Randolph Harris II International Institute

Ordinary life and formal religion are an understanding of religion as guidance for the soul. In many respects, we cannot fully see our parents as people until after they pass into Heaven. Then, their physical presence no longer distracts us, and the consequences of making judgments seems much less dire. Passing away finally extricates us from these relationships, unmasking our parents’ separateness and humanness. Not separating individual and social life from spiritual ideas, we might find more intimate connections between what goes on in church and what happens in the deepest places of the heart. Then we would realize that, more than psychological and sociological relevance, we need rituals carried out with understanding and care, sacred stories told with reverence and discusses with depth, and spiritual guidance that is tutored profoundly in traditional and imagery. The word regret derives from the Old English gretan, to speak to, or call out. We return through memory to events that had been previously unclear and re-greet them with the knowledge we have gained since these events transpired. After a loved one passes away, many tend to carry a feeling of guilt that usually will remain and should teach us to become kinder toward the living. We learn the works of God and accept the grace he has provided for us. We form the commitments and covenants of eternal families that become our passport to exaltation.  #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

We are always able to see father looking back than we can in the moment. People report feeling loved ones near them at moments, even after they had passed away, and then they think about how they resemble that individual, and we will notice how similar our behaviors are to theirs. Sometimes we might even slip into that person’s way of thinking. After his father passes away one man says: when working, I frequently get up from my desk to sit on a wicker chair on the back patio, letting my thoughts wander at random, with no connection to the work at hand. At those times, I always fix my gaze on the old cypress tree, which has branches spreading out in all directions. One day, I recalled that Father also looked out at the branches of a tree as he sat in his wicker chair on the veranda in our country home. I felt then as if I were staring into a deep pool in front of me. I was overawed by the realization that Father had lost himself in thought in the same way. With feelings like these, the image of Father as a distinct and individual human being formed in my mind. I began to see him and talk with him frequently. Flowers understand most of the selflessness of spring rains. Moon understands most the generosity of the Sun. I understand most the deep love of Father, kindness is love, sternness is love, full of hope and care. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

Impelled by the fervor of their regret, many people find that they need to express all that remained unspoken at the time their parents passed away. Many people claim to have hold conversations with deceased parents, either in a dream or at their grave. Many can actually feel the presence of their parents within them. Emotions activated by a parent’s death often take on a life of their own, evolving as we evolve. Some people get to know their Father after his death. Their own struggles with pain, defeat, help them to know their father and to love him. “I learned that the most important thing in life is death. He was gone. I could never talk to him again Before that time, I did not understand how serious life was,” one man said. He frequently thinks back to all the time he wasted and chances he threw away to do things he thought he could do later. Since his father did, the man finds that he does not have patience for chatter. He gets up and leaves when his friends start talking about nothing. He cannot get it out of his mind that one day it is all over. He thinks about how his father just disappeared and he makes sure that he says what he wants to do and does it. After losing a parent, goals and time management become extremely important for some. We want to reach our eternal destination. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

The time remaining to us after our parents die becomes more lonely and more lucid. When a parent goes, half of our innocence goes, too. It gets ripped away. Something, someday will replace that innocence, maybe something more useful, but we cannot know what, or how soon, and while we wait, it hurts. The waiting is often rewarded expansively. Virtually all adult children experience an upsurge of growth, a freeing of their own potential as part of their bereavement. Some men become efficacious after their father’s death. However, we cannot rush these discoveries. They are the consequence of living, not thinking. We can hasten to ask questions of surviving relatives, piecing together blurry aspects of the past, but true forgiveness and growth arise with the passage of time and the infusion of new experiences. Even the most painful losses can free and strengthen us. We have to give up nostalgia and guilt to see this. Acceptance keeps you waiting, and then comes all at once. It is exuberant and generous, not dull and sluggish like loss. Bereavement and guilt displays the most persistence. Often the only liberation is to admit out loud the wrong we think we committed, testing them against another person’s experience. Guilt that demands perfection is relentless, while guilt that allows room for weakness subsides over time. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

Speculation is a good word, a soul word, coming from speculum, mirror, an image of reflection and contemplation. Only when we stop holding ourselves to impossible standards can we start to relinquish the burden of our inevitable omissions and errors. In the long run, our flawed performance does not matter as much as the sincerity of the efforts we exerted. Regret provokes our attainment of hindsight and incites our search for more. The stronger our regret after our parents’ deaths, the more we can be assured that our wisdom has grown. Eventually, our self-knowledge and our understanding of our parents may expand to the point that it becomes possible to forgive ourselves and to grant our parents an unconditional right to their shortcomings. We cannot reflect on deeper issues involved in their lives, even if we spend hundreds of hours gathering data and working on research. The intellect often demands proof that is it on solid ground. The thought of the soul finds its grounding in a different way. It likes persuasion, subtle analysis, an inner logic, and elegance. It enjoys the kind of discussion that is never complete, that ends with a desire for further talk or reading. It is content with uncertainty and wonder. Especially in ethical matters, it probes and questions and continues to reflect even after a decision has been made. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

Exaltation is the goal of this mortal journey, and no one get there without the means of God. Almost everyone has secrets, parts of their lives they do not disclose to anyone, or fragments they only share with certain people. So, when it comes to our parents, we may never understand why they did the things they did. The thick of life sometimes needs to be distilled before it can be explored with imagination. This kind of sublimating is not the defensive flight from instinct and body into rationality. It is a subtle raising of experience into thoughts, images, memories, and theories. Eventually, over a long period of incubation, they condense into a philosophy of life, one that is unique for each person. For a philosophy of life is not an abstract collection of thoughts for their own sake, it is the ripening of conversation and reading into thoughts that are wedded to everyday decisions and analysis. Such ideas become part of our identity and allow us confidence in work and in life decisions. They provide a solid base for further wonder and exploration that reaches, through religion and spiritual practice, into the ineffable mysteries that saturate human experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

