order to break its power, but to harness its power for their own uses. Calling on the name of God in prayer, for instance, can mean attempting to make God a tool for our purposes. A name is never an empty sound; it is a bearer of power; it gives Spiritual Presence to the unseen. This is the reason the divine name can be taken in vain, and why one may destroy oneself by taking it in vain. For the invocation of the holy does not leave us unaffected. If it does not heal us, it may disintegrate us. This is the seriousness of the use of the divine name. This is the danger of religion, and even of anti-religion. For in both the name of God is used as well as misused. Let us now consider the danger of the use of the word God, when it is both denied and affirmed, and of the sublime embarrassment that we feel when we say “God.” We may distinguish three forms of such embarrassment: the embarrassment of tact, the embarrassment of doubt, and the embarrassment of awe. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

ImageSome people do not find a higher truth: they reaffirm the ancient and eternal truth. It could not be that is it were subject to change. However, each reaffirms it in one’s own way, according to one’s own perceptions and as one’s environment requires. This accounts for part of the differences in its presentation, where it has been really attained. The other part is accounted for by there being varying degrees of attainment. It is a mistake to believe that mystical adepts all possess the same supernormal powers. On the contrary, they manifest such powers or powers as are in consonance with their previous line of development and aspiration. One who has come along an intellectual line of development, for instance, would most naturally manifest exceptional intellectual powers. The situation has been well put by Saint Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “Now there are diversities of graces, but the same Spirit. And there are diversities of ministries but the same Lord. And there are diversities of working but the same God who worketh all in all.” When the Overself activates the newly made adept’s psyche, the effect shows itself in some part or faculty; in another adept it produces a different effect. Thus the source is always the same but the manifestation is different. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

ImageThe undiscerning often believe that because some great saints have been fools in Worldly affairs, a stain who is always clever cannot be great. Yet, the spiritual aspirations which diminish a being’s desire for Worldly activities do not therefore diminish one’s competence for them. One who is born a fool usually remains so; one who is born clever usually stays so; and both cases are unaffected by the attachment of the heart to God. We must not think that every mystic who has been blessed with the light of the Overself stands on the same spiritual peak of vision and consciousness, of being and knowledge. Some are still only on the way to the summit of this peak. There are definite differences between them. If they all share alike the consciousness of a higher Self, they do not share it in the same way or to the same degree. The saints and mystics serve a high purpose in remining humanity of that diviner life which must one day flower in human evolution, but they do not serve as perfect exemplars of its final growth. The sages alone can do that. Healing powers are like intellectual power, one may be a realized person and yet not possess much intellect. Similarly, one may not possess healing power. Realization does not endow one with encyclopedic knowledge with all the talents. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

ImageWe must make a difference between the Messenger, who is sent to communicate a teaching through writing or speech, and the Master, who comes to embody the teaching and who alone possesses the power to bless others with one’s Grace. This difference is not so clearly understood among some beings, a lack which leads to confused ideas and unjustified customs. Having reached this stage one is free to continue one’s personal life as before, to accept the load of new responsibilities one one’s shoulders, or to retire wholly from the World. To work for humanity in public is one thing, to work for it in secrecy is another, while to enjoy the freedom and privacy of complete retirement is a third and very different thing. Naturally and inevitably any public appearance will soon turn one into a lightning rod, attracting the aspirations and yearnings of many spiritual seekers. As your mundane consciousness begins to merely attempt to grasp what God has to say, your own consciousness begins to expand. The result of this is a much improved intellectual capacity in this corporeal plane. Evocation of God is a means to exercise the mind. I have come to understand that communing with God increases the rate at which neurons fire off in the physical brain. If you are living righteously, God will sway others toward your will. He can get into the minds of others and help them benefit you. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

