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The Future Movements of the Stars or the Facts of Past History are Determined Now Once and for All!

ImageDefend your soul as if your freedom depended on it. The soul is meant to satisfy the curiosity of the curious, provide a place for the lonely where they may enjoy the companionship and warmth of God. It supplies insight for those seeking knowledge, love for the yearning desires of the heart, truth for those in need of discernment, and makes available the blessings of reality which will eventually haunt one so successfully. How far you go in life depends on your being tender with your youth, compassionate as you age, sympathetic with those striving, and accepting of the weak and the strong. Immortality has come to reside in accumulated wealth. And once individuals and families were free to negotiate their value in this kind of coinage, there was no stopping the process. Uncertainty is no longer acceptable; the general mind will fail to come to rest in their presence, and will seek for solutions of a more reassuring kind. Primitive beings lived in a World devoid of clocks, progressive calendars, once-only numbered years. Nature was seen in her imagined purity of endless cycles of Sun risings and settings, Moon waxing and waning, seasons changing, animals dying and being born, and so forth. However, this kind of cosmology was not favorable to the accumulation of either guilt or property, since everything was wiped away with the gifs and nature was renewed with the help of ritual ceremonies and regeneration. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

ImageBecause of their cosmology in primitive times, beings did not feel that they have to pile things up. Primitive beings lived in an eternal now; they experienced the flow of time because they experienced guilt. That is, in terms of our discussion of guilt, primitive beings lived in certain universal binds that characterized human life, and so they had to experience time flow because these beings are composed with the passage of time. Guilt and time, then, are inseparable, which is why primitive beings so elaborately tried to deny them both with regenerative rituals. It took the longest time for this denial to be given up; the Greeks and Romans were reluctant to admit that the old regenerative rituals no longer worked. Probably the repeated sacking of Rome graphically swung the balance. It could no longer be pretended that the ancient rituals of renewal could keep regenerating the city, and at this time growing numbers of people opted for Christianity, which promised the impending end of the World; after Augustine, time was firmly set in a liner way while waiting for that end. Witness the attempt to overcome the “problem of evil,” the “mystery of pain.” There is no “problem of good.” We are still today ticking off the years, but we no loner know what for, unless it is for compounding interest. Compounding interest is one of the few meaningful thing to do in an irreversible time stream that is wholly secular and visible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

ImageNo wonder the confusion of the ancient World was so great and tension and anxiety were so high: beings had already amassed great burdens of guilt by amassing possession, and there was no easy way to atone for this. Being were no longer safely tucked into the group, but they still had their human burdens. They were still in flight from themselves, from their own mortality. But as one’s abilities to do lie wholly in the line of one’s natural propensities; as one enjoys reacting with such emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the like; and as one very unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or doubt, which is sure to leave the mind a prey to discontent and craving. In the lower forms of life no one will pretend that cognition is anything more than a guide to appropriate action. This is how we understand the growth of the notion of “sin” historically. Theologically, sin means literally separation from the powers and protection of the gods, a setting up of oneself as a causa sui. Sin is the experience of uncertainty in one’s relation to the divine ground of one’s being; one no longer is sure of possessing the right connection, the right means of expiation. One feels alone, exposed, weighed down by the burden of guilt accumulated in this World by the acts of one’s body and one’s material desires. One’s experience of physicalness of life obsesses one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

ImageThe experience of sin, for simple believers, is merely one of “uncleanliness” and straightforward prohibition of specific acts. It is not the experience of one’s whole life as a problem. We have put time on a wholly unilinear basis, and so money and cumulative interest have become our unequivocal god. There is no experience of sin where the body is not felt to be a problem, where one imagines that one does indeed have full control over one’s own destiny on the physical level alone. Separation from the divine powers is not felt because these powers are denied by the primary power of the visible things. In other words, we have succeeded better than ever the primitives in avoiding sin, by simply denying the existence of the invisible dimension to which it is related. In contrast with guilt, we do not even have to repress it, since it does not arise in our experience of the World. Secularization of the economy means that we can no longer be redeemed by work, since the creation of a surplus is no longer addressed as a gift to the gods. Which means that the new god Money that we pursue so dedicatedly is not a god that gives expiation! It is perverse. We wonder how we could allow ourselves to do this to ourselves, but right away we know the answer: we did not take command of history at some given point where civilization started. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

ImageRather, history took command of us in our original driveness toward heroism; and our urge to heroism has always taken the nearest means at hand. The result of this secularization process is that we have an economy driven by the pure sense of guilt, unmitigated by any sense of redemption. Human beings have changed from the giving beings, the one who passes things on, to the wholly taking and keeping one. By continually taking and piling and computing interest and leaving to one’s heirs, beings contrives the illusion that one is in complete control of one’s destiny. After all, accumulated things are a visible testimonial to power, to the fact that one is not limited or dependent. Beings imagine that the causa sui project is firmly in one’s hands, that one is the heroic maker and doer who takes what one creates, what is rightfully theirs. And so we see how modern beings, in one’s one-dimensional economics, is drive by the idea of one’s life, by one’s denial of limitations, of the trust state of natural affairs. Basically, human beings have become a greater victim of their drivenness when heroism pushed expiation out of the picture; beings are now giving expression to only one side of their nature. One still needs expiation for peace of one’s life because one is stuck with one’s natural and universal experience of guilt. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

ImageThe being who takes is strong enough to shoulder one’s own guilt, and the process of expiation of modern beings has been reified and passes into piles of stone and gold. Granted that money represents the new causa sui project, that the infantile omnipotence is no loner in one’s body but in things. However, to repress guilt is not to shoulder it; it is not that guilt has vanished by being transmuted into things or expiated by things; rather, that which is denied must come out by some other means. History is the tragic record of heroism and expiation out of control and of human’s effort to earn expiation in new, frantically driven and contrived ways. The burden of guilt created by cumulative possessions, liner time, and secularization is assuredly greater than that experienced by primitive beings; it has come out some way. Most of the evil that humans have visited on their World is the result precisely of the greater passion of one’s denial and historical drivenness. This leads us directly from problems of psychoanalysis and history right up to the problem of science of humans itself: what is the nature of evil in human affairs, and how can we come to grips with it as thoughtful beings trying to take back some control over our own destiny, trying to fish ourselves out of the whirlpool of our historical passion? The only way that seems open to reason is to continue to try to soberly sort out our own motive, those that have led to our present state. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

ImageWe are acquainted with a thing as soon as we have learned how to behave toward it, or how to meet the behavior which we expect from it. Up to that point it is still “strange” to us. All of our human problems, with their intolerable sufferings, arise from human’s ceaseless attempts to make this material World into a human-made reality…aiming to achieve on Earth a “perfection” which is only to be found in the beyond, thereby hopelessly confusing the values of both spheres. Willingness to live with energy, though energy brings pain is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished; if you are alive, it is not. No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. The unknowable may be unfathomed, but if it makes such distinct demands upon our activity, we surely are not ignorant of its essential quality. The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess. Take repentance: the person who can do nothing righty can at least repent of one’s failures. The seeker will pass through three periods successively before one can enter the sublime land of realization. First one must experiment with and exhaust the external possibilities of religion; then one must practise the internal rite of prayer; lastly one must, with sharpened intelligence, pursue the subtlest of all philosophies. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

ImageThat a higher existence is possible for humankind may be a strong intuitive feeling or a strong religious belief. It can develop through experience of a spiritual glimpse into personal realization or more lastingly, more truthfully, through experience of philosophic insight. Humans need a rule for their will, and will invent one be not given. Our own thoughts are what we are most at home with, what we are least afraid of. To say then that the Universe essentially is thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all. There is no radically alien corner, but an all-pervading intimacy. When Benjamin Franklin observed the spark coming from the key on his kite-string, he did not, fortunately, fall under the spell of its immediate and practical uses. Instead, he began to inquire into the basic process which made such a phenomenon possible. Happiness is a habit. Practise unhappy attitudes and become an unhappy person. Practise happy attitudes and learn that the habit becomes the person. Let optimistic thoughts become your habits. If you did your best yesterday, you have begun to die; if you are doing your best today, you are beginning to live! When we focus on solving problems is usually when we find ourselves just experiencing ourselves. The innermost core of human’s nature, the deepest layers of one’s personality, the base of terrestrial nature, the good in nature—is basically socialized, forward-moving, rational and realistic. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

ImageAt the heart, human beings are irrational, unsocialized, destructive of others and self—and this concept is accepted almost without question. The anti-social emotions—hostility, jealousy, and so forth—result from frustration of more basic impulses for love and security and belonging, which are in themselves desirable. However, cooperation, rather than struggle, is the basic law of human life. Just because the fact that in therapy there are continually being uncovered hostile and anti-social feelings, it is easy to assume that this indicates the deeper and therefore the basic nature of humans. Only slowly has it become evident that these untamed and unsocial feeling are neither the deepest nor the strongest, and that the inner core of human’s personality is the organism itself, which is essentially both self-preserving and social. There is an overpowering desire at moments to escape personality, to revel in the actions of forces that have no respect for our ego, to let the ties flow, even though they flow over us. The strife of these two kinds of mental temper will, I think, always be seen in philosophy. Some people will keep insisting on the reason, the atonement, that is possessed in the heart of things, and that we can act with; others, on the opacity of brute fact that we must react. In some people there is an underlying bitterness and hatred and a desire to get back at the World which has cheated them, and it is an anti-social feeling, a deep experience of having been hurt. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

ImagePeople who are hurt are deeply trying to express something within their soul which is difficult to formulate. Sometimes they like to torment themselves, and to chase things down. People often have feelings that go against the grain of their culture, they feel bound to say that the core of themselves is not bad, nor terribly wrong, but something beneficial. Underneath the layer of controlled surface behavior, underneath the bitterness, underneath the hurt, is a self that is good, and that is without hate. If hatefulness seems like a rather neutral or negative concept, people need love most then they deserve it least. And the deeper when digs into themselves, they will realize the less they have to fear; and instead of finding something terribly wrong within oneself, one may gradually uncover a core of self which wants neither to reward nor punish others, a self without hate, a self which is deeply socialized. In this sense a person becomes for the first time the full potential of the human organism, with the enriching element of awareness freely added to the basic aspect of sensory and visceral reaction. The person comes to be what he or she is. What this seems to mean is that the individual some to be—in awareness—what one is—in experience. One is, in other words, a complete and fully functioning human organism. Through self-actualization, people learn to control themselves, and one is incorrigibly socialized in one’s desires. There is no beast in human beings. There is only a human in humans and this we have to be able to release. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

ImageThere is a difference between having access to the soul and having the faith it takes to interpret it. Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified philosophies seeking the inconcussum are fruits of mental natures in which the passion for identity (which we see to be but one factor of the rational appetite) plays an abnormally exclusive part. In the average being, on the contrary, the power to trust, to risk a little beyond the literal evidence, is an essential function. Any more of conceiving the Universe which makes an appeal to this generous power, and makes the being seem as if one were individually helping to create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality one is willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to by large numbers. The human personality has to be ready to go in for what it feels to be right, in spite of all appearances. The concrete being has but one interest—to be right. That for one is the art of all arts, and all means are fair which help one to it. Vulnerable, we are flung into the World, and between us and nature there are no rules of civilized warfare. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

ImageWhen the human’s unique capacity of awareness is thus functioning freely and fully, we find that we have not an animal whom we must fear, not a beast who must be controlled, but an organism able to achieve, through the remarkable integrative capacity of its central nervous system, a balanced, realistic, self-enhancing, other-enhancing behavior as a resultant of all these elements of awareness. To put it another way, when humans are less than fully human—when one denies to awareness various aspect of one’s experience—then indeed we have all too often reason to fear one and one’s behavior, as present World situation testifies. However, when one is fully human, when one is one’s complete organism, when awareness of experience, that peculiarly human attribute, is most fully operating, then one is to be trusted, then one’s behavior is constructive. It is not always convent in one’s work; the brilliant student, at the top of one’s class, who is paralyzed by the conviction that one is hopelessly and helplessly inadequate; the parent who is distressed by one’s child’s behavior; the popular girl who finds herself unaccountably overtaken by sharps spells of morbid depression; the woman who fears that life and love are passing her by, and that her good graduate record is a poor recompense; the man who has become convinced that powerful or sinister forces are plotting against him;–I could go on and on with the many different and unique problems which people bring to us. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

ImageThe kaleidoscope of problems runs the gamut of life’s experiences. Yet there is no satisfaction in giving this type of catalog, for, as counselor, I know that the problem will eventually be resolved. However, the real problem seems to be people are trying to figure out who they are. They want to get in touch with themselves. They want to become their authentic self. All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. We cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith. Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis. The only difference is that while some hypotheses can be refuted in five minutes, others may defy ages. A chemist who conjectures that a certain wall-paper contains arsenic, and has faith enough to lead one to take the trouble to put some of it into a hydrogen bottle, finds out by the results of one’s action whether he was right or wrong. However, theories like that of Darwin, or that of the kinetic constitution of matter, may exhaust the labors of generations in their corroboration, each tester of their truth proceeding in this simple way—that one acts as if it were true, and expects the result to disappoint one if one’s assumption is false. The longer disappointment is delayed, the stronger grows one’s faith in one’s theory. Strongest minds are often those whom the noisy World hears least. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

ImageWe make a living by what we get, we may a life by what when give. Belief (as measured by action) not only does and must continually outstrip scientific evidence, but there is a certain class of truths of whose reality belief is a factor as well as a confessor; and this class of truths is regarded as faith and is not only licit and pertinent, but essential and indispensable. The truths cannot become true toll our faith has made them so. Part of wisdom clearly is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of the indispensable preliminary conditions of the realization of its object. There are then cases where faith creates its own verification. Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish. The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage. What is going to succeed must need fall back on personal belief as one of the ultimate conditions of truth. For again and again success depends on energy of act; energy again depends on faith that we shall not fail; and that faith in turn on the faith that we are right—which faith thus verifies itself. Take as an example the question of optimism or pessimism, which makes so much noise. Every human being must sometime decide for oneself whether life is worth living. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Image Suppose that in looking at the World and seeing how full it is of misery, of old age, of wickedness and pain, and how unsafe is one’s own future, one yields to the pessimistic conclusion, cultivates disgust and dread, ceases striving and finally commits suicide. The personal’s picture illumined by no gleam of good allowed pessimism to supply one’s belief about all that life was lacking, and no it made this belief right. Little inconveniences, exertions, pains—these are the only things in which we rightly feel our life at all. If these be not these, existence becomes worthless, or worse; success in putting them all away is fatal. So it is beings engaged in athletic sport, spend their holidays in climbing up mountains, find nothing so enjoyable as that which taxes their endurance and their energy. This is the way we are made, I say. It may or may not be a mystery or a paradox; it is a fact. Now, this enjoyment in endurance is just according to the intensity of life: the more physical vigor and balance, the more endurance can be made an element of satisfaction. A sick man cannot stand it. The line f enjoyable suffering is not a fixed one; it fluctuates with the perfectness of the life. That our pains are, as they are, unendurable, awful, overwhelming, crushing, not to be borne save in misery and dumb impatience, which utter exhaustion alone makes patient—that our pains are thus unendurable, means not that they are too great, but that we are sick. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

ImageWe have not got our proper life. So you perceive pain is no more necessarily an evil, but an essential element of the highest good. However, if we try pertinaciously enough, the highest good can be achieved only by our getting our proper life; and that can come about only by help of a moral energy born of the faith that in some way or other we shall succeed in getting it. This World is good, we must say, since it is what we make it—and we shall make it good. How can we exclude from the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creation of the truth? All depends on the character of personal contribution. Wherever the facts to be formulated contain such a contribution, we may logically, legitimately, and inexpugnably believe what we desire. The belief creates it verification. The thought becomes literally father to the fact, as the wish was father to the thought. If we had no courage to attempt anything, what would life be? The interest ae not there merely to be felt—they are to be believed in and obeyed. Not only is it best for my social interests to keep my promise, but best for me to have those interests, and best for the cosmos to like me. One who believes this to be a radically moral Universe must hold the moral order to rest either on an absolute and ultimate should, or on a series of should all the way down. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

ImageThere is no better place to be than where you are, and no better time than now to make a difference. Be yourself, try your best, and never be afraid to dream. A soul represents the mind of its collector, one’s fancies and foibles, one’s strength and weakness, one’s prejudices and preference. Particularly is this the case if to the character of a collector one adds—or tries to add—the qualities of a person who wishes to know the soul and grace of God. The grace of God in our lives, the phases of our growth, the vagaries of our mind, all are represented in God’s reality. If you proceed to act upon your theory it will be reversed by nothing that later turns up as your action’s fruit; it will harmonize so well with the entire drift of experience that the latter will, as it were adopt it, or at most give it an ampler interpretation, without obliging you in any way to change the essence of its formation. If this can be objectively moral Universe, all acts that I make on that assumption, all expectations that I ground on it, will tend more and more completely to interdigitate with the phenomena already existing. A soul should be like a pair of open arms. You and your acts and the nature of things will be alike enveloped in a single formula, a universal vanitas vanitatum. But nature has put into our hands two keys, by which we may test the lock. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

ImageIf we try the unmoral key and it fits, it is an unmoral lock. I cannot possibly conceive of any other sort of evidence or proof than this. It is quite truth that the co-operation of generations is needed to educe it. However, in these matters the solidarity (so called) of the human race is a patent fact. The essential thing to notice is that our active preference is a legitimate part of the game—that it is our plain business as people to try one of the keys, and the one in which we mist confide. If then the proof exist not till I have acted, and I must needs in acting run the risk of being wrong, how can the popular science professors be right in objurgating in me as infamous a credulity which the strict logic of the situation requires? If this really be a moral Universe; if by my acts I be a factor of its destinies; if to believe where I may doubt be itself a moral act analogous to voting for a side not yet sure to win—by what right shall they close in upon me and steadily negate the deepest conceievable function of my being by their preposterous command that I shall stir neither hand nor foot, but remain balancing myself in eternal and insoluble doubt? Why, doubt itself is a decision of the widest practical reach, if only because we may miss by doubting what goods we might be gaining by espousing the winning side. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

ImageIt is never too late to be what you might have been. Skepticism in moral matters is an active ally of immorality. Who is not for is against. The Universe will have no neutrals in these questions. All one needs to be free and hearty again in the exercise of their birthright is that these fastidious vetoes should be swept away. All that the human heart wants is its chance. If only it can be allowed to feel that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, the heart will willingly forgo certainty in universal matters, which no one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs. We give Thee thanks, Holy Lord, Father Almighty, everlasting God, who hast been pleased to bring us though the night to the hours of morning; we pray Thee to grant us to pass this day without sin, so that at eventide we may again give thanks to Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Look mercifully, O Lord, on the morning prayers of Ty suppliants, and enlighten with Thy healing goodness the secrets of our secrets of our heart; that no dark desires may have possession of those whom the light of Heavenly grace has renewed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Send forth, O Lord, we pray Thee, Thy light into our hearts; that we may perceive the light of Thy commandments, and, walking in Thy way, may fall into no error; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19Image

 

 

 

 

People do Not Desire Money Because You can Buy things for it, but You can Buy things for Money Because People Desire it!

ImageThe soul transforms reality from a mausoleum into many theaters. There are high spots in all of our lives and most of them come about through encouragement from someone else. Encouragement is the oxygen of the soul. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. Life is not about the breaths we take, it is about the moments that take our breath away. When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it. If immortality is the unchangeable motive, then all social custom is essentially sacred. It is important to gain insight into the evolution of new structures of power. We saw that with the decline of the primitive World and with the rise of kingship, beings came to imitate kings in order to get power. Now what did kings pursue besides immortality in the royal family? Why of course: skills, courtesans, fine swords, horses and monuments, city palaces and country estates—all the things that can be bought with gold. If you gained immortality by leaving behind Earthly sons, why not equally gain it by leaving behind vast accumulations of other physical mementos to your image? And so the pursuit of money was also opened up to the average being; gold became the new immortality symbol. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

ImageIn the temple buildings, palaces, and monuments of the new cities we see a new kind of power being generated. No longer the power of the totemic communion of persons, but the power of the testimonial of piles of stone and gold. In monumental forms, as money or as the city itself, each generation inherits the ascetic achievements of its ancestors…as a debt to be paid by further accumulation of monuments. Through the city the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, every city has a history and a rate of interests. In other words, the new patriarchy passes not only family immortality to the son, but also accumulated gold, property, and interest—and the duty to accumulate these in turn. The assures his own self-perpetuation by being “greater” than the father: by leaving behind a larger mark. Immortality comes to reside no longer in the invisible World of power, but in the very visible one, and death is overcome by accumulating time-defying monuments. These accumulations of stone and gold make possible the discovery of the immortal soul. Death is overcome on condition that the real actuality of life pass into these immortal and dead things; money is the man; the immortality of the estate or a corporation resides in the dead things which alone endure. The pyramid directed its hope of immortality to the sky which it tried to penetrate, but it displayed itself before beings and laid its heavy burden on their backs. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

ImageThe material that flowed in the veins was gold. Beings now took the sacred and tried to give it monumental, enduring form; it was natural, then, that in the city one finally settled upon the most durable precious metals. If the new dramatization of immortality was to be in the power and glitter of the visible rather than the invocation of the invisible, then that drama had to be transformed from the group to the new magic object, money. Money is the new “totemic” possession. This new equation of money and totemic spirits is not meant to be frivolous. With the decline of tribal society, rituals were also discredited. Yet beings needed new rituals because they gave order and form to society and magically tied the whole World of experience together. And this is probably the fundamental reason that money entered the picture in the ancient World with such ineluctable force: it filled the vacuum left by ritual and itself became the new ritual focus. Money provides a fixed, external, recognizable sign for what would be confused, contradictable operations: ritual makes visible external signs of internal states. Money mediates transactions; ritual mediates experience, including social experience. Money provides a standard for measuring worth; ritual standardizes situations, and so helps to evaluate them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

ImageMoney makes the link between the present and the future, so does ritual. The more we reflect on the richness of the metaphor, the more it becomes clear that this is no metaphor. Money is only an extreme and specialized type of ritual. However, modern humans seem to have trouble understanding money; it is too close to them, too much a part of their lives. Let each of us aspire to inspire, before we expire. The last thing a fish would discover is water, since it is so unconsciously and naturally a part of its life. Beyond all of this, the reason money is so elusive to our understanding is that it is still sacred, still a magical object on which we rely for our entrance into immortality. Or, put another way, money is obscure to analysis because it is still a living myth, a religion. When one points out their truth, religions die. From this point of view, the religion of money has resisted the revelation of its truth; it has not given itself over to science because it has not wanted to die. Money is what is is—sacred power—and not a thing. In primitive society, dog’s teeth, sea shells, bands of feathers, and mats were used as money! These things not only seem to us worthless, they may even be repugnant to our senses of what is proper to carry around and to value. The key to the whole thing is, of course, that we live in a different power World than did the primitives. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

ImageFor us, BMW motors, Winchester guns, Microsoft electric circuits embody power, for the primitives, power resided in the qualities of living thins and in the organs that embodied those qualities: teeth equaled biting and tearing power, with their uncanny smoothness and white luster and their terrible destructiveness to living beings; feathers equaled the freedom and miraculousness of flight; and so on. These forms of primitive money, then, did not have mere ornamental value or practical exchange values as we understand it; they had real spirit-power value. And when it comes to the evolution of our own money we must look to the same source, to its origin in magic amulets or tokens. In everyone’s life, at some time our inner focus fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should al be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. When we think about the origin of gold as a thing of great value in ancient Egypt, what led these beings to assign great value to it? Things that give life, enable beings to triumph over weakness and death by borrowing some of the power of the gods is what makes something valuable. Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent imagination. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

ImageLife is not about the breaths we take, it is about the moments that take our breath away. There was a cowrie shell in the Red Sea which came to be prized as a token of life-giving powers, as an amulet to ward off he danger of death and to prolong the existence of the souls of those already dead. It was an immortality symbol, then, that came to be identified with the goddess Hathor, the divine cow, the Great Mother. The people of Egypt began to make models of these and other magical shells in clay, stone and any other material that came to hand. These were believed to have the magic of real shells. In the course [of time they] discovered that they could make durable and attractive models by using the soft plastic metal which was lying around unused and unappreciated in the Nubian desert. The lightness and beauty of the untarnishable yellow metal material made an instant appeal. The gold models soon became more popular than the original shells, and the reputation for life-giving was then in large measure transferred from mere form of the amulet to the metal itself. In other words, the powers of the god came to be present in the metal. Gold was straightforwardly identified with the fire god Agni. Gold could be substituted for the Sun in the sacred ritual. The gold plate was the same as truth. The Sun was the same as truth. It was thought to be made of gold; for gold is light, and he (the Sun) is light; gold is immortality, and he is immortality; it is round, for he is round. Indeed, the gold plate was considered the Sun. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

ImageMoney suggests a common origin for the gold coin, the crown, and the halo, since all three represents the Sun’s disc. (We liked to imagine that we knew coins were round because they could fit more comfortably in our pockets.) The special attraction of gold and sliver as primary monetary values was due to their symbolic identification with the Sun and Moon, which occupied a primary sacred place in the early cosmic government cosmologies. Even more fascinating is the fact that the value ratio of gold and sliver has remained stable from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and even into modern times as 1.13 ½ (Sarah Winchester’s favorite time of day). Such a stability cannot be explained in logical terms of rational supply and demand: the explanation must be possessed in the astrological magic has been in history, even in the face of its vitality still today. Beings have always sought to discover special magical properties in nature and bring them to bear in their lives. The ancients sought these special qualities in qualities of living things, in natural miraculous objects like the Sun, and in the ratios they could tease out of nature. Until very modern times, to take one example, musical instruments were built in magical astrological proportions so as to make the most divinely harmonious sounds; and I personally know one inspired guitar maker who uses the ancient “Greek foot” as a basic measure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

ImageCurrency, then, seems to have had its origin in magic amulets and magic imitations of the Sun, which were worn or stored because they contained the protecting spirit powers. If gold had any utility, it was a supernatural utility: a little of it was given away in exchange for quantities of stuff because a few ounces of divinity were worth pounds of gross matter. And so we see ow it was that money came to buy many other things: If it was magic, people would give anything to have it. Originally people do not desire money because you can buy things for it, but you can buy things for money because people desire it. Because gold was considered sacred, we can now understand how it was that the first banks were temples and the first ones to issue money were the priests. With the ascendancy of the priestcraft it became the priests themselves who monopolized the official traffic in sacred charms and in the exchange of favors for gold. The first mints were set up in the temples of the gods, whence our word “money”—from the mint in the temple of Jun Moneta, Juno the admonisher, on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. Forgery was sacrilege because the coins embodied the powers of the gods and only the priests could handle such powers; we get the same feeling about counterfeiters today, that they are practicing an unspeakable usurpation of hallowed powers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

ImageThe temples, then, were clearinghouses for money transactions, just like banks today. It was surely not lost on the priests—the first leisure class—that the tiniest quantity of sacred gold-power could bring in huge amounts of food and other stuffs. Priests may have talents for dealing with the supernatural, but they have very human appetite (and often lots of it); and if they have the leisure to ply their trade, it is because since earliest times they have convinced their fellows that it is important to assure that leisure by bringing part of the fruit of the sweat of their brow to the priests. And so the food producers must have brought food to the temples in exchange for prayers and sacrifices being performed on their behalf. Also, it must have worked the other way too: gold was a fee paid to the priest for one’s intercessions with the invisible powers. The gold fee was the proper one to pay to a god, whose essence was gold. Whence the tradition of the earliest coins being imprinted with the images of gods, then divine kings, sown to presidents in our time. All visitors to the most holy temples could bring back with them gold encapsulations of sacred power that would keep them safe throughout the year. As we finger, in our pocket, the face on the silver dollar, we reexperience some of the quiet confidence of the ancients who left the temples with the life-securing charms. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

ImageWe know that the persists were part of the immortality ideology of what has aptly been called “cosmic government” and “the astrobiological unification of divine kingship.” We have already described the hierarchy: the king got his powers from the Heavens and radiated them in one’s own person to the people with the help of the priests, to the benefit of the patriarchal families. We might say that money coinage fit beautifully into this scheme, because now the cosmic powers could be the property of every being, without even the need to visit the temples: you could now traffic in immortality in the marketplace. (Probably why the consumer is the heart of the American economy.) Nor is this just a manner of speaking, for this traffic was a most serious new business that arose. Admittedly, when we reconstruct the phenomenological history of money it is impossible for us moderns to get into the mind and behind the eyes of ancient negotiators. However, a new being emerged in the ancient World, a being who based the value of one’s life—and so one’s immortality—on a new cosmology centered on coins. We cannot very well grasp what the painting visible even today at the entrance of a house in the ruins of Pompeii meant to the owner of the house or to the passerby whom it was obviously supposed to impress. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

ImageHowever, a picture of a man proudly weighing his phallus in a scale of gold coins must convey a feeling that the powers of nature  as exemplified in the reproductive life force have their equivalency in gold, even perhaps that fatherhood is given by gold as well as the phallus—and generally that the causa sui project it well in hand. And the two chest of coins just inside the entrance, adjacent to the sleeping rooms of the adult occupants, surely convey the new way of life based on the feeling in the painting. Money became the distilled value of existence. When Corinth was destroyed, the melting-down the statues for coinage and the auctioning of the inhabitants at the slave-mart were, for Classical minds, one and the same operation—the transformation of corporeal objects into money. Or, we might say, into a single immortality symbol, a ready way of relating the increase of oneself to all the important objects and events of one’s World. In this sense, money seems to have represented a cosmological unification of visible and invisible powers—powers of the gods, of kings, of heroic victors in way—and the distillation of the booty of war. And at the center of this cosmology stood the person oneself with the visible counters of one’s own increase, the divine testimonial to one’s own immortal worth, distilling and spanning both Worlds. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

ImageMoney is sacred as all cultural things are sacred. Custom is essentially sacred—and why should money be any exception? The thing that connect money with the domain of the sacred power. We have long known that money gives power over humans, freedom from family and social obligation, from friends, bosses, and underlines; it abolishes one’s likeness to others; it creates comfortable distance between persons, easily satisfies their claims on each other without compromising them in any direct and personal ways; on top of this it gives literally limitless ability to satisfy appetites of almost any material kind. Power is not an economic category, and neither is it simply a social category: All power is essentially sacred power. This is perfect. All power is in essence power to deny mortality. Either that or it is not real power at all, not ultimate power, not the power that humankind is really obsessed with. Power means power to increase oneself, to change one’s natural situation from one of smallness, helplessness, finitude, to one of bigness, control durability, importance. In its power to manipulate physical and social reality money in some way secures one against contingency and accident; it buys bodyguards, bullet-proof BMWs, and better medical care. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

ImageMost of all, money can be accumulated and passed on, and so radiates its powers even after one’s death, giving one a semblance of immortality as one lives in the vicarious enjoyments of one’s heirs that one’s money continues to buy, or in the magnificence of the art work that one commissioned, or in the statues of oneself and the majesty of one’s own mausoleum. In short, money is the human mode par excellence of coolly denying animal boundness, the determinism of nature. Money has been supercharged with the yearning of ambition and hope; money is a denial of filth, physicalness, of animality, of decay and death. The peculiar human fascination with excrement is the peculiar human fascination with death. Think; if a race of beings with advanced learning, health, and weapons were to land on our planet and tell us about the god who sustains them in Alpha Centauri, a new religion would sweep over large numbers of people overnight and discredit most of our institutions. Underneath the different historical forms of immortality striving has pulsated the lifeblood of money. In this sense, the social-structural forms of immortality striving that succeed each other up to modern times have been a kind of mask or façade over the deeper-going immortality symbol, money. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

ImageMoney gives power now—and, through accumulated property, and, and interest, power in the future. Beings have become dependent on social symbols of prestige that single one out as especially worthy of being remembered in the eyes of gods and in the minds of humans. And this, too, of course, is the traditional meaning of the symbol of the Devil: he represents physical, Earthly, visible power on this planet easily hold sway over his more ethereal competitor, spiritual power. This is what theologians have meant when they have said that on this Earth God must obey the Devil. The Earth runs on physical laws. No wonder economic equality is beyond the endurance of modern democratic humans: the house, the car, the bank balance are their immortality symbols. Modern beings cannot endure economic equality because they have no faith in self-transcendent, otherworldly immortality symbols; visible physical worth is the only thing they have to give them external life. No wonder that people segregate themselves with such consuming dedication, that specialness is so much a fight to the death: beings lash out all the harder when they are cornered, when they are a pathetically impoverished immortality seeker. One dies when one’s little symbols of specialness die. However, your success and happiness are possessed within you. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

ImageOccasionally modern beings are moved to philosophize on the human condition, and stumbles on the great insight that you cannot take it with you. This leads one to pause and heave a sigh over the perversity of nature, but it does not really touch one, since one leaves behind precisely the immortal marks of one’s own achievement. One might feel self-pity and bitterness about the one-dimensionality of one’s immortality, but in matters of eternity you take what you can get. No wonder either, that the other modern ideology of egalitarianism has also found real economic equality to be unendurable. Are we puzzled that people create new prestige classes, pursue patriarchal family and the careers of their children, and pursue money and goods? They too exist only on the level of the visible, and must somehow secure their immortality here. At the beginning of the revolution they got immortality be merging with the totemic group souls of revolutionary activity; now they must try to establish the marks of each one’s personal merit. Therefore, do not go where the path may lead you, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail of success. Primitive Christianity is one of the few ideologies that has kept alive the idea of the invisible dimension of nature and the priority of this dimension of assuring immortality. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Image Thus Christianity is a threat to any one-dimensional immortality ideology, and could work in a democracy that modern democratic beings themselves find too burdensome, a society free of class and race struggle, because symbols of class and race prestige do not carry weight in the realm of the invisible spirit, which may be why people are so concerned with the state being separating from the church, but the state steadily forming incestuous bonds with the media and Hollywood as a method of control, so that people forget that God is the ultimate power and authority. Attitude is the paintbrush of the sou. The word “listen” contains the same letters are the word “silent.” Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate irrationality which the head ascertains, the erection of its procedure into a systematized method would be a philosophic achievement of first-rate importance. Every generation will produce its Job, its Hamlet, its Prince Lestat, its Hamlet, its Faust, or its Sartor Resrtus. Rationality must, in a general way at least, banish uncertainty from the future. Our consciousness at a given moment is never free from the ingredient of expectancy. Everyone knows how when a painful thing has to be undergone in the near future, the vague feeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasiness and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control or attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home, in the given present. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

ImageWhen a great happiness awaits us, the same is true. However, when the future is neutral and perfectly certain, we do not mind it, as we say, but given an undisturbed attention to the actual. Let now this haunting sense of futurity be thrown off its bearings or left without an object, and immediately uneasiness takes possession of the mind. However, in every novel or unclassified experience this is just what occurs; we do not know what will come next; and novelty per se becomes a mental irritant, while custom per se it a mental sedative, merely become the one baffles wile the other settles our expectations. Every reader must feel the truth of this. What is meant by coming to feel at home in a new place, or with new people? It is simply that, at first, when we take up our quarters in a new room, we do not know what draughts may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, what forms may enter, what interesting objects may be found in cupboards and corners. When after a few days we have learned the range of all these possibilities, the feelings of strangeness disappears. And so it does with people, when we have got past the point of expecting any essentially new manifestations from their character. The utility of this emotional effect of expectation is perfectly obvious; natural selection, in fact, was bound to bring it about sooner or later. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

ImageSometimes we wish for the better, when we have it as good as it gets. People may look into their soul to find themselves, but they may find an entire community of like-minded individuals when they open their eyes. To those with ears to hear, the souls is a really noisy place. In its caverns we hear the captured voices of the centuries-old conversations that makes up our civilization. O God of hope, the true Light of faithful souls, and perfect Brightness of the blesses, Who art verily Light of Thy Church, grant that our hearts may both render Thee a worthy prayer, and always glorify Thee with the offering of praises; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Be present, O Lord, to Thy faithful people; and as Thou dost in Thy compassion vouchsafe them a hearty desire to pray, grant them, O Most Loving, the assistance of Thy comfort; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, the Life of the faithful, the Bliss of the righteous, mercifully receive the prayers of Thy suppliants, that the souls which thirst for Thy promises may evermore be filled from Thine abundance; through Jesus Christ our Lord. From the night of our spirit awaketh unto Thee, O God, for They precepts are a light unto us. Teach us, O God, Thy righteousness, Thy commandments, and Thy judgments. Enlighten the eyes of our mind, that we sleep not in sins unto death. Drive away all darkness from our hearts. Vouchsafe us the Sun of Righteousness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

ImageGuard our life from all reproach by the Seal of Thy Holy Spirit. Guide our steps into the way of peace. Grant us to behold the dawn and the day with joyfulness, that we may send up to Thee our Prayers at eventide. We give Thee thanks, Lord God of our salvation, because Thou doest all things for the good of our life, that we may always look steadfastly unto Thee, the Saviour and Benefactor of our souls; for Thou hast refreshed us in the night past, and raised us up from our beds, and brought us to worship Thy glorious Name. Wherefore we beseech Thee, O Lord, give us grace and power that we may be accounted worthy to sing praise to Thee with understanding, and to pray to Thee without ceasing, in fear and trembling working our out our salvation, through the assistance of Thy Christ. Shine into our hearts, O loving Master, by the pure light of knowledge of Thyself; and open the eyes of our mind to the contemplation of Thine Evangelic teaching, and put into us the fear of Thy blessed commandment; that trampling down all carnal appetites, we may follow a spiritual life, thinking and doing all things according to Thy good pleasure. For Thou art our sanctification and our illumination, and to Thee we render glory, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. O God, Who dividest the day from the night, separate our deeds from the gloom of darkness, that every meditating on things holy, we may continually live in Thy light; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19Image

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I Was Heartsick—The Door Had Been Shut to My Life!

ImageThe soul can play a large part in bolstering the faith of individuals who feel frustrated and upset by the tremendous problems that face the World. The more complex the World grows, the more necessary it is to spread the knowledge and wisdom to be found in the soul. Lacking the salutary feed-back of daily social intercourse with others, the self-isolate can become suspicious, depressed, hostile, anxious, and bewildered. The awareness of inferiority means that one is unable to keep out of consciousness the formulation of some chronic feeling of the worst sort of insecurity, and this means that one suffers anxiety and perhaps even something worse, if jealousy is really worse than anxiety. The fear that others can disrespect a person because of something one shows means that one is always insecure in one’s contact with other people; and this insecurity arises, not from mysterious and somewhat disguised sources, as a great deal of our anxiety does, but from something which one knows one cannot fix. Now that represents an almost fatal deficiency of the self-system, since the self is unable to disguise or exclude a definite formulation that reads, “I am inferior. Therefore people will dislike me and I cannot be secure with them.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

ImageWhen normal and stigmatized do in fact enter one another’s immediate presence, especially when they there attempt to sustain a joint conversational encounter, there occurs one of the primal scenes of sociology; for, in many cases, these moments will be the ones when the cause and effects of stigma must be directly confronted by both sides. The stigmatized individual may find that one feels unsure of how we normal will identify one and receive one. An illustration may be cited from a student of physical disability: “Uncertainty of status for the disabled person obtains over a wide range of social interactions in addition to that of employment. The visually impaired, the ill, those with auditory impairments, people with mobility issues can never be sure what the attitude of a new acquaintance will be, whether it will be rejective or accepting, until the contact has been made. This is exactly the position of the adolescent, the light-skinned African America, the second generation immigrant, the socially mobile person and the woman has entered a predominantly masculine occupation.” This uncertainty arises not merely from the stigmatized individual’s not knowing which of several categories one will be place in, but also, where the placement is favorable, from one’s knowing that in their hearts the other maybe defining one in terms of one’s stigma. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

ImageThe student goes on to say: “And I always feel this with straight people—that whenever they are being nice to me, pleasant to me, all the time really, underneath they are only assessing me as a criminal and nothing else. It is to late for me to be any different now to what I am, but I still feel this keenly, that that is their only approach, and they are quite incapable of accepting me as anything else.” Thus in the stigmatized arises the sense of not knowing what the others present are “really” thinking about one. Further, during mixed contacts, the stigmatized individual is likely to feel that one is “on,” having to be self-conscious and calculating about the impression one is making, to a degree and in areas of conduct which one assumes others are not. Also, one is likely to feel that the usual scheme of interpretation for everyday events has been undermined. One’s minor accomplishments, one feels, may be assessed as signs of remarkable and noteworthy capacities in the circumstances. At the same time, minor failings or incidental impropriety may be interpreted as a direct expression of one’s stigmatized differences. Former mental patients, for example, are sometimes afraid to engage in sharp interchanges with spouse or employer because of what a show of emotion might be take as a sign of. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

ImagePeople with mental disabilities are also worried about how they respond to situations because they face a similar contingency: “It also happens that if a person of low intellectual ability gets into some sort of trouble the difficulty is more or less automatically attributed to ‘mental defect’ whereas if a person of ‘normal intelligence’ gets into a similar difficulty, it is not regarded as symptomatic of anything in particular.” When the stigmatized person’s failing can be perceived by our merely directing attention (typically, visual) to one—when, in sort, one is a discredited, not discreditable, person—one is likely to feel that to be present among normal nakedly exposes one to invasions of privacy, experienced most pointedly perhaps when children simply stare at them. This displeasure in being exposed can be increased by the conversations strangers may feel free to strike up with one, conversations in which they express what one takes to be morbid curiosity about one’s condition or in which they proffer help that one does not need or want. One might add that there are certain classic formulae for these kinds of conversations, where people pretend to understand or be sympathetic, when they really have no idea what it is like. However, that is better than the cold shoulder, when other try to make it seem like an individual just has a problem and nothing is really going on. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

ImageHowever, instead of cowering, the stigmatized individual may attempt to approach mixed contact with hostile bravado, but this can induce from others its own set of troublesome reciprocations. It may be added that the stigmatized person sometimes vacillates between cowering and bravado, racing from one to the other, thus demonstrating one central way in which ordinary face-to-face interaction can run wild. I am suggesting, then, that the stigmatized individual—at least the “visibly” stigmatized one—will have special reasons for feeling that mixed social situations make for anxious unanchored interaction. However, if this is so, then it is to be suspected that we normal will find these situations shaky too. We will feel that the stigmatized individual is either too aggressive or to shamefaced, and in either case too ready to read unintended meanings into our actions. We ourselves may feel that if we show direct sympathetic concern for one’s condition, we may be overstepping ourselves; and yet if we actually forget that one has a failing we are likely to make impossible demands of one or unthinkingly slight one’s fellow-sufferers. Each potential source of discomfort for one when we are with one can become something we sense one is aware of, aware that we are aware of, and even aware of our state of awareness about ones awareness; the stage is then set for the infinite regress of mutual consideration that Meadian social psychology tells us how to begin but not how to terminate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

ImagePersonal counselors and psychotherapists specialize in helping individuals. Informed by knowledge about beings in general, they seek to learn about the particular being who consults them, to help one overcome impasses in one’s life, fulfill more of one’s possibilities, and live more effectively. It is their tasks to learn about the determiners and limits in human existence and teach those who consult them how to understand, master, and transcend these limits—then to pursue and enlarge their freedom. If for on other reason than to insure society is not disorganized into a mob of mutually destructive deviants, it is necessary for everyone in society to learn and to conform to laws and customs. It has been discovered that the suburbs often are helpfully for many people because the community is like a family and people want to conform and fit in. As a result, the suburbs often help to keep marriages monogamous because people do not want to break up the group with divorces as it would disrupt more than one household. And they have subtle clues to let you know when they do not want guest, such as keeping the Venetian blinds closed during the day. Nonetheless, society is organized such that some people enjoy higher status and more wealth and power than others. Every society in conservative. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