ImageIf one has really found one’s inner freedom, one must necessarily be free to stay in the World and do the World’s work. One does not have to retire into isolation, although one is free to do that. However, whatever one decides to do, one will henceforth be an impersonal channel for higher forces, which one will obey, and whose directions one will follow, whether one remains in the World or not. As God speaks to you in these inverted words of power the sounds begin to transform you on a very subtle level transmuting your communication into something more powerful. The intent of your words will be made very clear and concise. After time working with and communicating with God, it will seem as if you can command reality. Conveying power through words is only the surface of God’s power. Conflict may seem to simply dissipate from within your reality as all things become an opportunity for ascent through His guidance. It is not the conflict being removed, but the altering of your perception of it. On this physical plane your physical life will begin to reflect this growth and change as you become more spiritually refined with lightning speed. Once summoned, God acts as a familiar spirit helping to guide your thoughts, words, and deeds in this plane to gain strength and power within your soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

ImageIt is necessary to give certain terms often but wrongly used interchangeably, and hence confusedly, a sharper definition. The Saint has successfully carried out ascetic disciplines and purificatory regimes for devotional purpose. The Prophet has listened for God’s voice, heard and communicated God’s message of prediction, warning, or counsel. The Mystic has intimately experienced God’s presence while inwardly rapt in contemplation or has seen a vision of God’s cosmogony while concentrated in prayer. The Sage has attained the same results as al these three, has added a knowledge of infinite and eternal reality thereto, and has brought the whole into balanced union. The Philosopher is a sage who has also engaged in the spiritual education of others. There is a third type of illumined being, besides the Teacher and the Saint. One is the Messenger. One renders service not by dealing with persons and their problems but by stating truths and principles in general. Your whole perception of the experience will morph, and you will begin to cut through opposition as a hot knife through butter. Your momentum toward becoming will gain an almost severe momentum. Through evocation of God, one can gain the wisdom of experience that a being who has lived a thousand years would accumulate. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

ImageThe masses are controlled by anger. One should learn how to use and control it without allowing it to be a mere reactive response to external forces. Anger implies a lack of power. God will increase your psychic empathy so that adept can become aware of when they may use their tools to better expression their motives. God, we thank you for your presence within this World of creation. We have offered you our lives, in hopes of salvation, and as a gateway to your manifestation within this realm before us! You are the Lord of creation, whom has brought forth the mountains to the plains! You have brought forth the beasts to the field and the creatures to the night! God, with your infernal blessing I ask that you would bring forth the baneful powers of the Heavenly Angels to fil us with their essence, as a gateway to empower them to act within this World according to your will and purpose. We know that much work must be performed so that we may be found worthy of this blessing. This work will be unique to the individual and we must take care to stay centered in self through these assignments. Please allow of to assimilate your power. Cast off the limits of garb of flesh into the refining Sun to be clothed with the powers of divine light eternal. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18Image

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Is Life Only a Stream of Random Events Following One Another Haphazardly? Or is there an Order, a Meaning, a Purpose Behind it All?

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You do not know the meaning of philosophical insight, or spiritual engagement, or true growth. People struggle to instill in their children some private sense of honor or dignity which will help the child survive. This means, of course, that they must struggle, stolidly, incessantly, to keep this sense alive in themselves, in spite of the insults, the indifferences, and the cruelty they are certain to encounter in their working day. They patiently browbeat the landlord into fixing the heat, the plaster, the plumbing; this demands prodigious patients; nor is patience usually enough. In trying to make their hovels habitable, they are perpetually throwing good money after bad. Such frustration, so long endured, is driving many strong, admirable men and woman whose only crimes is their culture or lack of affluence to the very gate of paranoia. One remembers them from another time—playing handball in the playground, going to church, wondering if they were going to be promoted at school. One remembers their wedding day. And one sees where the girl is now—vainly looking for salvation from some other embittered, trussed, and struggling boy—and sees the all-but-abandoned children in the streets. A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