ImageChange in the social order is resisted, often with brute force by those with the most privilege and freedom. They are quick to detect threats to their status from whatever source. The entire institutional structure of society is the economic and political system in its present form. The family begins a socialization process, shaping children to the habits, values, and beliefs that will make the child “fit.” The school system, far from educating, is actually an additional training institution, directing people to the ways in which they must go, else they will not reach minimally privileged status. The organized churches, instead of the liberating beings from the sometimes crushing grip of social conformity, actually collude with “Caesar,” admonishing people to live in ways that prevent constructive social and political change. People inevitably sicken as they live in the ways their society seems to demand. I have come to see sickness of all kinds, whether physical or mental, as a form of protest against a way of life that is not fit for the person who has been living it. Sickness is a way of checking out of one’s usual roles and responsibilities in order to regain strength and perspective. I see sickness as an opportunity to meditate upon one’s life, to examine values and goals, relationships with people, and one’s life, to examine values and goals, relationships with people, and one’s usual practices with the aim of understanding how one because sick and how one might live one’s life in a more fulfilling way. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

ImageIndeed, the episodes of illness are actually the last and loudest protest of a violated organism against the destructive way of life that has been lived. If the ill person had been more sensitive to one’s own experience of oneself, and more imaginative and courageous, one would have noted “all-is-not-well” signals” long before one collapsed or broke down. The pain, fatigue, boredom, anxiety, depression, or feelings of futility would have caught one’s attention. One would have reflected upon them and sought to change one’s ways of living life so as to restore a sense of meaning, a feeling of zest and satisfaction. However, change calls of courage. And it calls for imagination, to invent new ways to live that will not jeopardize other values crucial to one’s existence. The courage, the imagination, and the capacity for reflective self-awareness, so necessary for the maintenance of health, are conspicuous lacking in the vast majority of people. These life saving capacities are usually trained out of people during the period of their growing up. We are taught to believe that there is only one proper way for a person to be and to live. All other ways are deemed evil, illegal, or insane. Grouping efforts to protest or to experiment are met by an onslaught that begins with parental criticism and may culminate with ostracism, imprisonment, or incarceration in a mental hospital. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

ImageIf a person persists in the way of life that is dispiriting one, one will eventually break down with some form of physical complaint. The medical profession then springs to action and repairs the damage, so the person again can take one’s place in a system that is crushing one. One will sicken again. However, one must not change one’s ways. If the sufferer is called a “mental patient,” one typically will be treated with  tranquilizing drugs, electroshock, or a form of “psychotherapy” that persuades one to conform to existing patterns. When we look at the psychotherapeutic professions and the physicians in this light, it becomes clear that practitioners of these arts are actually (though usually unwittingly) political agents. They are, in a real sense, counterrevolutionaries, opponents of those whose very sickness is a protest against prevailing ways to live. Physicians especially are earning the criticism that they are unimaginative in their treatment of sickness, that they function like middlemen between thee pharmaceutical houses and the customer. They persist in treating symptoms of illness with a drug or knife, rather than exploring other methods, such as enlightened inquiry into the patient’s way of living one’s life. Indeed, undue reliance upon drugs to treat symptoms or causes of illness is pernicious, for it diverts attention from the quest for causes and cures of disease in the way a being lives! #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

ImagePsychiatrists have followed the example of their medical colleagues and treat the miserable and the ineffective as if they were “sick,” rather than the ineffective protestants against an unlivable life style. However, let me turn to the outcomes of therapy, to the relatively lasting changes which occur. As in the other things I have said I will limit myself to statements borne out by research evidence. The client changes and reorganizes one’s concept of one’s self. One moves away from perceiving one’s self as unacceptable to oneself, as unworthy of respect, as having to live by standards of others. One moves toward a conception of one’s self as a person of worthy, as a self-directing person. Able to form one’s standards and values upon the basis of one’s own experience. One develops much more beneficial attitudes toward oneself. One study showed that at the beginning of therapy current attitudes toward self were four to one negative, but in the finial fifth of therapy self-attitudes were twice as often positive as negative. One becomes less defensive, and hence more open to one’s experience of oneself and of others. One becomes more realistic and differentiated in one’s perceptions. One improves in one’s psychological adjustment, whether this is measured by the Rorschach test, the Thematic Apperception Test, the counselor’s rating, or other indices. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

ImageOne’s aims and ideals for oneself change so that they are more achievable. The initial discrepancy between the self that one is and the self that one wants to be is greatly diminished. Tension of all types is reduced—physiological tension, psychological discomfort, anxiety. One perceives other individuals with more realism and more acceptance. One describes one’s own behavior as being more mature and, what is more important, one is seen by others who know one well as behaving in a more mature fashion. Not only are these changes shown by various studies to occur during the period of therapy, but careful follow-up studies conducted sic to eighteen months following the conclusion of therapy indicate that these changes persist. Perhaps the fact I have given will make it clear why I feel that we are approaching the point where we can write genuine equation in this subtle area of interpersonal relationships. It also helps in relationships in general if we can be more real and genuine, empathic, and have an unconditional regard for others so they can move away from being static, fixed, unfeeling, and impersonal. For many people the World is frightening, and they tightly try to hold it in place. It would help to sense the feelings of the people we care about and let them know we understand their feelings. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

ImageWe should let others know that we stand with them in their tight, constricted little World, and that we can look upon it relatively unafraid. Perhaps we can make the World safer for them. Personally, I would like my feelings in a relationship to be as clear and transparent as possible, so that they are discernible real to another individual, to which one can return again and again. I would like to go with one on the fearful journey into oneself, into the buried fear, and hate, and love which one has never been able to let flow in one. I recognize that this is a very human and unpredictable journey for me, as well as for one, and that I may, without even knowing my fear, shrink away within myself, from some of the feelings one discovers. To this extent I know I will be limited in my ability to help one. I realize that at ties one’s own fears may make one perceive me as uncaring, as rejecting, as an intruder, as one who does not understand. I want fully to accept these feelings in one, and yet I hope also that my own real feelings will show throw clearly that in time one cannot fail to perceive them. Most of all I want one to encounter in me a real person. I do not need to be uneasy as to whether my own feelings are therapeutic. What I am and what I feel are good enough to be a basis for therapy, if I can transparently be what I am and what I feel in relationship to one. Then perhaps one can be what one is, openly and without fear. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

ImageSometimes in life, we feel as if we are floating along the current of life, very adventurously, being who we are. We get defeated sometimes, we get hurt, but we learn that those experiences are not fatal. We may not know exactly who we are, but we can feel our reactions at any given moment, and they seem to work out pretty well as a basis for our behavior from moment to moment. Maybe this is what it means to be who we are. But of course we can only do this because we feel safe. Though some people possess immense spiritual power which may irresistibly influence your life, one will seem quite unconscious of it. One makes no claim to the possession of peculiar powers. One is completely without pose or pretense. The things which arouse passion or love or hatred in beings do not seem to touch one; one is indifferent to them as Nature is to our comments when we praise her Sunshine or revile her storms. For in one, we have to recognize a being freed, loosed from every limit which desire and emotion can place upon us. One walks detached from the anxious thoughts or seductive passions which eat out the hearts of beings. Through enlightened individuals behave and live simply and naturally, we are aware that there is a mystery within that beings. We are unable to avoid the impression that because one’s understanding has plumbed life deeper than other being’s, we are compelled to call a halt when we would attempt to comprehend one. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

ImageDespite all one’s psychical knowledge and personal attainment, the enlightened individual never loses one’s deep sense of the mystery which is at the heart of existence, which is God. O LORD our God, Who alone foreseest and bestowest things needful for our salvation; do Thou both bestow, we pray Thee, on our souls the hearty desire of imploring Thy mercy, and graciously vouchsafe us what will be for our good; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, vouchsafe us an unceasing perseverance  in praying unto Thee; that as Thou dost not forsake us when we are bowed down in tribulation, so Thou mayest cherish us with more abundant grace when we continually beseech Thy Majesty; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let the prayers Thy suppliants, O Lord, come up to the ears of Thy mercy; and that we may obtain what we ask, make us ever to ask what pleases Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, to govern the hearts of Thy Faithful servants; and that they may by Thy bounty obtain Thy good things, grant first of all that their own wills may be good; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, make us subject unto Thee with a ready will, and evermore stir up our wills to make supplication unto Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, O Lord, we beseech Thee, such a heart unto Thy people, that as they are brought together by their necessities to seek Thy favour, they may by their free will also become devoted to Thy Majesty; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14Image

Cresleigh Homes

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

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Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse.

ImageLocated off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.

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The Soul Can Become a Big Factor in Raising the Level of Intelligence in the World and in Developing Leaders!

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I was taken with your earnestness, your passion. You were not jaded or cynical. There was an immediacy to your feelings for these happenings, these creatures, those question. You make well ask, “But why does a person who is seeking help change for the better when one is involved, over a period of time, in a relationship with a therapist which contains conditions without a “front” or façade, openly being the feeling and attitudes which at the moment are flowing in one?” Few people think about the noble role that the soul plays. Our ability to collect, organize, and preserve the voice and observations we have is critical to our continued survival as a species. The more genuine and congruent the therapist in the relations is, the more probability there is that change in personality in the client will occur. As one find someone who is willing to listen acceptantly to one’s feelings, one little by little become sable to listen to oneself. One begins to receive the communications from within oneself—to realize that one is angry, to recognize when one is frightened, even to realize when one is feeling courageous. As one becomes more open to what is going on within one, one becomes able to listen to feelings which one has always denied and repressed. One can listen to feelings which have seemed to one so terrible, or so disorganizing, or so abnormal, or so shameful, that one has never been able to recognize their existence in one’s self. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

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While one is listen to their soul, one also becomes more acceptant of one’s self. As an individual expresses more and more of the hidden and awful aspects one oneself, one finds that the therapist showing a consistent and unconditional beneficial regard for one and one’s feelings. Slowly one moves towards taking the same attitude toward oneself, accepting oneself as one is, and therefore ready to move forward in the process of becoming. In being a sincere person, we learn that we cannot say one thing and believe in another. Take the fact of your sincerity and enthusiasm as testimony to the value of the techniques of emotion and management. It is precisely by such a technique of emotion management that sincerity itself is achieved. And so, through this hall of mirrors in the soul, when learn that when we become angry, our bodies become tense. Our heart races. We breathe more quickly and get less oxygen. Our adrenaline gets higher. When some people get angry, they cuss, want to hit someone, yell in a bucket, cry, eat, smoke a cigarette, talk to themselves. However, these responses carry a risk of offending someone, and could possibly make an individual seem less attractive or dangerous. So we need to consider some ways of how to alleviate angry toward an irate person. There is no celestial witch-doctor, no angelic magician coming to change their character overnight. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

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When I deal with an irate person, I pretend something traumatic has happened in their lives. Once I had an irate that was complaining about me, cursing at me, threatening to get my name and report me to the company. I later found out his son had just died. Now when I meet an irate, I think of that man. If you think about the other person and why they are so upset, you have taken attention off of yourself and your own frustration. And you will not feel so angry. If anger erupts despite these presentative tactics, then deep breathing, talking to yourself, reminding yourself that “you do not have to go home with that individual” are offered as ways to manage emotions. Using these, the worker become less prone to cuss, hit, cry, or smoke. The goal is to keep the focus on your response and on ways to prevent an angry repose through anger-desensitization. And sometimes you have to realize people are mentally disturbed, maybe they cannot afford their medication, and that may help you to not let them upset you so much, but it may allow you to feel more compassion for them. Imagine how hard it must be for mentally ill people to live with themselves and not seek help. Many theorists have seen emotion as a sealed biological event, something that external stimuli can bring on, as cold weather brings on a cold. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

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Furthermore, once emotion—which we call a biological response syndrome is operating, the individual passively undergoes it. This is an organismic conception. However, it seems to me a limited view. For if we conceive of emotion as only this, what are we to make of the many ways in which people taught to attend to stimuli and manage emotion, ways that can actually change feeling? It we conceive of feeling not as a periodic abdication to biology but as something we do by attending to inner sensation in a given way, by defining situations in a given way, by managing in given ways, then it becomes plainer just how plastic and susceptible to reshaping techniques a feeling can be. The very act of managing emotion can be seen as part of what the emotion becomes. However, if we assume, as the organismic theorists do, that how we manage or express feeling is extrinsic to emotion, this idea gets lost. The organismic theorists want to explain how emotion is motored by instinct, and so they by-pass the question of how we come to assess, label, and manage emotion. Emotion is a bodily orientation to an imaginary act. As such, it has a signal function; it warns of where we stand vis-à-vis outer or inner events. Feeling as it spontaneously emerges acts for better or worse as a clue. It filters out evidence about the self-relevance of what we see, recall, or fantasize. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

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The exact point at which we feel injured or insulted, complimented or enhanced, varies. Seeing and hearing is a way of knowing about the World. It is a way of testing reality. Anxiety has a signal function. It signals danger from inside, as when we fear an overload of rage, or from outside, as when an insult threatens to humiliate us beyond endurance. However, it is important to heed your feelings and sometimes turn back, it may protect you from danger. Every emotion has a signal function. No every emotion signals danger. However, every emotion does signal the “me” I put into seeing “you.: It signals the often unconscious perspective we apply when we go about seeing. Feeling signals that inner perspective. Thus, by using helpful techniques for changing feeling—in the service of avoiding stress on ourselves and making life pleasanter for those around us—we can intervene in the signal function of feeling. This simple point is obscured whenever we apply the belief that emotion is dangerous in the first place because it distorts perception and leads people to act irrationally—which means that all ways of reducing emotion are automatically good. Of course, a person gripped by fear may make mistake, may find reflection difficult, and may not (as we say) be able to think. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

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However, a persona totally without emotion has no warning system, no guidelines to the self-relevance of a sight, a memory, or a fantasy. Like one who cannot feel and touches fire, an emotionless person suffers a sense of arbitrariness, which from the point of view of his or her self-interests is irrational. In fact, emotion is a potential avenue to the reasonable view. We may misinterpret an event, feel accordingly, and then draw false conclusions from what we feel. (We sometimes call this neurosis.) We can handle this by applying a secondary framework that corrects habits of feeling and inference, as when we say, “I know I have a tendency to interpret certain gestures as rejections.” However, feeling is the essential clue that a certain viewpoint, even though it may need frequent adjustment, is alive and well. Furthermore, it can tell us about a way of telling us about a way of seeing. A less affluent person may see the deprivations of the ghetto more accurately, more rationally, through indignation and anger than through obedience or resigned realism. One will focus clearly on the police officer’s smoking gun, the landlord’s Cadillac, the look of disapproval on the employment agent’s affluent face. Outside of anger, these images become like boulders on a mountainside, minuscule parts of the landscape. Likewise, a chronically morose person who falls in love may suddenly see the World as happier people do. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

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Emotion locates the position in the viewer. It uncovers an often unconscious perspective, a comparison. “You look tall” may mean “From where I lie on the floor, you look tall.” “I feel awe” may mean “compared with what I do or think I could do, he is awesome.” Awe, love, anger, and envy tell of a self vis-à-vis a situation. When we reflect on feeling we reflect on this sense of “from where I am.” The word objective means “free from personal feeling.: Yet ironically, we need feeling in order to reflect on the external or “objective” World. Taking feelings into account as clues and then correcting for them may be our best shot at objectivity. Like hearing or seeing, feeling provides a useful set of clues in figuring out what is real. A show of feeling by someone else is interesting to us precisely because it may reflect a buried perspective and may offer a clue as to how that person may act. In public life, expressions of feeling often make for news. For example, a TV sports newscaster noted: “Reese Witherspoon has passed the stage of trying to survive in a commercial sport. We are beyond that now. The women’s tennis teams, too. The woman are really serious players. They get really mad if the hit a net ball. They get even madder than the guys, I would say.” He had seen Reese Witherspoon miss a shot (it was a new ball), redden in the face, stamp her foot, and spank the net with her racket. From this her inferred that women “really wants to win.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

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Wanting to win, she is a “serious” player—a pro. Being a pro, she can be expected to see the tennis match as something on which her professional reputation and financial future depend. Further, from the way she broke an ordinary field of calm with a brief display of anger, she was really serious. He also inferred that she really meant it—she was “serious.” He also inferred what she must have wanted and expected just before the net ball and what the newly grasped reality—a miss—must have felt like. He tried to pick out what part of her went into seeing the ball. A miss, if you really want to win, is maddening. From the commentator’s words and tone, TV viewers could infer his point of view. He assessed the woman’s anger in relation to a prior expectation about how pros in general see, feel, and act and about how women in general act. Women tennis pros, he implied, do not laugh apologetically at a miss, as a nonprofessional woman player might. They feel, he said, in a way that is appropriate to the role of a professional player. In fact, as newcomers they overconform. “They get even madder than the guys.” Thus the view can ferret out the sportscaster’s mental set and the role of women in it. In the same way that we infer other people’s view points from how they display feeling, we decide what we ourselves are really like by reflecting on how we feel about ordinary events. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

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Consider this example, a statement from a young man of nineteen: I had agreed to give a party with a young woman who was an old friend. Ad the time approached, it became apparent to me that, while I liked her, I did not want the [social] identification with her that such an action [the jointly sponsored party] would bring. I tried explaining this to her without success, and at first I resolved to do the socially acceptable thing—go through with it. But the day before the party, I knew I simply could not do it, so I canceled out. My friend did not understand and was places in a very embarrassing position. I cannot feel ashamed no matter how hard I try. All I felt then was relief, and this is still my dominant response. I acted selfishly, but fully consciously. I imagine that my friendship could not have meant that much. The young man reached his conclusion by reasoning back from his absence of guilt or shame, from the feeling of relief he experienced. (He might also have concluded: “I have show myself to be the sort of fellow who can feel square with himself in the cases of unmet obligation. I can withstand the guilt. It is enough for me that I tried to feel shame.”) For the sportscaster and the young man, feeling was taken as a signal. To observer and actor alike it was a clue to an underlying truth, a truth that had to be dug out or inferred, a truth about the self vis-à-vis a situation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

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The sportscaster took the anger of the women tennis player as a clue to how seriously Reese took the game of tennis. The young man who backed out on his friend took his sense of relief and absence of guilt feelings as a clue to the absence of seriousness in his “old friendship.” Feeling can be used to give a clue to the operating truth, but in private life as well as on the job, two complications can arise. The first one lies between the clue of feeling and the interpretation of it. We are capable of disguising what we feel, of pretending to feel what we do not—of doing surface acting. The box of clues is hidden, but it is not changed. The second complication emerges in a more fundamental relation between stimulus and response, between a net ball and feeling frustration, between letting someone down and feeling guilty, between being called names by an “irate” and getting angry back. Here the clues can be dissolved by deep acting, which from one point of view involves deceiving oneself as much as deceiving others. In surface acting we deceive others about what we really feel, but we do not deceive ourselves. Diplomats and actors do this best, and very small children do it worst (it is part of their charm). In deep acting we make feigning easy by making it unnecessary. When we are more successfully at emotional control, the techniques of deep acting are joined to the principles of social engineering. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

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Can a person suppress one’s anger at a person who insults one? People can be taught how—if one is qualified by a demonstrably friendly disposition to start with. Ne may have most for a while the sense of what one would have felt has one not been trying so hard to feel something else. By taking over the levers of feeling production, by pretending deeply, one alters oneself. Deep acting has always had the edge over simple pretending in its power to convince. In jobs that require dealing with the public, employers are wise to want workers to be sincere, to go well beyond the smile that is “just painted on.” Always be honest. Behind the most effective display is the feeling that fits it, and that feeling can be managed. As workers, the more seriously social engineering affects our behavior and our feelings, the more intensely we must address a new ambiguity about who is directing them (is this me or the company talking?). As customers, the greater our awareness of social engineering, the more effort we put into distinguishing between gestures of real personal feelings and gestures of company policy. We have practical knowledge of the commercial takeover of the signal function of feeling. In a routine way, we make up for it; at either end, as worker or customer, we try to correct for the social engineering of feeling. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

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We mentally subtract feeling with commercial purpose to it from the total pattern of display that we sense to be sincerely felt. In interpreting a smile, we try to take out what social engineering put in, pocketing only what seems meant just for us. We say, “It is her job to be friendly,” or “They have to believe in their product like that in order to sell it.” In the end, it seems, we make up an idea of our “real self,” an inner jewel that remains our unique possession no matter whose billboard is on our back or whose smile is on our face. We push this “real self” further inside, making it more inaccessible. Subtracting credibility from the parts of our emotional machinery that are in commercial hands, we turn to what is left to find out who we “really are.” And around the surface of our human character, where once we were vulnerable, we don a cloak to protect us against the commercial elements. And finally as one listens more accurately to the feelings within, and become less evaluative and more acceptant toward oneself, one also moves towards greater congruence. One finds it possible to move out from behind the facades one has used, to drop one’s defensive behaviors, and more openly to be what one truly is. As these changes occur, as one becomes more self-aware, more self-acceptant, less defensive and more open, one finds that one is free to change and grow in the directions natural to the human organism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

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In regard to feelings and personal meanings, one moves away from a state in which feelings are unrecognized, unowned, unexpressed. One moves toward a flow in which ever-changing feelings are experiences in the moment, knowingly and acceptantly, and may be accurately expressed. The process involves a change in the manner of one’s experience. Initially one is remote from one’s experiencing. An example would be the intellectualizing person who talks about oneself and one’s feelings in abstractions, leaving you wondering what is actually going on within him or her. From such remoteness one moves toward an immediacy of experiencing in which one lives openly in one’s experiencing, and knows that one can turn to it to discover its current meanings. The process involves a loosening of the cognitive maps of experience. From construing experience in rigid ways, which are perceived as external facts, the client moves toward developing changing, loosely held construings of meaning in experience, constructs which are modifiable by each new experience. In general, the evidence shows that the process moves away from fixity, remoteness from feelings and experience, rigidity of self-concept, remoteness from people, impersonality of functioning. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

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It moves toward fluidity, changingness, immediacy of feelings and experience, acceptance of feelings and experience, tentativeness of constructs, discovery of a changing self in one’s changing experience, realness and closeness of relationship, a unity and integration of functioning. We are continually learning more about this process by which change comes about, and I am not sure that this very brief summary conveys much of the richness of our findings. LORD our God, great, eternal, wonderful in glory, Who keepest covenant and promises for those that love Thee with their whole heart; Who art the Life of all, the Help of those that flee unto Thee, the Hope of those who cry unto Thee; cleanse us from our sins, secret and open, and from every thought displeasing to Thy goodness,–cleanse our bodies and souls, our hearts and consciences, that with a pure heart and a clear soul, with perfect love and calm hope, we may venture confidently and fearlessly to pray Thee. LORD, we beseech Thee, let thy favour be present to Thy people who supplicate Thee; that what by Thy inspiration they faithfully ask, by the speedy bounty they may obtain; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, to look upon Thy servants, whom Thou hast enabled to put their trust in Thee; and grant them both to ask such things as shall please Thee, and also to obtain what they ask: through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

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CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH

Residence Two a spacious single story home with over 2,500 square feet of home thoughtfully designed to maximize every available foot of space. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a three car garage all come included in this home. The layout is an entertainer’s dream with large kitchen and working island, dining room connected through the butler’s pantry, and a large great room overlooking the ample rear yard.