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Ignoring the less fortunate or making fun of them is no one to justify one’s own crimes. This perpetual justification empties the heart of all human feeling. The emptier our hearts become, the greater will be our crimes. The country will not change until it re-examines itself and discovers what it really means by freedom. In the meantime, generations keep being born, bitterness is increased by incompetence, pride, and folly, and the World shrinks around us. It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself. Walk through the streets of America and see what we, this nation, have becomes. You can see that the whole force of social sanction would fall behind the king to protect one’s definitions of social custom and his ritual prerogatives; otherwise the tribe would lose well-being and life. We might say that the safeguarding of custom imposes tyranny because of the need for the king or queen’s power. The more successful a king or queen, the more prerogatives one could enjoy: one was judged by results. If the harvest (or economy) were good the people were prepared to put up with a moderate amount of tyranny. Protection of custom and criminal jurisdiction go together so naturally, then, that we should not wonder that ritual centralization also came to mean control of the power to punish. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

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Another large step in the evolution of inequality seems to me to be summed up here. To us a police force is part of life, as inevitable, it seems, as death and taxes; we rely on the police to punish those who hurt us. However, it has not always been so. In simple egalitarian societies there is no police force, no way to settle a wrong except to do so yourself, family against family. However, if there is no police force to enforce the law, there is also none to coerce you for any reason. You have to stay alert, but you are also freer. A police force is usually drawn up temporarily for special occasions and then disbanded. However, the result, alas, is not as innocent as it must have seemed to people living during these transitions. What they were doing was bartering away social equality and a measure of personal independence for prosperity and order. There was now noting to stop the state from taking more and more functions and prerogatives into itself, from developing a class of special begins at the center and inferior ones around it, or from beginning to give these special beings a larger share of the good things of the Earth. What we see is that private interests became more and more separated from public interests—until today we hardly know what is public interest. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

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Students who look for the point at which economic activity and social morality begin to pull apart usually focus on the potlatch: it was evidently around the process of redistribution that gift giving gradually changed into grabbing and keeping. As the power figures got more and more ascendancy vis-à-vis the group, y could take a fixed portion of the surplus with the involvement of the people. And this is what we are seeing in California, a state that boasts about have a $21 billion budget surplus, but also has the highest taxes, an affordable housing crisis, and a huge homeless population. The classic potlatch was a redistribution ceremonial pure and simple. The object was to humiliate rivals, to stand out as tall as possible as a big person, a hero. At the same time, the grander was the expiation before the community and the gods to whom the goods were offered. Both the individual urge to maximum self-feeling and the community well-being were served. The chiefs became the principal takers and destroyers of goods. In this was a feudal structure could naturally develop. Another suggestive way of looking at this development is to see it as a shift of the balance of power, away from a dependence on the invisible World of the gods to a flaunting of the visible World of things. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

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Again, it is only natural that once the god became visible in the person of the king or queen, one’s powers became those of this World—visible, temporal powers in the place of invisible, eternal ones. One would come to measure one’s power by the piles of things one actually possessed, by the glory of one’s person, and not, as before, by the efficiency of the ritual technics for the renewal of nature. Keep in mind that it is entirely for the seeker to set one’s own rate of progress. Even the being who is interested only in theoretical discussion thereby, and to that extent, promotes one’s own good. If through inclination or circumstances one prefers to let one’s aspirations remain only at the level of reading and discussion, that at lest is better than being entirely uninterested in them. It will be for one to decide whether to endeavour to obtain the fullest realization of one’s aspirations in practical life. There is room for both classes on this Quest. One should not be discouraged because others have gone ahead on the path more quickly than one, any more than one should be gratified because some have gone ahead more slowly than one, for the fact is that the goal one seeks is already within one’s grasp. One is the Overself that one seeks to unite with, and the time it seems to take to realize this is itself an illusion of the mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