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The Soul is Considered the Most Fundamental Activity of the Human Mind—Last Night I Loved, this Morning I am Love!

ImageI have traveled the World twice over, met the famous; saints and sinners, poets and artists, kings and queens, old stars and hopeful beginners, I have been where no-one’s been before, learned secrets from writers and cooks, and one frequently finds, people who lower their voices and raise their minds are the one’s who organize the Universe of knowledge into some systematic order. Community cooperation in the creation of goods and services and a framework of complete social and economic security are in themselves great advances over forms of society which sanction gross and unfair relations among beings and which deprive some people of the minimum prerequisites for a decent living. A modern philosophy of life, however, cannot content itself with equality and security alone. Our generation, perhaps, more than all others, has witnessed the creation of chains of bondage and horror in the name of equality and economic security. The soul acquires what we cannot afford, retain what we prize and adore, restore the worn, ignores fashion, and repulses prejudice. There are both gender patterns and class patterns to the civic and commercial use of human feeling. That is the social point. However, there is also a personal point, too. There is a cost to emotion work: it affects the degree to which we listen to feeling and sometimes our very capacity to feel. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

ImageManaging feelings is an art fundamental to civilized living, and I assume that in broad terms the cost is usually worth the fundamental benefit. Enjoyable as the instinct for pleasures of the flesh is, we are wise in the long run to give up some gratification of it. However, when the transmutation of private use of feeling is successfully accomplished—when we succeed in lending our feelings to the organizational engineers of worker-customer relations—we may pay a cost in how we hear our feelings and a cost in what, for better or worse, they tell us about ourselves. When a speed-up of the human assembly line makes genuine personal service harder to deliver, the worker may withdraw emotional labor and offer instead a thin crust of display. Then the cost shifts: the penalty becomes a sense of being phony or insincere. In short, when the transmutation works, the worker risks losing the signal function of feeling. When it does not work, the risk is losing the signal function of display. Certain social conditions have increased the cost of feeling management. One is an overall unpredictability about our social World. Ordinary people nowadays move through many social Worlds and get the gist of dozens of social roles. As a result, we moderns spend more mental time on the question “What, in this situation, should I be feeling?” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

ImageBecause of our socially constructed reality may not jive with our soul, we ask ourselves, “Who am I?” as if the question permitted a single neat answer. We still search for a solid, predictable core of self even though the conditions for the existence of such a self have long since vanished. In the face of these two conditions, people turn to feelings in order to locate themselves or at least to see what their own reactions are to a given event. That is, in the absence of unquestioned external guidelines, the signal function of emotion becomes more important, and the commercial distortion become more important, and the commercial distortion of the managed heart becomes all the more important as a human cost. We may well be seeing a response to all this in the rising approval of the unmanaged heart, the greater virtue now attached to what is “natural” or spontaneous. The high regard for “natural feeling,” then, may coincide with the culturally imposed need to develop the precise opposite—and instrumental stance toward feeling. We treat spontaneous feeling, for this reason, as if it were scarce and precious; we raise it up as a virtue. It may not be too much to suggest that we are witnessing a call for the conversation of inner resources, a call to save another wilderness from corporate use and keep it forever wild. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

ImageWith growing celebration of spontaneity have come the robot jokes. Robot humor plays wit the tension between being human—that is to say, having feeling—and being a cog in a socioeconomic machines. The charm of the little robot R2-D2, in the film Star Wars, is that he seems so human. Films like this bring us the familiar in reverse: every day, outside the movie house, we see human beings whose show of feeling has a robot quality. The ambiguities are funny now. Many people turn into robot humans because they do not want to be exploited or stigmatized. However, sometimes the trials that we suffer are a blessing in disguise, especially because of what it is felt that suffering can teach one about life and people. When one evaluates what one has learned, it is clear that it is not only suffering: it is also learning through suffering. The awareness of others can be deepened and increased, and those around one can count on one to turn all one’s mind and heart and attention to their problems. That is something that cannot be learned by dashing all over the shopping mall. Correspondingly, one can come to re-assess the limitations of normals. Both healthy minds and healthy bodies may be crippled. The fact the normal people can get around, can see, can hear, does not mean that they are seeing or hearing. They can be very visually impaired to the things that spoil their happiness, or suffer extreme hearing impairments that make them unable to recognize the pleas of others for kindness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

ImageWhen I think of people who are living in lack and limitation and cannot make use of their God given functions because they are unaware or chose to ignore their soul, it makes one realized how blessed one is not to be like them, even if you are not physically or mentally perfect—at least you are not ignorant. Perhaps in some small way, those of us who are defective can be the means of opening their eyes and ears to the beauties around us: things like a warm handclasp, a voice that is anxious to cheer, a spring breeze, music to listen to, a friendly nod. These people, even if they are not aware of their impact on others, are still important, and we can help them. In this light, we can perceive, for instance, that some inadequacy like the inability to accept human love can effectively diminish satisfaction of living almost to the vanishing point, but it is unusual for the being who suffers from such a malady even to know he or she has it and self-pity is, therefore, impossible for one. I believe that we can no longer afford to ignore the effect of the experimenter on the experience and behavior of the subject. We can no longer afford to divert nice, tender-hearted humanitarians into clinical work and leave the research for hard-nosed, hardhearted impersonal folk. If an experimental psychologist is unpleasant and threatening in the eyes of others, it might be better to confine one to the calculating room or else let one contact human subjects only when the design for the experiment calls for an impersonal investigator. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

ImageIf a person has gone into psychology to get away from people, let one design experiments, build equipment, analyze data, run computers, and so on. We need all the versatility we can get in psychology. How strange that good animal psychologists view their animal subjects like individual persons, worthy of respect, while experimental psychologist frequently treat their human subjects as if they were anonymous animal objects! It is already known that gentled tame animals show different behavioral and physiological characteristic from nongentled or wild ones (wild means, here, defensive and hostile in the presence of humans). Yet many of our subjects are assumed to be tame and trusting when, in fact they are wild. Genuine dialogue may prove to be the appropriate context for research in human (free) beings. I believe each of us working in the field of human relationships has a similar problem in knowing how to use such research knowledge. We cannot slavishly follow such findings in a mechanical way or we destroy the personal qualities which these very studies show to be valuable. It seems to me that we have to use these studies, testing them against our own experience and forming new and further personal hypotheses to use and test in our own further personal relationships. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

ImageThere are somethings we need to figure out such as: Can I be in some way which will be perceived by the other person as trustworthy, as dependable or consistent in some deep sense? I used to feel that if I fulfilled all the outer conditions of trustworthiness—keeping appointments, respecting the confidential nature of the interviews, and so forth—and if I acted consistently the same during meetings with people, then this condition would be fulfilled. However, the experience drove home the fact that to act consistently acceptant, for example, if in fact I was feeling annoyed or skeptical or some other non-accepted feeling, was certain in the long run to be perceived as inconsistent or untrustworthy. I have come to recognize that being trust worthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real. The term “congruent” is one that I used to describe the way I would like to be. By this I mean that whatever feeling or attitude I am experiencing would be matched by my awareness of that attitude. When this is true, then I am a unified or integrated person in that moment, and hence I can be whatever I deeply am. This is a reality which I find others experience as dependable. A very closely related question is this: Can I be expressive enough as a person that what I am will be communicated unambiguously? I believe that most of my failures to achieve a helping relationship can be traced to unsatisfactory answers to these two questions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

ImageWhen I am experiencing an attitude of annoyance toward another person but am unaware of it, then my communication contains contradictory messages. My words are giving one message, but I am also in subtle ways communicating the annoyance I feel and this confuses the other person and makes one distrustful, though one too may be unaware of what is causing the difficulty. When as a parent or a therapist or a teacher or an administrator I fail to listen to what is going on in me, fail because my own defensiveness to sense my own feelings, then this kind f failure seems to result. It has made it seem to me that the most basic learning for anyone who hopes to establish any kind helping relationship is that it is safe to be transparently real. If in a given relationship I am reasonably congruent, if no feelings relevant to the relationship are hidden either to me or the person, then I can be almost sure that the relationship will be a helpful one. One way of putting this which may seem strange to you is that if I cam form a helping relationship to myself—if I be sensitively aware of and acceptant toward my own feelings—then the likelihood is great that I can for a helping relationship toward another. Now, acceptantly to be what I am, in this sense, and to permit this to show through to the other person, is the most difficult task I know and one I never fully achieve. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

ImageHowever, to realize that I must be acceptant towards other people is my task and it has been most rewarding because it has helped me to find what has gone wrong with interpersonal relationships which have become snarled and to put them on a constructive track again. It has meant that if I am to facilitate the personal growth of others in relations to me, then I must grow, and while this is often painful it is also enriching. Another questions: Can I let myself experiences optimistic attitudes toward this other person—attitudes of warmth, caring, liking, interest, respect? It is not easy. I find in myself, and feel that I often see in others, a certain amount of fear of these feelings. We are afraid that if we let ourselves freely experience these beneficial feelings toward another we may be trapped by them. They may lead to demands on us or we may be disappointed in our trust, and these outcomes we fear. So as a reaction we tend to build up distance between ourselves and others—aloofness, a professional attitude, an impersonal relationship. I feel quite strongly that one of the important reasons for the professionalization of every field is that it helps to keep this distance. In the clinical areas we develop elaborate diagnostic formulations, seeing the person as an object. In teaching and in administration we develop all kinds of evaluative procedures, so that again the person is perceived as an object. In these ways, I believe, we can help ourselves from experiencing the caring which would exist if we recognized the relationship as one between two persons. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

ImageWhen we can learn, even in certain relationships or at certain times in those relationships, that it is safe to care, that it is safe to relate to the other as a person for whom we have beneficial feelings, the relationship is a real achievement. Another question the importance of which I have learned in my own experience is: Can I be strong enough as a person to be separate from the others? Can I be a sturdy respecter of my own feelings, my own needs, as well as his or hers? Can I own and, if need be, express my own feelings as something belonging to me and separate from one’s feelings? Am I strong enough in my own separateness that I will not be downcast by one’s depression, frightened by one’s fear, nor engulfed by one’s dependency? Is my inner self hardy enough to realize that I am not destroyed by one’s anger, take over by one’s need for dependence, nor enslaved by one’s love, but that I exist separate from one with feelings and rights of my own? When I can freely feel this strength of being a separate person, then I find that I can let myself go much more deeply in understanding and accepting one because I am not fearful of losing myself. While in the presence of others, the individual typically infuses one’s activity with signs which dramatically highlight and portray confirmatory facts that might otherwise remain unapparent or obscure. For if the individual’s activity is to become significant to others, one must mobilize one’s activity so that it will express during the interaction what one wishes to convey. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

ImageIn fact, the performer may be required not only to express one’s claimed capacities during the interaction but also to do so during the split second in the interaction. Thus, if a baseball umpire is to give the impression that he or she is sure of one’s judgment, one must forgo the moment of thought which might make one sure of one’s judgment; one must give an instantaneous decision so that the audience will be sure that one is sure of one’s judgment. The next question is closely related. Am I secure enough within myself to permit him or her his or her separateness? Can I permit one to be what one is—honest or deceitful, infantile or adult, despairing or over-confident? Can I give one the freedom to be? Or do I feel that one should follow my advice, or remain somewhat dependent on me, or mold oneself after me? In this connection I think of the interesting study that found that the less well adjusted and less competent counselor tends to induce conformity to oneself, to have clients who model themselves after one. On the other hand, the better adjusted and more competent counselor can interaction with a client through many interviews without interfering with freedom of the client to develop a personality quite separate from that of one’s therapist. I should prefer to be in this latter class, whether as a parent or supervisor or counselor. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

ImageThere are test, dangers, and pitfalls at various stages of self-actualization. The momentary glimpse of God provides the real beginning of one’s quest. The uninterrupted realization of it provides the final ending. Another question I can ask myself is: Can I let myself enter fully into the World of one’s feelings and personal meanings and see these as one does? Can I step into one’s private World so completely that I lose all desire to evaluate or judge it? Can I enter it so sensitively that I can catch not only the meanings of which are only implicit, which one sees only dimly or as confusion? Can I extend this understanding without limit? I think of the client who said, “Whenever I find someone who understands a part of me at the time, then it never fails that a point is reached where I know they are not understanding me again. What I have looked for so hard is for someone to understand.” For myself I find it easier to feel this kind of understanding, and to communicate it, to individual clients than to students in a class or staff members in group in which I am involved. There is a strong temptation to set students “straight,” or to point out to a staff member the errors in one’s thinking. Yet when I can permit myself to understand in these situations, it is mutually rewarding. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

ImageAnd with clients in therapy, I am often impressed with the fact that even a minimal amount of empathic understanding—a bumbling and faulty attempt to catch the confused complexity of the client’s meaning—is helpful, though there is no doubt that it is most helpful when I can see and formulate clearly the meanings in one’s experience which for one have been unclear and tangled. Still another issue is whether I can be acceptant of each facet of this other person which one presents to me. Can I receive one as one is? Can I communicate this attitude? Or can I only receive one conditionally, acceptant of some aspect of one’s feelings and silently or openly disapproving of other aspects? It has been my experience that when my attitude is conditional, then one cannot change or grow in these respects in which I cannot fully receive one. And when—afterward and sometimes too late—I try to discovery why I have been unable to accept one in every respect, I usually discover that is because I have been frightened or threatened in myself by some aspect of one’s feelings. If I am to be more helpful, then I must myself grow and accept myself in these respects. First, one has a vague feeling of being attracted towards God. Then one bestows more attention upon God, thinks of him frequently; at length attention grows into concentration and this, in turn, culminates in absorption. In the end, one can say, “I live not in myself, only in God. Last night I loved. This morning I am Love.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

ImageA specific aspect of the preceding question but an important one is: Can I free one from the threat of external evaluation? In almost every phase of our lives—at home, at school, at work—we find ourselves under the rewards and punishments of external judgments. “That is good”; “that is naughty”; “that is poor counseling.” Such judgments are a part of our lives from infancy to old age. I believe they have a certain social usefulness to institutions and organizations such as schools and professions. Like everyone else I find myself all too often making such evaluations. However, n my experience, they do not make for personal growth and hence I do not believe that they are a part of a helping relationship. Curiously enough the beneficial evaluation is as threatening in the long run as a negative one, since to inform someone that one is good implies that you also have the right to tell one he or she is bad. So I have come to understand that the more I can keep a relationship free of judgment and evaluation, the more this will permit the other person to reach the point where one recognizes that the locus of evaluation, the center of responsibility, is possessed within oneself. The meaning and value of one’s experience is in the last analysis something which is up to one, and no amount of external judgment can alter this. So I should like to work toward a relationship in which I am not, even in my own feelings, evaluating one. This I believe can set one free to be a self-responsible person. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

ImageThe stages in philosophic training usually begin with gaining a theoretical knowledge of the teachings. When this is well established, it grows in time into an aspiration for self-improvement and into an effort to mold character and conduct in conformity with the philosophical ideal. Such a maturation period is often long and a difficult one. In the third stage the glimpse of enlightenment begins to be experienced. The first glimpse has a far-reaching effect and is likely to be associated with the first contact with an inspired spiritual guide, or with the writings of such a being. In the case of some persons there is a different series of steps. The glimpse comes first, the theoretical study next, the striving to express through living comes last. Sometimes we wonder: Can I meet this other individual as a person who is in process of becoming, or will I be bound by one’s past and by my past? If, in my encounter with one, I am dealing with one as an immature child, an ignorant student, a neurotic personality, or a psychopath, each of these concepts of mine limits what one can be in the relationship. We must confirm the other. Confirming means accepting the whole potentiality of the other. I can recognize in one, know in one, the person one has been crated to become. I confirm one in myself, and then in one, in relation to this potentiality that can now be developed, can evolve. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

ImageOne has to make oneself ready for the illumination, then only will one get it. As a consequence of all these efforts and aspirations, one will begin to grow out of oneself. Wisdom comes with the end of a long probation. If I see a relationship as only an opportunity to reinforce certain types of words or opinions in the other, then I tend to confirm one as an object—a basically mechanical, manipulable object. And if I see this as one’s potentiality, one tends to act in ways which support this hypothesis. If, on the other hand, I see a relationship as an opportunity to reinforce all that one is, the person tat one is with all one’s existent potentialities, then one tends to act in ways which support this hypothesis. I have then confirmed one as a living person, capable of creative inner development. Personally I prefer this second type of hypothesis. The optimal helping relationship is the kind of relationship created by a person who is psychologically mature. Or to put it another way, the degree to which I can crate relationships which facilitate the growth of others as separate persons is a measure of the growth I have achieved in myself. In some respects this is a disturbing thought, but it is also a promising or challenging one. It would indicate that if I am interested in creating helping relationships I have a fascinating lifetime job ahead of me, stretching and developing my potentialities in the direction of growth. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

ImageAll of us who are working in the field of human relationships and trying to understand the basic orderliness of that field are engaged in the most crucial enterprise in today’s World. If we are thoughtfully trying to understand our tasks as administrators, teachers, educational counselors, vocational counselors, therapist, then we are working on the problem which will determine the future of this planet. For it is not upon the physical sciences that the future will depend. It is upon us who are trying to understand and deal with the interations between human beings—who are trying to create helping relationships. So I hope that the questions I ask of myself will be of some use to you in gaining understanding and perspective as you endeavor, in your way, to facilitate growth in your relationship. People would like to live quiet, tumult-free lives, without the feeling of being continuously uprooted on one pretext or another. Every normal person yearns for the luxury of anonymity at some time or another, and has some part of oneself which one does not choose to reveal to others, desires to make one’s own decisions in certain spheres of life, and need some time to spend alone with oneself in whatever form one chooses. If people do not have enough room to satisfy their own individual needs within the collective framework, they leave or else build up sublimated pressures within the community, which it sometimes cannot withstand. The system thus makes it possible for some people to live a parasitic life. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

ImageThe higher stage is pure philosophy, for it re-educates one’s outlook and hence one’s high consciousness. It demands close, concentrated study, however, and therefore few care for it. It is based on reasoning, not on mystic intuitions, and will be the logical development of modern science if it keeps on probing. Reason is not to be confused with logic, either; the latter is limited and cannot yield truth. The soul is always helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Its skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed.  Anyone who has a soul and a garden wants for nothing. We find God’s language. O God the Father of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ, Lord, Whose Name is great, Whose nature is blissful, Whose goodness is inexhaustible, Thou God and Master of all things, Who art blessed for ever; Who Sittest on the Cherubim, and art glorified by the Seraphim; before Whom stand thousands of thousands and tens of thousands times ten thousand, the host of holy Angles and Archangels; sanctify, O Lord, our souls and bodies and spirits, and touch our apprehensions and search out or consciences, and cost out of us every evil thought, every base desire, all envy, and pride, and hypocrisy, all falsehood, all deceit, and all Worldly anxiety, all covetousness, vainglory, and sloth, all malice, all wrath, all anger, all remembrance of injuries, all blasphemy, and every motion of the flesh and spirit that is contrary to Thy holy will. And grant us, O Lord, the Lover of humans, with freedom, without condemnation, with a pure heart and a contrite soul, without confusion of face and with sanctified lips, boldly to call upon Thee, or holy God and Father Who art in Heaven. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18Image

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The Soul is One of the Few Places Left Where One Can be Private–The Edge of Sleep Can be Such a Precious Time!

ImageThe edge of sleep can be such a precious time. I felt that quickening again, that prodding from the depths of my soul that some great change was taking place in me, a vital change—another nagging thought that, some to do with language. What was it? One gets thrilled and frightened at the same time in the presence of the soul because it reminds one about one’s past, present, and, most, of the possibilities of future. A basic cause for sublime embarrassment about using the divine name—the doubt about God Himself. Such doubt is universally human, and God would not be God if we could possess Him like any object of our familiar World, and verify his reality like any other reality under inquiry. Unless doubt is conquered, there is no faith. Faith must overcome something; it must leap over the ordinary process that provide evidence, because its object is possesses the whole realm where scientific verification is possible. Faith is the courage that conquers doubt, not by removing it, but by taking it as an element into itself. I am convinced that the element of doubt, conquered in faith, is never completely lacking in any serious affirmation of God. It is not always on the surface; but it always gnaws at the depth of our being. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

ImageWe may know people intimately who have a seemingly primitive unshaken faith, but it is not difficult to discover the underswell of doubt that in critical moments surges up to the surface. Religious leaders tell us both directly and indirectly of the struggle in their minds between faith and unfaith. From fanatics of faith we hear beneath their unquestioning affirmations of God the shrill sound of their repressed doubt. It is repressed, but not annihilated. On the other hand, listening to the cynical denials of God that are an expression of the flight from the meaning of life, we hear the voice of a carefully covered despair, a despair that demonstrates not assurance but doubt about their negation. And in our encounter with those who assume scientific reasons to deny God, we find that they are certain of their denial only so long as they battle—and rightly so—against superstitious ideas of God. When, however, they ask the question of God Who is really God—namely, the question of the meaning of life as a whole and their own life, including their scientific work, their self-assurance tumbles for neither one who affirms nor one who denies God can be ultimately certain about one’s affirmation or one’s denial. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

ImageDoubt, and not certitude, is our human situation, whether we affirm or deny God. And perhaps the differences between them is not so great as one usually thinks. They are probably very similar in their mixture of faith and doubt. Therefore, the denial of God, if serious, should not shake us. What should trouble everyone who takes life seriously is the existence of indifferences. For one who is indifferent, when hearing the name of God, and feels, at the same time, that the meaning of one’s life is being questioned, denies one’s true humanity. It is doubt in the depth of faith that often produces sublime embarrassment. Such embarrassment can be an expression of conscious or unconscious honesty. Have we not felt how something in us sometimes makes us stop, perhaps only for a moment, when we want to say “God”? This moment of hesitation may express a deep feeling for God. It says something about one who hesitates to use it. Sometimes we hesitate to use the word “God” even without words, when we are alone; we may hesitate to speak to God even privately and voicelessly, as in prayer. It may be that doubt prevents us from praying. And beyond this we may feel that the abyss between God and us makes the use of His name impossible for us; we do not dare to speak to Him, because we feel Him standing on the other side of the abyss from us. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

ImageThis can be a profound affirmation of God. The silent embarrassment of using the divine name can protect us against violating the divine mystery. We have considered the silence of tact and the silence of honesty concerning the divine name. However, behind them both possesses something more fundamental, the silence of awe, that seems to prohibit the speaking of God altogether. However, is this the last word demanded by the divine mystery? Must we spread silence around what concerns us more than anything else—the meaning of our existence? The answer is—no! For God Himself has given humankind names for Himself in those moments when He has broken into our finitude and made Himself manifest. We can, and must use these names. For silence has power only if it is the other side of speaking, and in this way becomes itself a kind of speaking. This necessity is both our justification and our being judged, when we gather together in the name of God. We are an assembly where we speak about God. We are a church. The church is the place where the mystery of the holy should be experienced wit awe and sacred embarrassment. However, is this our experience? Are our prayers, communal or personal, a use or a misuse of the divine name? #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

ImageDo we feel the sublime embarrassment that so many people outside the churches feel? When, as ministers, we point to the Divine Presence in the sacraments, are we gripped by awe? Or, as theological interpreters of the holy, are we too sure that we can really explain God to others? When fluent Biblical quotations or quick, mechanized words of prayer pour from our mouths, is there enough sacred embarrassment in us? Do we preserve the respectful distance from the Holy-Itself, when we claim to have the truth about God, or to be at the place of His Presence or to be the administrators of His Power—the proprietors of the Christ? How much embarrassment, how much awe is alive in Saturday or Sunday devotional services all over the World? And now let me ask the church and all its members, including you and myself, a bold question. Could it be that, in order to judge the misuse of God’s name within the church, God reveals Himself from time to time by creating silence about Himself? Could it be that sometimes He prevents the use of his name in order to protect His name, that He withholds from a generation what was natural to previous generations—the use of the word God? Could it be that godlessness is not caused only by human resistance, but also by God’s paradoxical action—using beings and the forces by which they are driven to judge the assemblies that gather in His name and take His name in vain? #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

ImageWhen speaking of him, is the secular silence about God that we experience everywhere today perhaps God’s way of forcing His church back to a sacred embarrassment? It may be bold to ask such questions. Certainly there can be no answer, because we do not know the character of the divine providence. However, even without an answer, the question itself should warn all those inside the church to whom the use of His name comes too easily. The entire being, who feels all needs by turns, will take nothing as an equivalent for life but the fulness of living itself. Since the essence of things are as a matter of fact disseminated through the whole extent of time and space, it is in their spread-outness and alternation that one will enjoy them. When weary of the concrete clash and dust and pettiness, one will refresh oneself by a bath in the eternal springs, or fortify oneself by a look at the immutable natures. However, one will only be a visitor, not a dweller in the region; one will never carry the philosophic yoke upon one’s shoulders, and when tired of the gray monotony of one’s problems and insipid spaciousness of one’s result, will always escape gleefully into the teeming and dramatic richness of the concrete World. So abstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality except with reference to a particular interesting he conceiver. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

ImageThe interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but one of a thousand human purposes. When others rear their heads, it must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs. The exaggerated dignity and value that philosophers have claimed for their solutions is this greatly reduced. The only virtue their theoretic conception need have is simplicity, and a simple conception is an equivalent for the world only so far as the World is simple,–the World meanwhile, whatever simplicity it may harbor, being also a mightily complex affair. Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgency in our craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of the most invincible of human impulses. The quest of the fewest elements of things is an ideal that some will follow, as long as there are beings to think at all. However, suppose the goal attained. Supposed that at last we have a system unified in the sense that has been explained. Our World can now be conceived simply, and our mind enjoys the relief. Our universal concept has made the concrete chaos rational. However, now I ask, Can that which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly called rational? It would seem at first sight that it might. One is tempted at any rate to say that, since the craving for rationality is appeased by the identification of one thing with another, a datum which left nothing else outstanding might quench that craving definitively, or be rational in se. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

ImageNo otherness being left to annoy us, we should sit down at peace. In other words, as the theoretic tranquility of the boor results from one’s spinning no further considerations about one’s chaotic Universe, so any datum whatever (provided it were simple, clear, and ultimate) ought to banish puzzle from the Universe of the philosopher and confer peace, inasmuch as there would then be for one absolutely no further considerations to spin. A difficult is solved, a mystery unriddled, when it can be shown to resemble something else; to be an example of a fact already known. Mystery is isolation, exception, or it may be apparent contradiction: the resolution of the mystery is found in assimilation, identity, fraternity. When all things are assimilated, so far as assimilation can go, so far as likeness hold, there is an end to explanation; there is an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire. The path of science as exhibited in modern ages is toward generality, wider and wider, until we reach the highest, the widest laws of every department of things; there explanation is finished, mystery ends, perfect vision is gained. However, unfortunately, this first answer will not hold. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

ImageOur mind is so wedded to the process of seeing an other beside every item of its experience, that when the notion of an absolute datum is presented to it, it goes through its usual procedure and remains pointing at the void beyond, as if in that lay further matter for contemplation. In short, it spins for itself the further absolute consideration of nonentity enveloping the being of its datum; and as that leads nowhere, back recoils the thought toward its datum again. However, there is no natural bridge between nonentity and this particular datum, and the thought stands oscillating hither and tither, wondering “Why was there anything but nonentity; why just this universal datum and not another?” and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost. When the attempt to fuse the manifold into a single totality has been most successful, when the conception of the Universe as a unique fact is nearest its perfection, the carving for further explanation, the ontological wonder-sickness, arises in its extreme form. The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this World is just as possible as its existence. The notion of nonentity may thus be called the parent of the philosophic craving in its subtilest and profoundest sense. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

ImageAbsolute existence is absolute mystery, for its relations with the nothing remain unmediated to our understanding. One philosopher only had pretended to throw a logical bridge over this chasm. Hegel, by trying to show that nonentity and concrete being are linked together by a series of identities of a synthetic kind, binds everything conceivable into a unity, with no outlying notion to disturb the free rotary circulation of the mind within its bounds. Since such unchecked movement gives the feeling of rationality, he must be held, if he has succeeded, to have eternally and absolutely quenched all rational demands. However, for those who deem Hegel’s heroic effort to have failed, nought remains but to confess that when all things have been unified to the supreme degree, the notion of a possible other than the actual may still haunt our imagination and prey upon our system. The bottom of being I left logically opaque to us, as something which we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. The philosopher’s logical tranquility is thus in essence no other than the boor’s. They differ only as to the point at which each refuses to let further considerations upset the absoluteness of the data one assumes. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

ImageThe boor does so immediately, and is liable at any moment to the ravages of many kinds of doubt. The philosopher does not do so till unity has been reached, and is warranted against the inroads of those considerations, but only practically, not essentially, secure from the blighting breath of the ultimate Why? If one cannot exorcise this question, one must ignore or blink it, and, assuming the data of one’s system as something given, and the gift as ultimate, simply proceed to a life of contemplation or of action based on it. There is no doubt that this acting on an opaque necessity is accompanied by a certain pleasure. There is an infinite significance in fact. Necessity is the last and highest point that we can reach. It is not only the interest of ultimate and definitive knowledge, but also that of the feelings, to find a last repose and an ideal equilibrium in an uttermost datum which can simply not be other than it is. Such is the attitude of ordinary beings in their theism, God’s fiat being in physics and morals such an uttermost datum. Such is also the attitude of all hard-minded analysts and Verstandesmenschen. Of experiences as a whole no account can be given. However, meditating attempts may be made. The peace of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

ImageTo religious persons of every shade of doctrine moments come when the World, as it is, seems so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it by the heart so rapturously complete, that intellectual questions vanish; nay, the intellect itself is hushed to sleep,–thought is not; enjoyment it expires. Ontological emotion so fills the soul that ontological speculation can no longer overlap it and put her girdle of interrogation-marks round existence. Even the least religious of beings must have felt when loafing on the grass on some transparent summer morning, that swiftly arose and spread round one the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the Earth. At such moments of energetic living we feel as if there were something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic grubbing and brooding. In the eye of healthy sense the philosopher is at best a learned fool. It is a matter of complete assurance and scientific observation for the truth seeker that God exists, that beings have souls, that we are here on Earth to become untied with this soul, and that one can attain true happiness only by following good and avoiding evil. One is not a quester after saintly prestige: one will not outwardly try to present oneself as a holy person. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

ImageOne could never make a commercial business out of spiritual uplift, nor even turn it into a paid professional career. How different from those ambition leaders whose pretended motive of serving humanity is really a cover for the service of their own ego. People may think a person who is attuned to their soul exercises infinite tolerance and patience. This is because they have no standard by which to measure the qualities of one’s rhythm of consciousness. Tolerance and patience imply their opposites. People who are connected to their soul reactions conform to neither. One literally lives where they do not apply. The set of conditions which for the ordinary being gives rise to the possibility of tolerance and patience or their opposites is for one an opportunity for reflection. Such a beings has no enemies, although one may have those who regard one as their enemy. For hate cannot enter one’s heart; goodwill towards all is its fragrant atmosphere. In all relations, whether as a friend or a partner or spouse, one is possessing, but one requires in return to be unpossessed. Here, then, is the point which I see the new mission of humanity, to rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, many people have been principally occupied with the material aspect of reality. From now on one must give their attention to reality as a living function. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

ImageThe soul is one of the few places left where one can be private. The soul’s existence is not persuasion, but knowledge—it is an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders. The adept has no indispensable need to know. One is being, which is one’s foundational consciousness—pure, unmixed with mental images or thoughts, and not dispersed in the existence of the five sense. One does not seek and will not accept those who are already members of any society or group which provides them with instruction, for one will not interfere between the teacher and the taught. Truth must be sought in its fullness, not as a supplement to the teaching of others. For one will not adulterate truth. The truth one has to give is not the same as that taught by one and one does not want to distort it to fit such misconceptions. One who has found one’s genuine self does not need to pose for the benefit of gushing disciples. One obtains the deepest satisfaction merely from being oneself. What other may say about one in praise cannot being one anything like pleasures which one’s own higher consciousness beings one. One’s ever-present calmness is not a mask for secretive emotions, inner conflicts, mental tensions, or explosive passions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

ImageOne has paid a high price for this serenity. One has accepted the necessity of walking alone, the shattering of all illusions, the denudation of human desire, and the funeral of animal passion. The illuminated individual’s conduct in this World is a guided one. One’s senses tell one what is happening in the World about one, but one’s soul guides one to a proper evaluation of those sense reports. In this way one lives in the World, but is not of it. Of one alone is it true today that one’s is a spiritual life. One possesses a largeness of heart at all times, an immense tolerance towards the frailty of faulty men and women. Most of the studies throw light on the attitudes on the part of the helping person which makes a relationship growth-promoting or growth-inhibiting. A careful study of parent-child relationships denotes that parental attitudes towards children, the “acceptant-democratic” seemed most growth-facilitating. Children of these parents with their warm and equalitarian attitudes showed an accelerated intellectual development (an increasing I.Q.), more originality, more emotional security and control, less excitability than children from other types of homes. Though somewhat slow initially in social development, they were, by the time they reached school age, popular, friendly, non-aggressive leaders. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

ImageWhen parents’’ attitudes are classed as “actively rejectant” the children show a slightly decelerated intellectual development, relatively poor use of the abilities they do possess, and some lack of originality. They are emotionally unstable, rebellious, aggressive, and quarrelsome. The children of parents with other attitude syndromes tend in various respect to fall in between these extremes. I am sure that these findings do not surprise us as related to child development. I would like to suggest that they probably apply to other relationships as well, and that the counselor or physician or administrator who is warmly emotional and expressive, respectful of the individuality of oneself and of the others, and who exhibits a non-possessive caring, probably facilitates self-realization much as does a parent with these attitudes. When one has fully accomplished this passing-over, all the elements of one’s lower nature will then have been fully eliminated. The ego will be destroyed. Instead of being enslaved by its own senses and passions, blinded by its own thoughts and ignorance, one’s mind will be inspired, enlightened, and liberated by God. Yet life in the human self will not be destroyed because one has entered life in the divine God. However, neither will it continue in the old and lower way. That self will henceforth function as a perfectly obedient instrument of the soul and no longer of the animal body or intellectual nature. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

ImageNo evil thought and no animal passion can ever again take hold of one’s mind. What remains of one’s character is therefore the incorruptible part and the immortal part. Death may rob one of lesser things, but not of the thing which one cherishes most. Having already parted in one’s heart with what is perishable, one can await it without perturbation and with sublime resignation. When we comprehend what it is that must go into the making of a truth seeker, how many and how diverse the experiences through which one has passed in former days, we realize that such a being’s wisdom is part of one’s bloodstream. The free soul is a living room to an ordinary citizen, a treasury to a researcher, and a chamber of horrors to a dictator. “Thou also sayest, except we repent we shall perish. How knowest thou the thought and intent of our hearts? How knowest thou that we have cause to repent? How knowest thou that we are not a righteous people? Behold, we have built sanctuaries, and we do assemble ourselves together to worship God. We do believe that God will says all humans,” reports Alam 21.6. Not only does God supply infinite riches to our soul, but we may sit at home, and yet be in all quarters of the Earth. The eternal access to God is not a privilege, but a necessity for any free society. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17Image

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Those Who Sing Before Breakfast Will Cry Before Supper!

ImageThis attitude was not too different from the attitudes of people today—in this very time—in which the entire World is dependent on energy technologies which the vast majority do not understand. To be faced by a troubled, conflicted persons who is seeking and expecting help, has always constituted a great challenge to me. Do I have the knowledge, the resources, the psychological strength, the skill—do I have whatever it takes to be of help to such an individual? If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within oneself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur. As it stands, many people are mostly childlike or eccentric in the wearisome way of abnormal or psychopathic people of low intelligence. Most of them also tend to be egotistical or self-pitying. A history will, for instance, frequently show temper tantrums up to the age of five or eight, disappearing then to give place to a general docility. However, aggressive trends are also reinforced and fed by later experience, since hostility is continually generated from many sources. It would lead us too far afield to go into all of these at this point; suffice it to say here that self-effacement and goodness invite being stepped on and being taken advantage of. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

ImageFurther, that dependence upon others makes for exceptional vulnerability, which in turn leads to a feeling of being neglected, rejected, and humiliated whenever the excessive amount of affection or approval demanded is not forthcoming. When I say that all these feelings, drives, attitudes are repressed I used the term in Dr. Freud’s sense, meaning that the individual is not only unaware of them but has so implacable an interest in never becoming aware of them that one keeps anxious watch lest any traces be disclosed to oneself or others. Every repression this confronts us with the question: What interest has the individual in repressing certain forces operating within one? In the case of the complaint type we can find several answers. Most of them we can understand only later when we come to discuss the idealized image and sadistic trends. What we can already understand at this point is that feelings or expressions of hostility would endanger the person’s need to like others and to be liked by them. In addition, any kind of aggressive or even self-assertive behavior would appear to one as selfish. One would condemn it oneself and hence would feel that others condemned it, too. And one cannot afford to risk such condemnation because one’s self-esteem is all too dependent upon their approval. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

ImageThe repression of all assertive, vindictive, ambitious feelings and impulses has still another function. It is one of the many attempts a neurotic makes to do away with one’s conflicts and to create instead a feeling of unity, of oneness, of wholeness. The longing for unity within ourselves is no mystical desire but is promoted by the practical necessity of having to function in life—and impossibility when one is continually driven in opposite directions—and by what in consequence amounts to a supreme terror of being split apart. Giving predominance to one trend by submerging all discrepant elements is an unconscious attempt to organize the personality. It constitutes one of the major attempts to solve neurotic conflicts. So we have already discovered a twofold interest in keeping a strict check on all aggressive impulses: the person’s whole way of life would be endangered and one’s artificial unity exploded. And the more destructive the aggressive trends, the more stringent the necessity to exclude them. The individual will learn over backward never to appear to want anything for oneself, never to refuse a request, always to like everyone, always to keep in the background, and so on. In other words, the compliant, appeasing trends are reinforced; they become more compulsive and less discriminate. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

ImageNaturally, all these unconscious efforts do not keep the repressed impulses from operating or asserting themselves. However, they do so in ways that fit into the structure. The person will make demands because one is so miserable or will secretly dominate under the guise of loving. Accumulated repressed hostility may also appear in explosions of greater or less vehemence, ranging from occasional irritability to temper tantrums. These outbursts, while they do not fit into the picture of gentleness and mildness, appear to the individual oneself as entirely justified. And according to one’s premises one is quite right. Not knowing that one’s demands upon others are excessive and egocentric one cannot help feeling at times that one is so unfairly treated that one simply cannot stand it any longer. Finally, if the repressed hostility takes on the force of a blind fury, it may give rise to all kinds of functional disorders, like headaches or stomach ailments. Most of the characteristics of the complaint type thus has a double motivation. When one subordinates oneself, for instance, it is in the interest of avoiding friction and thereby achieving harmony with others; but it may also be a means of eradicating all traces of one’s need to excel. When one lets others take advantage of one it is an expression of compliance and goodness, but it may also be a turning away from one’s own wish to exploit. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

ImageFor neurotic compliance to be overcome, both sides of the conflict must be worked through, and in the proper order. From conservative psychoanalytic publications we sometimes get the impression that the liberation of aggression is the essence of psychoanalytic therapy. Such an approach shows little understanding of the complexities and particularly of the variations in neurotic structures. Only for the particular type under discussion does it have any validity, and even here the validity is limited. The uncovering of aggressive drives is liberating, it can easily be detrimental to the person’s development if the liberation is regarded as an end in itself. If the personality is ultimately to be integrated, it must be followed by a working through of the conflicts. We need still to turn our attention to the role that love and pleasures of the flesh for the complaint type. Love often appears to one as the only goal worth striving for, worth living for. Life without love appears flat, futile, empty. Love becomes a phantom that is chased to the exclusion of everything else. People, nature, work, or any kind of amusement or interest become utterly meaningless unless there is some love relationship to lend them flavor and zest. The fact that under the conditions of our civilization this obsession is more frequent and more apparent in women than in men has given rise to the notion that it is a specifically feminine longing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

ImageActually, it has nothing to do with femininity or masculinity but is a neurotic phenomenon in that it is an irrational compulsive drive. If we understand the structure of the complaint type we can see why love is so all important to one, why there is a method to one’s madness. In view of one’s contradictory compulsive tendencies, it is in fact the only way in which all one’s neurotic needs can be fulfilled. It promises to satisfy the need to be liked as well as to dominate (through love), the need to take second place as well as to excel (through the partner’s undivided regard). It permits one to live out all one’s aggressive drives on a justified, innocent, or even praiseworthy basis, while allowing one at the same time to express all the endearing qualities one has acquired. Furthermore, since one is unaware that one’s lack and limitations are one’s suffering issue from the conflicts within oneself, love beckons as the sure cure for them all: if only one can find a person who loves one, everything will be all right. It is easy enough to say that this hope is fallacious, but we must also understand the logic of one’s more or less unconscious reasoning. One thinks: “I am weak and helpless; as long as I am alone in this hostile World, my helplessness is a danger and a threat. But if I find someone who loves me above all others, I shall no longer be in danger for he (she) will protect me. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

Image“With him I should not need to assert myself, for he would understand and give me what I want without my having to ask or explain. In fact, my weakness would be an asset, because he would love my helplessness and I could lean on his strength. The initiative which I simply can’t muster for myself would flourish if it meant doing things for him, or even doing things for myself because he wanted it.” One thinks—again reconstructing in terms of formulated reasoning what is partly thought out, partly only a feeling, and partly quite unconsciously: “It is torture for me to be alone. It’s not only that I can’t enjoy anything I do not share. It’s more than that; I feel lost, I feel anxious. Surely I could go to see Queen of the Damned alone, read a book, or watch The Morning Show starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston on a Saturday night, but that would be humiliating because it would point out to me that nobody wants me. So I must plan carefully never to be alone on a Saturday evening—or at any other time, for that matter. But if I found the great lover, he would free me from this torture; I would never be alone; everything that is now meaningless, whether it’s preparing breakfast or working or seeing a sunset, would be a joy.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

ImageAnd he thinks: “I have no self-confidence. I always feel everybody else is more competent, more attractive, more gifted than I am. Even the things I’ve managed to accomplish don’t count, because I can’t really credit myself with them. I may have been bluffing, or it may have been just a lucky break. I certainly can’ be sure that I could do it again. And if people really knew me, they’d have no use for me anyway. But if I found someone who loved me as I am and to whom I was of prime importance, I would be somebody.” No wonder, then, that love has all the lure of mirage. No wonder that it should be clutched at in preference to the laborious process of changing from within. Pleasures of the flesh as such—aside from its biological function—has the value of constituting proof of being wanted. The more the complaint type tends to be detached—that is, afraid of being emotionally involved—or the more one despairs of being loved, the more will mere pleasures of the flesh be likely to substitute for love. It will then appear as the only road to human intimacy, and be overrated, as love is, for its power to solve everything. If we are careful to avoid both extremes—that of regarding the patient’s overemphasis on love as “only natural,” and that of dismissing it as “neurotic”—we shall see that the complaint type’s expectations in this direction comes as a logical conclusion from one’s philosophy of life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