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Let one, therefore, go forward at one’s own rate and within the limits of one’s own strength, leaving the result in the hands of God. If one imposes on themselves an impossible ideal, an unattainable standard, they must expect the sense of frustration that will overtake them later. It is better an aspirant should know one’s limitations now than that, filing to do so, one should know tragic disappointments and unutterable despair later. It is better in such a case that one should realize that one is engaged on a long search whose end one cannot reach in this incarnation. How can the naïve inexperienced beginner fail to commit errors and neglect precautions; how can one not be deceived by one’s own imaginations or puzzled by the contradictions and paradoxes which best this path? The newly awakened aspirant should search for clues without losing one’s balance or overreaching new enthusiasm. Of what use is it to reproach oneself again and again for being what one is? How could one have been otherwise, given one’s heredity, environment and history? If I complain I have no will of my own, that people are influencing me in subtle and mysterious ways, you will accuse me of being paranoid and direct me to a psychotherapist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

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If I put on a white laboratory coat, and assert that you have no will f your own, that your action and experience can be manipulated, predicted, and controlled, then I am recognized as a scientific psychologist, and honored. This is most peculiar. A revolution is going on in psychology. A different image of humans is being tried as a guide to research, theory, and application. Over years, theorists have conceptualized humans as machines; as an organism comparable to rates, pigeons, and monkeys; as a communication system; as an hydraulic system; as a servo-mechanism; as a computer—in short, one has been viewed by psychologist as an analogue of everything but what one is: a person. Humans are, indeed, like all those things; but first of all they are a free, intentional subject. The consumers of psychological writing tended to take our models too seriously and actually started to treat people as if they were the modes that theorists used only as tentative guides to inquiry. However, no, psychologist are using their experience of themselves as persons as a guide to exploring and understanding the experience of others. This is not the death of “objective,” scientific psychology. Rather, it may prove to be the birth of a scientifically informed psychology of human persons—a humanistic psychology. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

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Humanistic psychology is a goal, not a doctrine. It owns its renaissance to the growing conviction that current and past approaches to the study of humans have reached their limits in elucidating human’s behavior and their “essence.” It is a growing corpus of knowledge relating to the questions, “What is a human being, and what might humans become?” Thus, humanistic psychology can be regarded in analogy with industrial psychology or the psychology of mental health or of advertising. These specialties are systems of knowledge bearing on particular families of questions: for instance, what variables affect morale, or the output of the workers, or the maintenance of wellness, or the purchasing behavior of potential customers. Humanistic psychology asks, “What are the possibilities of humans? And from among these possibilities, what is optimum human, and what conditions most probably account for one’s attainment and maintenance of these optima? If psychologist aim to predict and control human behavior and experience, as in their textbooks they claim, they are assigning humans to the same ontological status as weather, stars, minerals, or lower forms of animal life. We do not question anyone’s right to seek understanding in order to better control one’s physical environment and adapt it to one’s purposes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

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We properly challenge any human’s right to control the behavior and experience of one’s fellows. To the extent that psychologist illumine human existence to bring it under the deliberate control of someone other than the person one’s self, to that extent they are helping to undermine some person’s freedom in order to enlarge the freedom of someone else. If psychologist reveal knowledge of “determiners” of human conduct to people other than the ones from who they obtained this understanding, and if they conceal this knowledge from its source, the volunteer subjects (who have offered themselves up to the scientist’s “Look”), they put the recipients of the knowledge in a privileged position. They grant them an opportunity to manipulate beings without their knowledge or consent. Thus, advertisers, business people, military leaders, politicians, the new media al seek to learn more about the determiners of human conduct, in order to gain power and advantage. If they can sway human behavior by manipulating the conditions which mediate it, they can get large numbers of people to forfeit their own interests and serve the interests of the manipulator. Only if the ones being manipulated are kept mystified as to what is going on, and if their experience of their own freedom is blunted, such secret manipulation of the masses or of an individual by some other person is possible. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