ImageAs so often in neurotic phenomena—or is it always?—we find that the patient’s reasoning, conscious or unconscious, is flawless, but rests on false premises. The fallacious premises are that one mistakes one’s need for affection and all that goes with it for a genuine capacity to love, and that one completely leaves out of the equation one’s aggressive and even destructive trends. In other words one leaves out the whole neurotic conflict. What one expects is to do away with the harmful consequences of the unresolved conflicts without changing anything in the conflicts themselves—an attitude characteristic of every neurotic attempt at solution. That is why these attempts are inevitably doomed to failure. For love has a solution, one must say this, however. If the complaint type is fortunate enough to find a partner who has both strength and kindliness, or whose neurosis fits in with his or her own, one’s suffering may be considerably lessened and one may find a moderate amount of happiness. However, as a rule, the relationship from which one expects Heaven on Earth only plunges one into deeper misery. One is all too likely to carry one’s conflicts into the relationship and thereby destroy it. Even the most favorable possibility can relieve only the actual distress; unless one’s conflicts are resolved one’s development will still be blocked. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

ImageIn the striving for possession hostility usually takes the form of a tendency to deprive others. The wish to cheat, steal from, exploit or frustrate others is not in itself neurotic. It may be culturally patterned, or it may be warranted by the actual situation, or it may normally be considered a question of expediency. In the neurotic person, however, these tendencies are highly charged with emotion. Even if the beneficial advantages one derives from the are slight or irrelevant one will feel elated and triumphant if one meets with success; in order to find a bargain, for example, one may spend time and energy entirely disproportionate to the amount saved. One’s satisfaction at success has two sources: a feeling that one has outwitted others, and a feeling that one has injured others. This tendency to deprive others takes many forms. If one is not treated gratuitously, or for less than one is able to pay, the neurotic person will feel resentment toward a physician. In relations with friends and children the exploiting tendency is often justified by alleging that they have an obligation toward one. Parents may actually destroy their children’s lives by demanding sacrifices on such a basis, and even if the tendency does not appear in such destructive forms, any mother who acts according to the belief that the child exists to give her satisfaction is bound to exploit the child emotionally. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

ImageA neurotic of this kind may also tend to withhold things from others, withhold money which one ought to pay, information which could give, satisfaction in pleasures of the flesh which one has led another to expect. The presence of robbing tendencies may be indicated by repeated dreams of stealing, or one may have conscious impulses to steal, which one checks; one may actually have been a kleptomaniac at some period. Persons of this general type are often unaware that they purposely deprive others. The anxiety connected with their wish to do so may result in an inhibition as soon as something is expected of them, so that, for example, they forget to buy an expected birthday present, or they become important if a woman is willing to yield to them. This anxiety, however, does not always lead to an actual inhibition, but may become apparent in a lurking fear that they are exploiting or depriving others, as indeed they are, though consciously they would indignantly repudiate such an intention. A neurotic may even have this fear concerning certain of one’s activities in which these tendencies are actually not present, at the same time remaining unaware that in other activities one does exploit or deprive other people. These tendencies to deprive others are accompanied by an emotional attitude of begrudging envy. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

ImageIf others have certain advantages which we should like to have ourselves, most of us will feel some envy. With the normal person, however, the emphasis lies on the fact that one wishes to have these advantages oneself; with the neurotic the emphasis lies on the fact that one begrudges them to others, even if one does not want them at all. Mothers of this kind often begrudge the gaiety of their children and tell them that “those who sing before breakfast will cry before supper.” The neurotic will try to disguise the crudity of one’s begrudging attitude by putting it on the basis of a justified envy. The advantage of others, whether it concerns a doll, girl, leisure or a job, appears so glorious and desirable that ne feels entirely justified in one’s envy. This justification is possible only with the help of some inadvertent falsification of facts: an underestimation of what one has oneself, and an illusion that the advantages of others are the really desirable one. The self-deception may go as far as to make one actually believe that one is in a miserable state because one fails to have the one advantage in which another person surpasses one, completely forgetting that in all other respects one would not like to change with the other. The price one has to pay for this falsification is incapacity to enjoy and appreciate the possibilities for happiness that are available. This incapacity, however, serves to protect one from the much-feared envy of others. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

ImageOne does not deliberately keep oneself from satisfaction with what one has, as many normal persons who have good reason to protect themselves against the envy of certain persons, and therefore mispresent their real situation; one does a thorough job of it, and really deprives oneself of any enjoyment. Thus one defeats one’s own ends: one wants to have everything, but in consequence of one’s destructive drives and anxieties one emerges at the end with empty hands. It is obvious that the tendency to deprive or exploit, like all the other hostile tendencies we have discussed, not only arise from impaired personal relations but results in further impairment. Particularly if this tendency is more or less unconscious, as is usually the case, it necessarily renders the person self-conscious or even timid toward others. One may behave and feel free and natural towards persons from whom one does not expect anything, but one will become self-conscious as soon as there is any possibility of getting any advantage from someone. The advantage may concern tangible things, such as information or a recommendation, or it may concern something much less tangible, such as the mere possibility of future favors. This is true in erotic as in all other relationships. A neurotic of this type may be frank and natural with men for whom she does not care, but feel embarrassed and constrained toward a man whom she wants to like her, because, for her, obtaining his affection is identified with getting something out of him. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

ImagePersons of this type may have an exceptionally good earning capacity, thus leading their impulses into profitable channels. More often, they will develop inhibitions concerning the earning of money, so that they will hesitate to ask for pay or will do a great deal of work without getting an adequate reward, thus appearing to behave more generously than is really the case. They are likely then to become discontented at their inadequate earnings, often without knowing the reasons for the discontentment. If the neurotic’s inhibitions become so ramified that they pervade one’s whole personality the result will be a general incapacity to stand on one’s own feet, and one will have to be supported by others. One will then lead a parasitic kind of existence, thus satisfying one’s exploiting tendencies. This parasitic attitude will not necessarily appear in the gross form of “the World owes me a living,” but may take the more subtle form of expecting others to do one favors, to take the initiative, to give one ideas for work, in short, expecting others to take the responsibility for one’s life. The result is an odd attitude toward life in general: one has no clear conception that this is one’s life, and that it is up to one to make something out of it or to spoil it, but one lives as if what happens to one were no concern of one’s own, as if good and evil came from the outside without one’s having anything to do about it, as if one had a right to expect the good things from others and to blame them for all bad things. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

ImageSince in these circumstances usually more bad than good is produced, a growing embitterment against the World is almost inevitable. This parasitic attitude can be found also in the neurotic need for affection, especially when the need for affection takes the form of a craving for material favors. Another frequent outcome of the neurotic’s tendency to deprive or exploit is an anxiety that one will be cheated or exploited by others. One may live in a perpetual fear that someone will take advantage of one, that money or ideas will be stolen from one, and one will react to every person one meets with the fear that this person might want something of one. If one really is chanted, a seemingly disproportionate amount of anger is discharged, if, for example, an Uber-driver does not take the shortest route, of it a waiter overcharges one. The psychic value of projecting one’s own abusing tendencies on others is obvious. It is far more pleasant to feel a righteous indignation at others than to face a problem of one’s own. Moreover, hysterical persons often use accusations as a means of intimidation, or bullying the other into feeling guilty and thus letting oneself be abused. The aims and functions of the neurotic striving for power, prestige, and possession can be very roughly schematized as following: Aim for power, reassurance against it leads to helplessness, and hostility appears in the form of tendency to domineer. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

ImageWhen the aim is prestige, reassurance against leads to humiliation, the hostility appears in the form of a tendency to humiliate. If the aim if for possession, reassurance against cases destitution, and the hostility appears in the form of the tendency to deprive others. Nonetheless, these strivings are the foremost trend in human nature, not in themselves requiring any explanation; their intensification in neurotics can be traced back to feelings of inferiority and to physical inadequacies. Dr. Freud has also seen many of the implications of these strivings, but he does not regard them as belonging together. The striving for prestige one considers an expression of narcissistic tendencies. One would originally have considered the strivings for power and possession, and the hostility involved in them, as derivatives of the anal-sadistic stage. Later, however, he recognized that such hostilities could not be reduced to a sexual basis, and assumed them to be an expression of a death instinct, thus remaining faithful to his biological orientation. In the nonstop tsunami of mental discord in society, we have to be provided with floaties and learn how to swim. I have found that the more that I can be genuine in the relationship, the more helpful it will be. This means that I need to be aware of my own feelings, in so far as possible, rather than presenting an outward façade of one attitude, while actually holding another attitude at a deeper or unconscious level. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

ImageBeing genuine also involves the willingness to be and to express in my own words and my behavior, the various feelings and attitudes which exist in me. It is only in this way that the relationship can have reality, and reality seems deeply important as a first condition. It is only by providing the genuine reality which is in me, that the other person can be successfully seek for the reality in one. I have found this to be true even when the attitudes I feel are not attitudes with which I am pleased, or attitudes I feel are not attitudes with which I am pleased, or attitudes which seem conducive to a good relationship. It seems extremely important to be real. As a second condition, I find that the more acceptance and liking I feel toward this individual, the more I will be creating a relationship which one can use. By acceptance I mean a warm regard for one as a person of unconditional self-worth—of value no matter what one’s condition, one’s behavior, or one’s feelings. As a second condition, I find that the more acceptance and liking I feel toward this individual, the more I will be creating a relationship which one can use. By acceptance I mean a warm regard for one as a person of unconditional self-worth—of vale no matter what one’s condition, one’s behavior, or one’s feelings. It means a respect and liking for one as a separate person, a willingness for one to possess one’s own feelings in one’s own way. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

ImageIt means an acceptance of and regard for one’s attitudes of the moment, no matter how pessimistic or optimistic, no matter how much they may contradict other attitudes one has held in the past. This acceptance of each fluctuating aspect of this person makes it for one a relationship of warmth and safety, and the safety of being liked and prized as a person seems a highly important element in helping relationship. I also find that the relationship is significant to the extent that I feel a continuing desire to understand—sensitive empathy with each other’s feelings and communications as they seem to one at the moment. Acceptance does not mean much until it involves understanding. It is only as I understand the feelings and thoughts which seem so horrible to you, or so weak, or so sentimental, or so bizarre—it is only as I see them as you see them, and accept them and you, that you feel really free to explore all the hidden nooks and frightening crannies of you inner and often buried experience. This freedom is an important condition of the relationship. There is implied here a freedom to explore oneself at both conscious and unconscious levels, as rapidly as one can dare to embark on this dangerous quest. There is also a complete freedom from any type of moral or diagnostic evaluation, since all evaluations are, I believe, always threatening. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

ImageThus the relationship which I have found helpful is characterized by a sort of transparency on my part, in which my real feelings are evident; by an acceptance of this other person as a separate person with value in one’s own right; and by a deep empathic understanding which enables me to see one’s private World through one’s eyes. When these conditions are achieved, I become a companion to someone else, accompanying the individual in the frightening search for oneself, which one now feels free to undertake. I am by no means always able to achieve this kind of relationship with another, and sometimes, even when I feel I have achieved it in myself, one may be too frightened to perceive what is being offered to one. However, I would say that when I hold myself the kind of attitudes I have described, and when the other person can to some degree experience these attitudes, then I believe that change and constructive personal development will invariably occur—and I include the word “invariably” only after long and careful consideration. So much for the relationship. The second phrase in my overall hypothesis is that the individual will discover within oneself the capacity to use this relationship for growth. I will try to indicate something of the meaning which the phrase has for me. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

ImageGradually my experience has forced me to conclude that the individual has within oneself the capacity and the tendency, latent if not evident, to move forward toward maturity. In a suitable psychological climate this tendency is released, and becomes actual rather than potential. It is evident in the capacity of the individual to understand those aspects of one’s life and of oneself which are causing one pain and dissatisfaction, an understanding which probes beneath one’s conscious knowledge of oneself into those experiences which one has hidden from oneself because of their threatening nature. It shows itself in the tendency to reorganize one’s personality and one’s relationship to life in ways which are regarded as more mature. Whether one calls it a growth tendency, a drive toward self-actualization, or a forward-moving directional tendency upon which all psychotherapy depends. It is the urge which is evident in all organic and human life—to expand, extend, become autonomous, develop, mature—the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, to the extent that such activation enhances the organism or the self. This tendency may become deeply buried under layer after layer of encrusted psychological defenses; it may be hidden behind elaborate facades which deny its existence; but it is my belief that it exists in every individual, and awaits only the proper conditions to be released and expressed. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

ImageTo comprehend the mysterious side of an adept’s personality correctly, we must comprehend its twofold nature. One is worthy to be called a sage who unites in one’s person mature judgement and experience, prudent speech and conduct, correct reasoning and adequate knowledge, humanized sanctity and spiritual enlightenment. In the loneliness of the divine presence one is always unutterably humble. In the presence of one’s fellow beings one is incomparably self-possessed, quietly dignified, and subtly armed with authority. The wearing of a halo would not make one any happier; one is not interested in being marked out as a “spiritual” person; spirituality is not a separate special feature for one but not something that ought to be the natural state of a human being. Consequently one finds the thought of being singed out for this quality, or becoming conspicuous for it, uninteresting to one. This paradox is the extraordinary situation of a being. One accepts the ego but one also repudiates it at the same time. Although one has reached a Godlike level, one is never arrogant, never pretentious, yet always keeps a simple natural dignity. Just as there is no special virtue in going to sleep, nothing to be proud of, so the sage regards one’s being in Being as no less natural, nothing to vaunt before other beings. This seems undue humility to the World but it seems ordinary to one. “And blessed are all the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” 3 Nephi 12.8 #RandolphHarris 21 of 21 Image

There is No Better Way in this World to Lose Something Forever than to Prejudge it!

ImageNo human being in the World has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great soul. When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have to come to an end. Even the most misfitting child who’s changed upon the soul’s worth, sits with the genius of the Earth and turns they key to the whole World. In one applies it around themselves like scaffolding, theory can obscure and individual. When working in difficult places, scaffolding does provide the builder a secure place to stand and gives architects the opportunity to view an emerging building from new angles. However, a builder’s rough scaffolding can easily camouflage and be mistake for the intricate architecture is surrounds. Similarly, people can erect theory around other individual’s quickly—often automatically—when they are uncertain and hoping for a surer vantage point, as in the opening vignette. One of the most formidable challenges of being human, then, is to draw structure from a particular orientation without letting theory obscure the complex, unique individual in front of you. We have preserved this life, and the soul has preserved us. Exploring deeply can mean thinking not about the way one came to be the way one is, but that one is. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

ImageThe Greeks, who were apparently strong visual learners, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designs to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor—a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two players of metaphor were added to the term: the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it. Furthermore, shifts have occurred in the kinds of disgrace that arouse concern. Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. Social setting established the categories of person likely to be encountered there. The routines of social intercourse in established settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

ImageWhen a stranger comes into our presence, then, first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate one’s category and attributes, one’s “social identity”—to use a term that is better than “social status” because person attributes such as “honesty” are involved, as well as structural ones, like “occupation.” We lean on these anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into righteously presented demands. Typically, we do not become aware that we have made these demands or aware of what they are until an active question arises as to whether or not they will be fulfilled. It is then that we are likely to realize that all along we had been making certain assumptions as to what the individual before us ought to be. Thus, the demands we make might better be called demands made “in effect,” and the character we impute to the individual might better be seen as an imputation made in potential retrospect—a characterization “in effect,” a virtual social identity. The category and attribute one could in fact be proved to possess will be called one’s actual social identity. While the stranger is present before us, evidence can arise of ones possessing an attribute that makes one different from others in the category of persons available for one to be, and of a less desirable kind—in the extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or dangerous, or weak. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

ImageOne is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and unusual person to a tainted, discounted one. Such an attribute is a stigma, especially when its discrediting effect is very extensive; sometimes it is also called a failing, a shortcoming, a limitation. It constitutes a special discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity. Note that there are others types of discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity, for example the kind that causes us to reclassify an individual from one socially anticipated category to a different but equally well-anticipated one, and the kind that causes us to alter our estimation of the individual upward. Not, too, that not all undesirable attributes are at issues, but only those which are incongruous with our stereotype of what a given type of individual should be. The term stigma is used to refer to an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but should be seen as a language of relationships, not attributes, is really needed. An attribute that stigmatizes one type of possessor can confirm the usualness of another, and therefore is neither creditable nor discreditable as a thing in itself. For example, some jobs in American cause holders without the expected college education to conceal this fact; others job, however, can lead the few of their holders who have a higher education to keep this a secret, lest they be marked as failures and outsiders. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

ImageSimilarly, a middle class boy may feel no compunction in being seen going to the library; a professional criminal, however, writes this: “I can remember before now on more than one occasion, for instance, going into a public library near where I was living, and looking over my shoulder a couple of times before I actually went in just to make sure no one who knew me was standing about and seeing me do it.” So, too, an individual who desires to fight for one’s country may conceal a physical defect, lest one’s claimed physical status be discredited; later, the same individual, embittered and trying to get out of the army,  may success in gaining admission to the army hospital, where one would be discredited if discovered in not really having an acute sickness. A stigma, then, is really a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype, although I do not propose to continue to say so, in part because there are important attributes that almost everywhere in our society are discrediting. The term stigma and its synonyms conceal a double perspective: does this stigmatized individual assume one’s differentness is known about already or is evident on the spot, or does one assume it is neither known about by those present nor immediately perceivable by them? In the first case one deals with the plight of the discredited, in the second with that of the discreditable. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

ImageThis is an important difference, even though a particular stigmatized individual is likely to have experience with both being discredited, and discreditable, the two cannot always be separated. However, remaining committed to understanding and describing one’s World as he or she experiences it—even when formulating—helps individuals be sure they are focusing on the architecture, not the scaffolding. “No confraternity or sodality has ever been made sacred expect by the faith of those who formed it, as there is no known power beyond this World or in in that can make anything sacred except the power we claim for ourselves. We are children of the Universe no matter who thinks otherwise, we live and breathe and think and dream as do all sentient beings, and no one has a right to condemn us or deny us the right to love and live,” (Page 425 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Three different types of stigma may be mentioned. First there are abomination of the body—the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering or unnatural passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism, sexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical political behavior. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

ImageFinally, there are tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion, these being stigma that can be transmitted though lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family. In all of these various instances of stigma, however, including those the Greeks had in mind, the same sociological features are found: an individual who might have been received easily in ordinary social intercourse posses a trait that can obtrude itself upon attention and turn those of us whom one meets away from one, breaking that claim that one’s other attributes have on us. One possesses a stigma, an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated. We and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I shall call the normal. Some have “rebelled in their own way against the inevitable isolation that closes around us all; they have survived because the beauty of life would not let them leave it; and a thirst for knowledge has been born in them—a thirst for new ages and new forms and new expression of art and love—even as they see everything that have cherished crumbling and fading away. This is our Universe. We too are made of stardust as are all things on this planet; we too belong,” (Page 426 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

ImageThe attitudes we normal have toward a person with a stigma, and the actions we take in regard to one, are well known, since these responses are what benevolent social action is designed to soften and ameliorate. By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce one’s life chances. We construct a stigma-theory, an ideology to explain one’s inferiority and account for the danger one represents, sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences, such as those of social class. We use specific stigma terms such as cripple, bastard, moron in daily discourse as a source of metaphor and imagery, typically without giving a thought to the original meaning. We tend to impute a wide range of imperfections on the basis of the original one, and at the same time to impute some desirable but undesired attributes, often of a supernatural cast, such as “six sense,” or “understanding”: For some, there may be a hesitancy about touching or steering the blind, while for others, the perceived failure to see may be generalized into a gestalt of disability, so that the individual shouts at the blind as if they were deaf or attempts to lift them as if they were crippled. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

ImageThose confronting the blind may have a whole range of belief that is anchored in the stereotype. For instance, they may think they are subject to unique judgment, assuming the blinded individual draws on special channels of information unavailable to others. Further, we may perceive one’s defensive response to one’s situation as a direct expression of one’s defect, and then see both defect and response as just retribution for something one or one’s parents or one’s tribe did, and hence a justification of the way we treat one. Now turn from the normal to the person one is normal against. It seems generally true that members of a social category may strongly support a standard of judgment that they and others agree does not directly apply to them. Thus it is that a business person may demand womanly behavior from females or ascetic behavior from monks, and not construe oneself as someone who ought to realize either of these styles of conduct. The distinction is between realizing a norm and merely supporting it. The issue of stigma does not arise here, but only where there is some expectation on all sides that those in a given category should not only support a particular nor but also realize it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

ImageAlso, it seems possible for an individual to fail to live up to what we effectively demand of one, and yet be relatively untouched by this failure; insulated by one’s alienation, protected by identity beliefs of one’s own, one feels that one is a full-fledged normal human being, and that we are the ones who are not quite human. One bears a stigma but does not seem to be impressed or repentant about doing so. Sometimes it may be difficult to know, at times, whether we have been hurt more by friends or our enemies. Human’s awesome scientific advances into the infinitude of pace as well as the infinitude of sub-atomic particles seems mostly likely to lead to the total destruction of the World unless we can make great advances in understanding and deal with interpersonal and inter-group tensions. I believe that when we accept ourselves as we are, then we change. I believe that we have learned this from others in society as well as within our own experiences—that we cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed. Another result that comes out of being myself is that relationships then become real. Real relationships have an exciting way of being vital and meaningful, and real relationships tend to change instead of reaming static. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

ImageVery rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what others are saying. Our first reaction to most of the statements which we hear from other person is an immediate evaluation, or judgment, rather than an understanding of it. I believe this is because understanding is risky. If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual, to enter thoroughly and completely and empathically into one’s frame of reference. It is also a rare thing. To understand is enriching in a double way. I learned from other’s experiences in ways that change me, that make me a different and, I think, a more responsive person. Even more important perhaps, is the fact that my understanding of these individuals permits them to change. It permits them to accept their own fears and bizarre thoughts and tragic feelings and discouragements, as well as their moment of courage and kindness and love and sensitivity. And it is their experience as well as mine that when someone fully understands those feelings, this enables them to accept those feelings in themselves. Then they find both the feelings and themselves changing. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

ImageWhether it is understanding a woman who feels that very literally she has a hook in her head by which other lead her about, or understanding a man who feels that no one is as lonely, no one is as separated from others as he, I find these understandings to be of value to me. However also, and even more importantly, to be understood a very beneficial value to these individuals. Here is another learning which has had importance for me. I have found it enriching to open channels whereby others can communicate their feelings, their private perceptual Worlds, to me. Because understanding is rewarding, I would like to reduce the barriers between others and me, so that they can, if they wish, reveal themselves more fully. On a national scale, we cannot permit another individual to think differently than we do. Yet it has come to seem to me that this separateness of individuals, the right of each individual to utilize one’s experience in one’s own way and to discover one’s own meanings in it,–this is one of the most priceless potentialities of life. Not surprisingly, one good way to start designing an essential being is to plan to allow one’s soul to flourish and let its heart shape the rest. The soul gets you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no soul. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Image Each person is an island unto oneself, in a very real sense; and one can only build bridges to other islands if one is first of all willing to be oneself and permitted to be oneself. So I find that when I can accept another person, which means specifically accepting the feelings and attitudes and beliefs that one has as a real and vital part of one, then I am assisting one to become a person: and there seems to me great value in this. The next learning I want to state may be difficult to communicate. It is this. The more I am open to the realities in me and in the other person, the less do I find myself wishing to “fix things.” As I try to listen to myself and the experiencing going on in me, and the more I try to extend that same listening attitude to another person, the more respect I feel for the complex process of life. So I become less and less inclined to hurry to fix things, to set goals, to mold people, to manipulate and push them in the way that I would like them to go. I am much more content simply to be myself and to let another person be oneself. I know this must seem strange. If we are not going to do things to people, what is life for? If we are not going to mold them to our purposes, what is life for? If we are not going to teach the thing things that we think they should learn, what is life for? If we are not going to make them think and feel as we do, what is life for? #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

ImageHow can anyone hold such an inactive point of view as the one I am expressing? I am sure that attitudes such as these must be a part of the reaction of many of you. Yet the paradoxical aspect of my experience is that the more I am simply willing to be myself, in all this complexity of life and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up. It is a very paradoxical thing—that to the degree that each one of us is willing to be oneself, then one finds not only oneself changing; but one finds that other people to whom one relates are also changing. At least this is a very vivid part of my experience, and one of the deepest things I think I have learned in my personal and professional life. All my professional life I have been going in directions that others thought were foolish, and about which I have had many doubts myself. However, I have never regretted moving in directions which felt right, even though I have often felt lonely or foolish at the time. I have found that when I trusted some inner non-intellectual sensing, I have discovered wisdom in the move. In fact, I have found that when I have followed one of these unconventional paths because it felt right or true, then in five or ten years many of my colleagues have joined me, and I no longer need to feel alone in it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

ImageAs I gradually come to trust my total reactions more deeply, I find that I can use them to guide my thinking. I have come to have more respect for those vague thoughts which occur in me from time to time, which feel as thought they were significant. I am inclined to think that these unclear thoughts or hunches will lead me to important areas. I think of it as trusting the totality of my experience, which I have learned to suspect is wiser than my intellect. It is fallible I am sure, but I believe it to be less fallible than my conscious mind alone. My attitude is very well expressed in saying carrying on my own humble creative effort, I depend greatly upon that which I do not yet know, and upon that which I have not yet done. Very closely related to this learning is a corollary that, evaluation by others is not a guide for me. The judgments of others, while they are to be listened to, and taken into account for what they are, can never be a guide for me. This has been a hard thing to learn. I remember how shaken I was, in the early days, when a scholarly thoughtful being who seemed to me a much more competent and knowledgeable psychologist than I, told m what a mistake I was making by getting interested in psychotherapy. It could never lead anywhere, and as a psychologist I would not even have the opportunity to practise it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

ImageIn later years it has sometimes jolted me a bit to learn that I am, in the eyes of some others, a fraud, a person practicing medicine without a license, the author of a very superficial and damaging sort of therapy, a power seeker, a mystic, and so forth. And I have equally been disturbed by equally extreme praise. However, I have not been too much concerned because I have come to feel that only one person (at least in my lifetime, and perhaps ever) can know whether what I am doing is honest, thorough, open, and sound, or false and defensive and unsound, and I am that person. I am happy to get all sorts of evidence regarding what I am doing and criticism (both friendly and hostile) and praise (both sincere and fawning) are a part of such evidence. However, to weigh this evidence and to determine its meaning and usefulness is a task I cannot relinquish to anyone else. Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person’s ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to the truth as it is in the process of becoming me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets—neither Dr. Freud nor research—neither the revelations of God nor man or woman—can take precedence over my own direct experience. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

ImageMy experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction. I enjoy the discovering order in my experience. It seems inevitable that I seek for the meaning or the orderliness or lawfulness in any large body of experience. In is this kind of curiosity, which I find it very satisfying to purse, which as led me to each of the major formulations I have made. It is justified because it is satisfying to perceive the World as having order, and because rewarding results often ensure when one understands the orderly relationships which appear in nature. Suppose our hypotheses were disproved! Suppose our opinions were not justified! Every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true. And being closer to the truth can never be harmful or dangerous or unsatisfying thing. So while I still hate to readjust my thinking, still hate to give up old ways of perceiving an conceptualizing, yet at some deeper level I have, to a considerable degree, come to realize that these painful reorganizations or what is known as learning, and that though painful they always lead to a more satisfying because somewhat more accurate way of seeing life. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

ImageI feel I can only puzzle my way though life and I will find a much more satisfying approximation to the truth. I am sure the facts will be my friends. The very way of feeling which has seemed to me the most private, most personal, and hence the most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves. When I can sensitively understand the feelings which people are expressing, when I am able to accept them as separate persons in their own right, then I find that they tend to move in certain directions. And what are these directions in which they tend to move? The words which I believe are most truly descriptive are words such as beneficial, constructive, moving toward self-actualization, growing toward maturity, growing toward socialization. I have come to fee that the more fully the individual is understood and accepted, the more one tends to drop the false fronts with which one has been meeting life, and the more one tends to move in a direction which is forward. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

ImageI would not want to be misunderstood on this. I do not have a Pollyanna view of human nature. I am quite aware that out of defensiveness and inner fear individuals can and do behave in ways which are incredibly cruel, horribly destructive, immature, regressive, anti-social, hurtful. Yet none of the most refreshing and invigorating parts of my experience is to work with such individuals and to discover the strongly beneficial directional tendencies which exist in them, as in all of us, at the deepest levels. Life at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed. Life is the most richest and most rewarding it is a flowing process. To experience this is both fascinating and a little frightening. I find I am at my best when I can let the flow of my experience carry me, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals of which I am but dimly aware. In thus floating with the complex stream of my experiencing, and in trying to understand its ever-changing complexity, it should be evident that there are no fixed points. Life is guided by a changing understanding of an interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming. I can only try to live by my interpretation of the current meaning of my experience, and try to give others the permission and freedom to develop their own inward freedom and thus their own meaningful interpretation of their own experience. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

ImageIf there is such a thing as truth, this free individual process of search should I, believe, converge toward it. And in a limited way, this is also what I seem to have experienced. “But what endures is what has always matter: love—that we love one another as surely as we are alive. And if there is any hope for us to ever really be good—that hope will be realized through love. To love any one person or thing truly is the beginning of the wisdom to love all things. This has to be so. It has to be. I believe it and I do not really believe anything else,” (Page 440 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Where is the being who is free of the ego? To one we must bow deep reverence, in wondering admiration, in enforced humility. Here is one who has found one’s true self, one’s personal independence, one’s own being. Here at last is a free being, someone who has found one’s real worth in a World of false values. Here at last is a truly great being and truly sincere being. Whosoever enters into this realization becomes a human Sun who sheds enlightenment, radiates strength, and emanates love to all beings. One’s serenity is alive and buoyant, not lethargic and dull. “And it came to pass that the work of the Lord did prosper unto the baptizing and uniting to the church of God, many souls, yea, even tens of thousands. Thus we may see that the Lord is merciful unto all who will, in the sincerity of their hearts, call upon his holy name,” reports Helaman 3.26-27. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Stepping onto this beautiful tile, in this home, will transport you back to Victorian England—but the modern shower and light fixtures will remind you that you are actually in your #MillsStation Residence 3. 😉

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ImageLocated off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.

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I Searched a Way to Me By Drawing Pieces of Myself Out of their Eyes!

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Surely we will achieve great things together. The importance of forms is revealed in the inescapable unity of the body with the World. The body is always a part of the World. The body is always a part of the World. I sit on this chair; the chair is on a floor in this building; and the building, in turn, rests on the mountain of stone that is Manhattan Island. Whenever I walk, my body is interrelated with the World in which and on which I take my steps. This presupposes some harmony between body and World. We know from physics that the Earth rises infinitesimally to meet my step, as any two bodies attract each other. The balance is essential in walking is one as a relationship of my body to the ground on which it stands and walks. The Earth is there to meet each foot as it falls, and the rhythm of my walking depends on my faith that the Earth will be there. Our active need for form is shown in the fact that we automatically construct it in an infinite number of ways. The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in order to make sense of it. The instantaneous way this is done shows how we are driven to construct the remainder of the scene. If the scene is to have meaning, to fill in the gaps is essential. That we may do this in misleading ways—at times in neurotic or paranoid ways—does not gainsay the central point. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

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We have Rome, our whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of our library. We have in our books the ruins of an antique World and the glories of a modern one. Our passion for soul and form expressed our yearning to make the World adequate to our needs and desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance. “You have robbed these people of ambition. You have robbed them of the capacity for deep concerns. You have robbed them of the opportunity to grow in spirit. You have cast doubt on the inherent value. All you have to lose in death, no matter how long you have lived, is the present moment in which you die. You can live three thousand years or thirty thousand years, and all you have to lose is the life you are living right now. Suffering helps to generate the soul. The energy it is giving off by suffering, of course, it might organize into a soul. To put it another way, a being’s unsatisfied curiosity might generate that human being’s soul,” (Page 312 and 316 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Soul’s exist because we believe that information and knowledge are not the exclusive domain of a certain type or class of person, but rather the province of every living being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

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The souls are shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are reserved and reposed. “And the fuel might be the collective suffering endured by that human all through his or her life, and some other intangible ingredient, perhaps, such as an overview, an attitude, a perspective on life, that too might help the formation of a soul,” (Page 316 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). The soul is fundamental in Gothic art, a graphic example of which is Mont-Saint-Michel, the triangle of rock rising from the sea capped by the Gothic triangle of human-built architecture which, in turn, ends in a pinnacle pointing toward Heaven—a magnificent art form in which we have the triangle of nature, human, God. And psychologically speaking, we have the basic human triangle—man, woman, and child. Because the wield unfathomable power, a truly great soul contains something in it to offend everyone, and one may even point you toward a new appropriate life. The knowledge of the soul extends beyond human understanding and it can bring order to chaos by extending its wisdom and culture to the masses, which will preserve every aspect of human knowledge. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

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The alienated person is one who observes one’s behavior from the point of view of the spectator. One’s central ego does not live in one’s present and previous experiences. The self appears without soul. What is occurring in the person, hidden as it may be by passivity or other neurotic symptoms, is a conflict-filled passion to make sense out of a crisis-ridden life. Alienation can be not only part of depressive and schizophrenic psychoses, but to some extent it occurs in almost all neuroses as an unspecific result of the general shock of the psychic conflict. This is the soil in which rebellious resignation grows. Here also grows compulsive non-conformism which, while it contains constructive strivings for freedom, distorts its meaning and perpetuates self-alienation as much as does compulsive conformism. Hipsters are often alienate from themselves as in the man in the gray flannel suit. The alienated person is not born alienated, nor does one choose alienation. Lacking genuine acceptance, love, and concern for one’s individuality in childhood, one experiences basic anxiety. Early one begins to move away from one’s self, which seems not good enough to be loved. One moves away from what one is, one can at least be safe—safe perhaps by being very good and perfect and being loved for it, or by being very strong and being admired or feared for it, or by learning not to feel, not to want, not to care. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

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Therefore, one has to free oneself from any need for others, which means first their love and affection, and, later on, in many instances, pleasures of the flesh. If there is no response, why feel, why want? So the person puts all one’s efforts into becoming what one should be. Later, one idealizes one’s self-effacement as goodness, one’s aggression as strength, one’s withdrawal as freedom, self-expression, and self-realization, one moves toward safety, self-elimination, and self-idealization. The alienated individual often is a good observer of oneself. Together with the therapist, one looks at oneself as though one were a third person in the empty chair. One seems not to care about anything, not to desire anything, particularly anything to which one could get attached. Experiences are dissociated from feelings, feelings do not reach awareness. Events happen to one, and no feeling is experienced, no joy, no longing, no love, no anger, no despair, no continuity of time and life, no self. One has no active relation to life. And these people often go to an ophthalmologist with complaints about visual disturbances for which no organic basis is found. In seeing we relate actively to the World around us, while hearing involves awareness of something which comes toward us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

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Physical symptoms, such as tiredness, dizziness, a general or localized numbness, various degrees of anesthesia in pleasures of the flesh, headaches, or gastric disturbances, often are the only clinical evidence of a deeper emotional problem. The absence of manifest anxiety, rage, or conflict in the clinical picture—playing dead—has led some psychoanalysts to diagnose this condition as an emotional or even constitutional defect, or as an irreversible end-stage of neurotic process. Clinical experiences, however, shows that below the apparently insensitive, frozen surface of these patients is a highly sensitive self, weakened and paralyzed by violent conflict. Underground there exist strong longings and feelings. Alienated people are deeply blocked. There is dissociation from the active, spontaneous core of oneself and one’s feelings and, therefore, from one’s incentives and one’s capacity for making decisions. Recently, a person said: “I am color-blind until somebody reveals the colors to me. Only when plugged into the wall-socket of ‘the other’ do I get the light, the energy, the reality of myself.” He could have added, “and the feeling of being alive.” This explains the existence of is called the “echo phenomenon” in the alienated person. One’s own inner voice often is so weak and unconvincing that one hardly hears it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

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With echo phenomenon, a person’s statement, a creative idea, a promising plan on which one has been working for weeks remains unreal and meaningless to one until, with much hesitation, one expresses it to another person. When, however, “the other,” whom one experiences as an insider of life, repeats one’s statement, one’s idea, or one’s plan, this echo suddenly sounds real and convincing to one, while one’s own—usually much better—formulation of the same thought remains unreal. In one’s inner experiences one does not count. One does not exist as an individual on one’s own. One may say, “Nothing moves me,” or “I cannot make any move.” However, should one follow one’s limited movements in life, one will notice that one moves for short spurts, like an electric car with a dead battery, which must be pushed by another car to a charging station. It stops, however, not simply due to a lack of power, but due to the action of an automatic built-in brake. The persons seems to say in a non-verbal way: “I will not move on.” People suffering from anxiety experience deprivation and resignation, such as, “I do not want anything. If I do not want, I cannot be hurt,” or in an active way, by violent feelings of bitterness, frustration, resentment, and rage against life and the World which has withheld love or recognition. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

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In both forms, deprivation and resignation, we find the same powerful, unconscious premise: “I shall not participate in the game of life, get emotionally involved, or make a move on my own, until there is a guarantee for the fulfillment of my needs.” These by now have become “just” claims for total love or unique success which form part of the unconscious idealized image that has to be actualized. The apparently static condition of self-alienation reveals itself as a dynamic and comprehensive attempt to avoid the painful experience of severe inner conflict, particularly between strong dependency needs and co-existing violent and hostile aggression. By remaining alienated from oneself and detached from others, the person avoids the anxiety connected with emotional involvement in conflict. However, one pays for this with a steadily increasing restriction of one’s life, one’s feelings, and one’s wants; one pays with a loss of oneself. Self-alienation is an unavoidable result of the neurotic process. Simultaneously, however, it is an active move away from—or, rather, against—the real self: Alienation prevents disturbing self-awareness. The alienated person often complains of being in a fog, but unconsciously one wants to stay in it. One welcomes self-anesthesia. Alienation, in the sense of conforming like an automaton, protects one from the burden and responsibility of commitment to oneself and one’s identity. It permits self-elimination. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

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Alienation, it its most active form, is the rejection of being oneself and the attempt to become the other, the ideal self. It means escape from the hated self through self-idealization. These three ways, in which the despair at not being willing to be oneself finds expression, is called loss of the self, sickness unto death. The first way is to avoid consciousness of the self: By diversions or in other ways, for instance, by work and busy occupations as a means of distractions, one seeks to preserve an obscurity about one’s condition, yet again in such a way that it does not become quite clear to one that one does it for this reason (that one does what one does in order to being about obscurity). When a person packs their schedule full of appointments or work, they are often moving in a great empty circle. However, when they glance inwardly, one will see from the periphery and aww the void enclosed there. One will see the emptiness, but the way that centrifugal force prevents a whirling object from falling inward, one is removed for a long time from the void they circle. This void is the existential vacuum, and it is a main aspect of the neuroses of our time. Our culture is continuously providing new means for self-anesthesia through shallow living, social drinking, late and late-late shows on television, never-ending double features at the movies, Miltown taken like candy. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

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The second way to avoid willing to be oneself is willing to be simply the conventional self: By becoming wise about how things go in this World, such a being forgets oneself…finds it too venturesome to think, to be oneself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd. This form of despair is hardly ever noticed in the World. Such a being, precisely by losing oneself in this way, has gained perfectibility in adjusting. Today, what has become a mass phenomenon: self-elimination through conforming adjustment. The third, most radical way to avoid willing to be oneself is willing to be someone else. Generally, this is how schizophrenic people, in a decisive though modified way, also most neurotic people want to free themselves from the burden they experience their actual self to be, escaping into fantasy, and trying to become that ideal other self they feel they should be. This is what many people believe Kim Kardashian is experiencing by trying to become Paris Hilton. This process leads, in two ways, to steadily increasing atrophy and paralysis of the self and interference with its further growth. The first factor is the result of a kind of inner deprivation. All available energy is used in the compulsive attempt to actualize the other, the ideal, self. Too little energy is left for the developing of the real potentials of the self. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

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The second, much more active factor is the destructive force of contempt and hate which is generated incessantly by the omnipotent, idealized self-image and directed against the despicable, actual self that failed. Early self-rejection and active self-alienation are the roots of masochistic and compulsive homosexual trends. To rid of his hated self is the pervasive motivation of the masochist. In Anne Rice’s Tales of the Body Thief Prince Lestat switched bodies with Reglan James, someone he also found attractive. By throwing his soul, as it were, into the other body, talking with his voice and laughing with his heart; Lestat was able to experience himself doing all the things the other did. It was so vivid and real because he was no longer himself. In this way he enjoyed many intervals of fantastic happiness, but end the end was sad and near death because as they say, “The sky is always bluest over your neighbour’s house.” Basically, the lives of others may look better and easier, but what have no idea how hard they work nor what they are actually going through to get there and maintain. Nonetheless, by living someone else’s life, this self-elimination and identification with somebody else gives Lestat a fantastic happiness because he is temporarily freed from his hated self; but it also drives him into the self-destructive morbid-dependency relationship with the nun. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

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Dr. Freud was right when he observed the close relationship between narcissism and homosexuality. They dynamics of compulsive homosexuality, however, become clear only when we recognize that narcissism is an expression not of self-love, but of alienation from the self. A person clings to illusions about oneself because and as far as one has lost oneself. The narcissist lost vital aspects of oneself due to early rejection which one internalized. One defends oneself against this self-rejection by compulsive self-idealization. If the early rejection is experienced as directed particularly against aspects of the self connected with the pleasures of the flesh, no clear sense of gender identity can develop. It is a desperate search for a self and identity which drives one into the homosexual relationship. “I do not want to be me. I want to have his balls. I want to be him,” a patient recently said. Symbiosis seems to provide the solution in two ways: by merging with the partner one hopes to become the other, the ideal, self. This partner often is the externalized symbol of the lost, the repressed part of one’s own self, for example, of one’s masculinity. The second function of the symbiotic relationship is what I have called the magic mirror symbiosis. The alienated person exists, becomes at least partially alive, only in the mirror image reflected by others. Without it one feels emotionally dead. A patent says it well: “I searched a way to me by drawing pieces of myself out of their eyes.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

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In the symbiotic relationship each partner functions as a mirror of the other’s self-image. One’s love has to neutralize the acid of destructive self-hate in the other. When the mirror functions stops, the relationship immediately breaks. Phenomena such as so-called penis envy (a woman’s wish to be a man), or vagina envy (a man’s wish to be a woman), have to be seen as symbols of a partial or total rejection of personal and sexual identity. “If I had the chance of being myself, I would not be myself,” a woman said. “I would be a boy.” As a boy you are in control. You can do what you want; it is very depressing not to be a man.” Such statements have to be analyzed as an expression of the total attitude the patient has toward oneself and one’s life, as a characteristic of one’s very specific being in the World. The wish not to be oneself often focuses on the body, fostering a negative body-image which may crystallize around tallness or shortness, above average weight, below average weight, face, skin, gender—and color. If self-rejection selects the focus on color or nationality, distorting attitudes not only of the parents but of the community have been in operation. We may well ask whether segregation does not foster as much self-alienation in the segregating person who glorifies body aspects, as in the victim. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