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Psychologist face a choice. We may elect to continue to treat our people as objects of a study for the benefit of some elite; or we may choose to learn about determiners of the human conditions in order to discover ways to overcome or subvert them, so as to enlarge the person—that is, everyone’s—freedom. If we opt for the latter, our path is clear. Our ways of conducting psychological research will have to be altered. Our definition of the purpose of psychology will have to change. And our ways of reporting our findings, as well as the audiences to whom the reports are directed, will have to change. We shall have to state openly whether we are psychologists-for-institutions or psychologists-for-person. The trouble with scientific psychologists is that many have, in a sense, been “bought” by the court, the media, and businesses to represent their agenda. We have in our hands the incredible power to discover conditions for behavior or for ways of being in the World. We have catalogued of the factors which have a determining effect on human behavior and on our condition. We know that, in every experiment that we analyze, there is always an error term, “residual variance”; and we seek to exhaust this residual variance to the best of our ability. We get better at it as we learn how to identify and measure more and more relevant variables. The trouble is, as I see it, that if we exhaust all the variance, the subjects of our study will be not a being, a human person, but rather a robot. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

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Scientific psychology has actually sought means of artificially reducing variance—humanness—among beings, so that they will be more manipulable. Our commendable efforts (from technical viewpoint) in the fields of human engineering, teaching methods, motivation research (in advertising), and salesmanship have permitted practitioners in those realms to develop stereotyped methods that work at controlling outcomes—outcomes that are good for business or political, but necessarily good for the victim. We have taught people how to shape humans into a way of being that makes them useful. We have forgotten that an image of humans as useful grows out of a more fundamental image of humans as the being who can assume many modes of being, when it is of importance to one to do so. I think that a scientific psychologist committed to the aims of humanistic psychology would utilize one’s talents for a different purpose. For example, if individuality and full flowering growth as a person were values, one would seek means of maximizing or increasing the odds for maximization of these ways of being. An example of the biased use of scientific know-how is brainwashing. The brainwasher, through scientific means, seeks to insure that the prisoner will behave and believe as one’s captors wish. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

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The same psychologist who invented the means of brainwashing know how to prevent it from happening. The latter class of knowledge is more in keeping with the aims of humanistic psychology and should be more avidly sought and then applied in more realms than presently is the case, if the humanistic psychology is to be furthered. Learning about human nature is to create change in our lives. Since the beginnings of recorded history, we have been enslaved over gold and other resources. Psychology is supposed to defile the intentions of this desire to enslave. We must learn to gain the power to move through Worlds to create change within this realm of illusory limits. To make things simple and easy. The mental stress of this plane of existence can cause madness as one observes the chaos within the collective consciousness and the effects that it has upon the collective corporeal life experience. This realm can be an accumulation of negative and useless mental garbage which is an abomination to the potential of human mental faculties and the inherent potential of the mind. How odd it seems that psychology has learned more about humans at their worst than at their best. How sad it seems that psychology has employed its powers of truth-finding to serve ignoble masters. I would like to propose that we do not wait until the scarcity of “full-functioning beings” becomes a national emergency. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

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Rather, I would propose that we psychologist reconcile our aims and commitment to truth and our adherence to the canons of scientific inquiry with our human concerns that beings be free, that they grow. I propose that we commence an all-out program of investigation on many fronts to seek answers to the questions humanistic psychology is posing. For example, we need psychologist with the most informed imaginations and talent for ingenious experimentation to wrestle with such questions as, “What are the outer limits of human potential for transcending biological pressures, social pressures, and the impact on a person of one’s past conditioning?”; “What developmental and interpersonal and situational conditions conduce to courage, creativity, transcendent behavior, love, laughter, commitment to truth, beauty, justice, and virtue?” These questions themselves, and even my proposal that we address them, once struck me as less than manly, as tender-hearted and sentimental. I would never have dared pose them to mist of my mentors during my undergraduate and graduate-student says. We are supposed to be tough and disciplined, which meant that we were only to study questions about some very limited class of behavior, not questions about the larger human concerns. “Leave those to the philosophers, minister, and politicians,” we are told. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