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Only when the unconscious attempts fail—be they self-anesthesia, self-elimination through conforming adjustment, or escape from the self through identification with the other, the ideal self-does the patient come to us. Something has happened to one which shows that one’s safety system is not so safe, one’s solution not so perfect as one expected. One hopes that the therapist will help one to correct one’s mistake, to improve one’s solution. In therapy, one is in search of one’s self, and the therapist wants to help the patient move in a centripetal direction, to reconnect one with the vital roots and creative potential of the individual, and the individual longs for a genuine relationship. However, one still feels driven to accelerate one’s centrifugal move away from oneself, which means to perfect one’s alienation. Or at least one expects to be freed from anxiety. However, in doing so, it blocks awareness and destroys the patient’s chance for growth and change. All too often the patient gets what one wants: the therapist complies with one’s expectations for a painless (because changeless) cure. The task of the psychoanalyst is not to remove anxiety and thereby to perpetuate alienation. One has to help the patient find one’s way back to oneself. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

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One has to help one face the anxiety generated on this road by self-confrontation and the surrender of cherished illusions. This can rarely be done by analysis in the orthodox manner, with the therapist sitting behind the couch taking notes and giving interpretations. The alienated, “shut-up” patient has all one’s life used words not to express but to hide one’s feelings. Psychoanalysis has to outgrown alienated concepts of personality as well as alienating techniques in therapy. The image of a beings as an id harboring only libidinous, aggressive and destructive drives, but no constructive forces; as a super-ego, functioning as an inner police force, not as a healthy human conscience; and as a more or less passive ego, which reminds one of a rather sick self—such an image of being in itself appears fragmented and alienated. The concept of a doctor-patient relationship which is seen as determined by the transference of a neurotic past but disregards the constructive impact of the creative meeting in the present is in itself alienating. Instead of lessening the patient’s alienation, it is likely to prolong it. Psychoanalysis, born as a child of the age of enlightenment, overestimated the therapeutic effect of knowledge in itself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

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Making the unconscious conscious is not, in itself, therapeutically effective. To know, for example, that I harbor strong, compulsive dependency needs, may increase rather than lessen my self-alienation. Self-knowledge becomes therapeutically active only when it is owned, and generates the emotional shock which is inherent in the process of self-confrontation. Only such experience has the power to lead to change, choice, and commitment. Gnothi seauton (know yourself) has been seen as the goal of all human endeavor, but it cannot be the goal if it is not at the same time the beginning. The ethical individual knows oneself, but this knowledge is not a mere contemplation, it is a reflection upon oneself which itself is an action and therefore I have deliberately preferred to use the expression “choose oneself” instead of “know oneself” when the individual knows oneself and has chosen oneself one is about to realize oneself. Frequently at the end of an orthodox analysis, the patient has gained much knowledge. One could easily present one’s own case. One looks with some interest at the stranger who happens to be oneself. One may even reflect the image which the therapist expects. However, one has not changed. To break through one’s alienation one need to begin to feel oneself and to permit oneself more and more to be. The first step involves helping one to stop hating himself or herself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

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Any true psychotherapy, and this is particularly true for the alienated person is reconciliation of being with oneself and thereby with the World, and a transformation of hostility against oneself into friendship with oneself and thereby with the World.IN the beginning of therapy, the patient who refuses participation in life will also refuse true participation in psychoanalysis, even though one may lie down on the expensive couch or sit down on the plush lazy boy with a complaint smile. One is deeply convinced that nobody cares, nobody understands one, and that communicating one’s true feelings, one’s sufferings, and one rage to anybody, including the analyst, is sheer waste. To defrost, to open up, to experience and to accept oneself become possible for the patient only in a warm, mutually trusting relationship in which, often for the first time in one’s life, one feels fully accepted as one is, accepted with those aspects of oneself which early in life one had felt compelled to reject or repress. Only this enables the patient gradually to drop one’s defenses. One will test the liability of this acceptance again and again before one risks emotional involvement. One will need this basic trust especially when one begins to experience the dizziness of freedom. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

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The road from self-alienation and self-rejection to self-acceptance and self-realization leads through steadily growing self-awareness, which is made possible by the new creative experience of acceptance and meeting. Thus, the main therapeutic factor becomes the doctor-patient relationship itself. In the beginning of therapy, question such as, “What do you feel now?” or “What would you really want?” may bring the patient close to panic. One becomes aware for a moment how deeply one’s capacity for spontaneous feeling or wanting is impaired. My own experience with compulsive eaters has convinced me that cognitive behavioral and physiological treatments can be essential first steps on the path to recovery. They help people understand the importance of reassessing their habits, belief systems, and approaches to food. They educate them about their physiology and the physiology of practise. But most important of all, perhaps, they prompt clients to begin a process of deep reflection about their lives—who they essentially are and where they are headed—and this, in turn, sometimes leads to a fundamental change. There are no absolute truths; all realities (or stories) are socially constructed; and fluidity among realities is desirable. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

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Human nature will not find a better helper than love. Utility is subsumed as part of the character of being beautiful. The harmony of an internal form, the inner consistency of a theory, the character of beauty that touches your sensibilities—these are significant factors the determine why one given insight comes into consciousness rathe than another. As a psychoanalyst, I can only add that my experience in helping people achieve insights from unconscious dimensions within themselves reveals the same phenomenon—insights emerge not chiefly because they are intellectually true or even because they are helpful, but because they have a certain form, the form that is beautiful because it completes what is incomplete. Do not join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Do not be afraid to go in your soul and read every truth you have witnesses. Move forward without wasting anything. It is not that object simply speak to us; they also conform to our ways of knowing. The mind thus is an active process of forming and re-forming the World. It must be the totality of ourselves that understand, not simply reason. And it is the totality of ourselves that fashions the images which the World conforms. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

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Not only does reason form and re-form the World, but the preconscious, with its impulses and needs, does so also and does so on the basis of which and intentionality. Human beings not only think but feel and will as they make form in their World. If this World is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise beings in the phase of passion for form. Persons in therapy—or anybody for that matter—is not simply engaged in knowing their World: what they are engaged in is a passionate re-forming of their World by virtue of their interrelationship with it. We should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial topics, thoughts, ideas, authors, and books. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty. You must live feverishly in seeking an education. Colleges are not going to do you any good unless you are raised and live in a place of seeking knowledge everyday. This passion for form is a way of trying to find and constitute meaning in life. And this is what genuine creativity is. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

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Imagination, broadly defined, seems to me to be a principle in human life underlying even reason, for the rational functions, according to our definitions, can lead to understanding—can participate in the constituting of reality—only as they are creative. Creativity is thus involved in our every experience as we try to make meaning in our self-World relationship. A soul is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears parasites, the elements and clumsy hands…so God protects the souls not only against humankind but also against nature and devotes His life to this war with the forces of oblivion. “But one that believeth these things which I have spoken, one will I visit with the manifestations of my Spirit, and one shall know and bear record. For because of my Spirit one shall know that these things are true; for it persuadeth people to do good,” Ether 4.11. God connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire Universe and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the healthy of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our God. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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Every Step Forward Also Digs the Depths to Which One Can Likewise Go!

EJN0elGVUAM6FQQFor the time in their lives and regardless of class, people felt a strong sense of solidarity. In the face of n external threat, social differences were forgotten and the people were united. We are facing a new ethic, an ethic which will be relevant to the new age into which we are moving. Put simply, it is an ethic of intention. It is based on the assumption that each being is responsible for the effects of one’s own actions. The ultimate evil in our day is inherent in situations in which the person is prevented from taking responsibility. The future lies with the man or woman who can live as an individual, conscious within the solidarity of the human race. One then uses the tension between individuality and solidarity as the source of one’s ethical creativity. So far we have been taught to do one or the other. We have learned to accept responsibility for our convictions; but that is not enough. We have learned to accept responsibility for our convictions; but that is not enough. We have learned to accept responsibility for the sincerity of our actions; but that, too is not enough. These are both individualistic—both part of the ethic which had its roots in the Renaissance. It is worth reminding ourselves that one can be entirely sincere and firm in one’s convictions—and entirely wrong. We must accept responsibility for whether we are right or wrong. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

ImageBeing human means having a soul. In fact, “everything that is self-conscious and capable of thought and love has a soul. The soul emanated from self-consciousness. The soul is the expression of the self-consciousness. When you began to think and feel, a soul was formed within you as the result of your thinking and feeling,” (Page 296 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). It is hoped that one can learn to accept responsibility for their actions without the guilt on one’s hands of the killing of the mathematician or the bombing of a financial district or the killing of thousands of innocent people in Mexico. However, to do this, we must first overcome alienated concepts of personality and its alienating techniques. What is called for is not just help in achieving self-awareness, not mere explanations, but emotional experience which will help the individual to begin to feel oneself and to permit oneself more and more to be. In other words, one needs a warm, mutually trusting relationship in which for the first time one is accepted as one is, accepted with those characteristics which earlier in one’s life one had felt compelled to reject or repress. Ordinary neurotics who in trying to escape from themselves do damage chiefly to themselves. However, what about those who express their alienation by destroying others? #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

ImageTheir self-esteem rests on a status and respect that comes with their positions, and it depends on their jobs, on being head of a family, or similar external factors. Nearly all of them lose their desirable characteristics of those with family values, such as their sense of propriety and self-respect. They become shiftless, and develop an exaggerated extent of undesirable characteristics: pettiness, quarrelsomeness, self-pity as they thrive on suffering, anger, resentment, sorrow, grief. It gives them delight, intoxicating delight. “They believe the gods want the blood of children and the agony of those children when they die, and the agony of their parents when they see them sacrificed. And people have been bred to feed off suffering! To feed off the grief and the pain of the victims of war and blood-soaked altars. But there is no value in suffering,” (Page 300 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Many people who thrive off the suffering of others will eventually become depressed in an agitated way and will complain eternally. We can, in a splurge of individualism, live by our own integrity; or we can, in a splurge of solidarity, identify ourselves with a group r party that takes over our decisions for us and decides by its own rules. If it neglects the other, either way leads us into error. Held in balance, however, they constitute the two sources of ethical choice. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

ImageFrom the first ethical choice should be preserved the element of the consciousness of the individual, necessary to all ethics; and from the second, the element of interpersonal responsibility, also a necessary source of all ethics. The legend of Jesus Christ and him dying on the cross is to remind us that suffering is not good and it even hurts the divine, but it is also a story that gives us hope to know that someone died for our sins and is a reminder that salvation is possible. Also, “the concept of eternal damnation that lies behind this God Incarnate-crucifixion religion—the idea that the Maker (God) of the Universe, the Maker of all Worlds, has devised a place of eternal unspeakable conscious agony for all human beings who are not redeemed through acceptance of the horrific  execution of this God Himself as His own Son in the flesh! How this God has consecrated suffering; how He has elevated unspeakable suffering as something to which He personally attaches value. He requires this Hell of eternal suffering as some sort of payment from those struggling finite humans who have disobeyed Him or failed to consecrate the suffering of God Incarnate on His fabled cross as an act of love!” (Page 305 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

ImageHuman’s unlimited potential is a term one hears often, and we are adjured to fulfill it as much as possible. “For thousands of years, the people have believed this. It is the only way they can go forward in a World where there is so much suffering. They have always believed that a brave man (or woman) will suffer torment, but not give in. They want you to fight. They have bred you to fight. And when you see heroism, great heroism as in a battle, this too gives off energy, and you are energized to fight beyond your normal endurance.” (Pages 300 and 299 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). However, what tends to be missing is the recognition that this potential never functions except as it is experienced within its own limits. The error is in treating potential as if it has no limits at all, as though life’s course were perpetually onward and upward. The illusion that we become good by progressing a little more each day is a doctrine bootlegged from technology and made into a strict and rigid doctrine in ethics where is does not fit. This is the course in technology; but in ethics, in aesthetics, in other matters of the spirit, the term progress in that sense has no place. Modern beings are not ethically superior to Sokrates and the Greeks, and although we build buildings differently, we do not make them more beautiful than the Parthenon. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

ImageThe rehabilitation of disturbed persons is frequently an individual mater. However, as we are beginning to learn, the community itself and its culture may affect the nature of mental disorders and their treatment. This is suggested in our study of mental health among the Hutterites by Joseph Eaton and Robert Weil. An isolated and cohesive religious sect in the American Mid-West, the Hutterites “live a simple, rural life, have a harmonious social order and provide every member with a high level of economic security from the womb to the tomb. They are a homogeneous group, free from many of the tensions of the American melting-pot culture. And they have long been considered almost immune to mental disorders.” The Hutterite culture does not prevent mental disorders, it has almost no violence, divorce, alcoholism, or other forms of social maladjustment. More over it provides a highly therapeutic atmosphere for treatment—the whole community showing sympathy and support for the disturbed individual and all patients being looked after by their immediate families. No stigma attaches to them and they are encouraged to participate in the normal life of family and community. Modern society offers no such solidarity and consequently no such therapy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15ImageThis brings us back to our central problem: how can complex, modern societies achieve such solidarity? This question has preoccupied a host of thinkers and planners. In all communities where solidarity is achieved beings may escape from alienation, only to lose themselves in conformity to the group. Is there any way out of dilemma? While it is important to recognize that belongingness and togetherness represent a new form of tyranny, it will not do to urge upon an alienated population a meaningless freedom. The task before us is to build group cultures that will satisfy being’s yearning to reach one’s fellows without destroying one in the process. Who is to say that it cannot be done? We need a psychological foundation that will do justice to both our diversity and our particularity, our freedom and our limits. Such a foundation would view human beings in its fullness while carefully acknowledging its tragedy and incompleteness. It would honor our biological and mechanical propensities, but not at the cost of compromising our capacity to create and to transcend ordinary consciousness. Many people look a human life as though it were a Roman candle onto which you can hang to be carried higher and higher into the stratosphere, up, up, forever. However, soon the Roman candle bursts, and then where are you? #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

ImageIt is completely forgotten that joy increases to the extent that the capacity for woe does also. Humans were made for joy and woe; and when this we rightly know, through the World we safely go. Joe and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine. The awareness that human existence is both joy and woe is prerequisite to accepting responsibility for the effect of one’s intensions. My intentions will sometimes be evil—the dragon or the Sphinx in me will often be clamoring and will sometimes be expressed—but I ought to do my best to accept it as part of myself rather than to project in on you. Growth cannot be a basis for ethics, for growth is evil as well as good. Each day we grow toward infirmity and death. Many a neurotic sees this better than the rest of us: one fears growing into greater maturity because one recognizes, in a neurotic way of course, that each step upward brings one nearer to death. Cancer is a growth. It is a disproportionate growth where some cells run wild growing. The Sun is generally good for the body, but when one has tuberculosis, it is disproportionately the t.b. bacilli and therefore the affected parts have to be shielded. Whenever we find we have to balance one element against another, we find that we need other, more profound criteria than one-dimensional ethic of growth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

ImageThe question will arise: What is the relation of the ethic suggested here to our present ethical system in Christianity? Christianity has to be taken realistically, in terms of what it has become rather than what was ideally meant by Jesus. The Christian ethic evolved from the “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” system of justice present at the beginning of the Old Testament—for instance, the concept of justice attained by the balance of evils. The Christian and Hebrew ethic then shifted its focus to the inner attitudes: “As a human thinketh in one’s heart, so is one.” The ethic of love ultimately become the criterion, even to the extent of the ideal commandment: “Love your enemies.” However, in the course of this development it is forgotten that love for one’s enemies is a matter of grace. Grace is the help or strength given through the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. Through the grace of God, everyone will be resurrected—our spirits will be reunited with our bodies, never again to be separated. Through His grace, the Lord also enables those who live His gospel to repent and be forgiven. Grace is a gift from Heavenly Father given through His Son, Jesus Christ. The word grace, as used in the scriptures, refers primarily to enabling power and spiritual healing offered through the mercy and love of Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

ImageLoving your enemies is a possible impossibility, never to be realized in a real sense except by an act of grace. It would be required grace for me to love a cruel individual. When the element of grace is omitted the commandment of loving one’s enemies becomes moralistic: it is advocated as a state an individual can achieve by working on one’s own character, a result of a moral effort. Then we have something very different: an oversimplified, hypocritical form of ethical pretense. This leads to those moral calisthenics that are based on blocking-off of one’s awareness of reality and that prevent the actually valuable actions one could make for the social betterment. The innocent person in religion, the one who lacks the wisdom of serpents, can do considerable harm without knowing it. We also tend consistently to forget the presence of the diamonic all the way through the Old Testament. Speaking of Jeremiah, when we think of the statement: to pluck up and break down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant. Such words sound strangely destructive to modern ears. However, the words spoken to Jeremiah are an enemy to all gradualism, all theories of history based upon the escalation of goodness. Can it be true that God is not a Niagara of Pablum, spilling His childish comfort upon the morally and humanly neutral, whose faces are raised blankly to partake of the infantile nourishment? “Therefore I will contend with you” [says God to Jeremiah]. It is at once the highest compliment of God and a guaranty of the dramatic and abrasive quality of life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

ImageAnother thing that occurred in the cultural evolution is that the ethic of Christianity in our time became allied, especially in the last five centuries, with the individualism which emerged in the Renaissance. This increasingly became the ethics of the isolated individual, standing bravely in one’s lonely situation of self-enclosed integrity. The emphasis was on being true to one’s own convictions. This was true especially in American sectarian Protestantism, strongly assisted by the individualism cultivated by our life on the frontier. Hence the great emphasis in America on sincerity as one lived by one’s own convictions. We idealized beings such as Thoreau, who supposedly did that. Hence also the emphasis on one’s own character development, which in America seems always to have a mortal connotation. This is the character that makes one intolerable to other being. Ethics and religion became largely a matter of Saturday or Sunday, the weekdays being relegated to making money—which one always did by ways that kept one’s own character impeccable. We had then the curious situation of the being of impeccable character directing a factory that unconscionably exploited its thousands of employees. It is interesting that fundamentalism, that form of Protestantism which puts most emphasis on the individualistic habit of character, tends to be also the most nationalistic and defense-minded of the sects, and expresses supremacy in their beliefs. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

ImageA central criticism of this ethical development is that it omitted any real inclusion of the solidarity of the human kind. The crowd, as it was called, was important in one’s moral development only as something one stood against, as something one trained one’s self not to be influenced by. We bought our own ethical achievement as solitary creates, interested in helping others only by giving from our own abundance—tithing. And since this character development fitted the capitalistic system and the habits that went into making money, one rose socially, never forgetting one’s duty to share with the less affluent. However, this rarely fooled the less fortunate, and it never got us out of our individualistic shell. What is lacking is an authentic empathy with others, an identification with the woes and the joys of those bereft of power—the groups of people who have yet to experience self-actualization, and the poor. Naturally the Marxist concern with solidarity geared to the proletariat in contrast to the self-involved middle and upper cases, achieved a vast following. It is no wonder that the Marxist emphasis on internationalism, brotherhood, and comradeship caught the imagination and emotions of a World which thirsted for just that. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

ImageWe need not—indeed, we must not—surrender our concerns with integrity and our valuing of the individual. I am proposing that our individualistic gains since the Renaissance be set in balance with our new solidarity, our willingly assumed responsibility for our fellow men and women. In these days of mass communication, we no longer be oblivious to their needs; and to ignore them is to express our hatred. Understanding, in contrast to ideal love, is human possibility—understanding for our enemies as well as our friends. There is in understand the beginning of compassion, of pity, and of charity. Granted that human potentialities are not fulfilled by a movement upward but by an increase in escape downward as well. Every step forward also digs the depths to which one can likewise go. No longer shall we feel that virtues are to be gained merely by leaving behind vices; the distance up the ladder ethically is not to be defined in terms of what we have left behind. Otherwise goodness is no longer good but self-righteous pride in one’s own character. Evil also, if it is not balanced by capacities for good, becomes more sensitive to both good and evil each day; and this dialectic is essential for our creativity. To admit frankly, our capacity for evil hinges on our breaking through pseudoinnocence. S long as we preserve our one-dimensional thinking, we can cover up our deeds by pleasing innocent. This anti-diluvian escape from conscience is no longer possible. We are responsible for the effect of our actions, and we are also responsible for becoming as aware as we can of these effects. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

ImageIt is especially hard for the person in psychotherapy to accept his or her increased potentiality for evil which goes along with the capacity for good. Patients have been so used to assuming their own powerlessness—whether truly powerless or not. Any direct awareness of power throws their orientation to life off balance, and if they were to admit their own evil, they do not know what they would do. To other people the fact that they can hurt other people seems an unthinkable thing because they are always used to being hurt by other people. Frenzy and hysteria are exactly ways of not being conscious of what one is doing. It is a considerable boon for a person to realize that one has one’s negative side like everyone else, that the diamonic works in potentiality for good and evil, and that one can neither disown it nor live without it. When one also comes to the sense that much of one’s achievement is bound up with the very conflicts this diamonic impulse engenders, it is similarly beneficial. This is the seat of the experience that life is a mixture of good and evil; that there is no such thing as pure good; and that if the evil were not there as a potentiality, the good would not be either. Life consists of achieving good not apart from evil but in spite of it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

ImageThe last lap necessarily brings one into the Silence of God which transcends intellect, but it is a silence that is rich with freedom and serenity. Here alone one may hear the wordless voice of God and, once heard, one can well afford to disregard al other voices. Although movement towards enlightenment goes forward by stages, the actual moment of enlightenment comes abruptly with a sudden transcendence of the darkness in which some ordinarily live. If one perseveres, the time will come when one’s mind will naturally orient itself toward the spiritual pole of being. And this will happen by itself, without any urging on one’s part. No outer activity will be able to stop the process, for to make it possible one’s mind will apparently double its activity. In the foreground, it will attend to the outer World, but in the background it will attend to God. Believers and doers are what we need—faithful people who are humble in the presence of the Lord…to experience the love of God is one of the purest of all experiences. This awareness of the soul’s unique, even sacred nature, is what should be instilled in all our people. “Fear not, for behold, it is God that has shown unto you this marvelous thing, in the which is shown unto you cannot lay your hands on us to slay us,” reports Helaman 5.26. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15Image

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Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch | Residence 4

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