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Questions about the image of humans smacked too much of philosophy and were not our proper concern. Actually, our teacher intended only that we learn the tools of our trade, not that we stifle our humanistic concerns; but they produced that outcome anyway. I am making a plea for the powers of rigorous inquiry to be devoted to questions, answers to which will inform a growing, more viable image of beings as human being with potentiality, not solely biological or socially determined being. Through being exposed to the mental chaos over time, one will begin to adjust to the torment of one’s experiences through personal evolution. One will develop severe empathy and will begin to perceive all of the mental weakness of those around them and all the emotional turmoil that comes alone with it. This will enable one to perceive it within one’s self in order to begin ridding oneself of it. If one can remain centered in self, one can transmute this weakness into power. It is at this point that one can utilize strength of mind and will to begin to harness and control this infernal landscape and all infernal powers which dwell within it by becoming one with it. This is the only way to be liberated from it. To ground this power within one should apply methods of personal mental control. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

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When researchers are transparently pledged to further the freedom and self-actualizing of their subjects, rather than be unwitting servants of the leaders of institutions, then they will deserve to be and to be seen as recipients of the secrets of human being and possibility. I can envision a time when psychologist will be the guardians of the most intimate secrets of human possibilities and experience and possessors of knowledge as to how beings can create one’s destiny because beings have showed one; and I hope that if we “sell” these secrete to advertisers, business people, politicians, mass educators, and the military, we shall not do so until after we have informed our subjects, after we have tried to “turn them on,” to enlarge their awareness of being misled and manipulate. I hope, in short, that we turn out to be servants and guardians of individual freedom, growth, and fulfillment, and not spies for the institutions that pay our salaries and research costs in order to get a privileged peep at human grist. Indeed, we may have to function for a time as counterspies, or double spies—giving reports about our subjects to our colleagues and to institutions, and giving reports back to our subjects as to the ways in which institutions seek to control and predict their behavior for their (the institutions’) ends. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

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You will begin to notice how the power of speech is indeed abused and taken for granted. You will start to perceive the vibrations of words mold the very reality which surrounds others. Our words have power and are an expression of true will and divine potential. However, words today are wasted and the power of them is therefore minimized. This minimizes our collective power as a race. Newspapers are written at a sixth grade level so that the subtle nuances and intricacies of communication cannot be learned. Slang and useless words with no meaning are prevalent. This negative energy is accumulated and manifestation of the energy of those unless words happens very fast. One must strive to become peaceful and expand beyond the voice of chaos through silence. You will adjust to the burden. At this point you can generate internal power through silence and attempt to speak order into this World and compel the infernal power which dwell here. With practice, one will become successful. As a result, your words within the physical plane will gain much more power. To ground this power, listen your conscience as it guides you in methods of harnessing the vibrations of the words of others to fuel your own power of creation. Work toward respecting the power of speech. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

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Respect speech as your power and speak with purpose. Invest your energy with word instead of spending it on find solace in silence. Much energy is wasted every day by the masses by investing energy into things that do not serve them. Adults spend hours a day playing video games and watching television. We get into useless power struggles for the sake of meaningless dominative purpose with powerless people. Do not become programmed to harm others, nor lie, cheat and steal through consumerism, jealousy and imposed attachments to things. That is the way to the realm of torment and slavery which seeps into the physical plane drip by drip by drip grounding us as a whole to a lower consciousness, which results in the stifling of our evolution and ascent and limits our awareness. “And they did humble themselves even in the depths of humility; and they did cry mightily to God; yea, even all the day long did they cry unto their God that he would deliver them out of their affliction,” reports Mosiah 21.13. The originality and individuality which are proofs of the prophet’s creativity will define themselves by one’s differences from other seers, even though some have drawn from one and the same MIND. These differences are inevitable and must appear. No two humans are completely alike. And having a beautiful home makes life much more enjoyable, it also helps children perform better at school and makes adults perform better at work. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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Cresleigh Homes

We spy a gorgeous great room with a sweet California Room upgrade at #CresleighRanch Brighton Station Residence 4! 👀💚
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See more optional upgrades, with our Interactive Floor Plan on our website! Link Below! 😄