Soul knows the relativity of its claim on truth. It is always in front of a mirror, always in a speculative mode, watching itself discover its developing truth, knowing that subjectivity and imagination are always in play. Truth is not really a soul word; soul is after insight more than truth. Truth is a stopping point asking for commitment and defense. Insight is a fragment of awareness that invites further exploration. Intellect tends to enshrine its truth, while soul hopes that insights will keep coming until some degree of wisdom is achieved. After the loss of a parent people try to move on, love others, and bond with them, but at some point they get tired. Each situation is a learning experience, but after a while they see it as force and just wait for the experience to burn out so they can go their own way and be free of the obligation of trying to be human, friendly, and loving. Wisdom is the marriage of intellect’s longing for truth and soul’s acceptance of the labyrinthine nature of the human condition. We are not going to have a soulful spirituality until we begin to think in the ways of the soul, and then maybe someday we will meet someone who understands us and is actually able to truly connect. If we bring only the intellect’s modes of thought to our search for a path or to spiritual practices, then from the very beginning we will be without soul. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

The bias toward spirit is so strong in modern culture that it will take a profound revolution in the very way we think to give our spiritual lives the depth and subtlety that are the gifts of the soul. Therefore, a soul-oriented spirituality begins in reevaluation of the qualities of soul; subtlety, complexity, ripening, Worldliness, incompleteness, ambiguity, and wonder. All people are born with a predetermined desire to express life, to come to self-fulfillment through love and accomplishment, and to live creatively. This is the cosmic urge to express something that seems to be inherent and fundamental in all living beings and nature. We have an emotional craving for self-expression. We have a passion for love, to have something we may lavish our affections and, and in finding fulfillment in the object of our desire. For some, it may be a person, for other it may be a career, and/or a house and car. This impulsion is born with a life itself, and we are told from birth, and even prenatally, the infant should be surrounded by an atmosphere of love an attention. So, as we mature, we work towards those things that make us feel safe and loved. God’s plan is in place. He is at the helm, and his great and powerful ship flows towards salvation and exaltation. Remember, we cannot get there by jumping out of the boat and trying to swim there by ourselves. I am trying to win an Oscar, like Reese Witherspoon, but for me it is more symbolic. Maybe someday you will understand what that Oscar is for me. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8

March 6, 2018 10:38 pm

We all want some portion of our lives to live beyond midnight. We gain palpable security from our possessions and there are serious drawbacks to the soul in the abstraction of experience. We can stop to compose ourselves at any time. Composure is the result, not the precondition, of assembling the events of our lives into a meaningful whole. The intellectual attempt to live in a known World deprives ordinary life of its unconscious elements, those things we encounter every day but know little about. If we are fortunate, we get to take a long pause before we pass into Heaven. When frailty or something else limits our external activities, we are given the opportunity to expand our reach into ourselves. The unconscious and the soul are similar, and so when we try to live fully consciously in an intellectually predictable World, protected from all mysteries and comfortable with conformity, we lose our everyday opportunities for the soulful life. The intellect wants to know; the soul likes to be surprised. Intellect, looking outward, wants enlightenment and the pleasure of burning enthusiasm. The soul is always drawn inward, and seeks contemplation and the more shadowy, mysterious experiences of the terrestrial. Our places and people are composite in space and time, constructed from various sources and from widely separate periods of life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10

To varying degrees, we all accumulate things as appendages of ourselves. Our recollections are mosaics, composed of fragments of what we actually experience and arranged to suit our need for meaning. At each juncture, we decide what to reveal to others, what to keep for ourselves, and what to forget. When our spirituality is not sufficiently profound, it sometimes sneaks out a backdoor and takes on bizarre forms, all kinds of strange enthusiasm. Often, when spirituality loses its soul it takes on the shadow-form of fundamentalism.  The long hours of lying in bed or being confined to home invite us to use the interlude to make order out of life’s disarray. We construct a World which is constantly within reach and which endures more reliably than anything human. Things literally stand by us. Their constancy becomes all the more valuable when we move from place to place, or when the rest of our lives seems to be in flux. The intellect wants a summary meaning—all well and good for the purposeful nature of the mind. However, the soul craves depth of reflection, many layers of meaning, nuances without end, references and allusions and prefigurations. All these enrich the texture of an image or story and please the soul by giving it much food for rumination. Ruminating is one of the chief delights of the soul. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10

Many people have their closest relationships with things. Ownership is the most intimate relation that one can have to objects. The longer we own our belongings, the more we belong to them. Time after time, when we are feeling low, something inside of us lets us know, it is alright. Love is on our side.  When the World becomes a lonely place, we have a dream that will not leave a trace of the blues. We just think of our possessions and feel like we have a real thing here by our side. Something that needs us and these memories hold us tight. And these special feelings will never fade. These objects and possession put a move on our hearts. Our love is like a melody. The collector dreams our way not only into a remote or bygone World, but at the same time into a better one in which these things bring special feelings that time cannot erase, and we are liberated from the drudgery of uselessness. Collecting preserves the past while it elevates objects in value and cancels out their ordinary functions. They will love us to the end of time. Accumulating and remembering are parallel phenomena, one external and the other internal. The accumulated past makes the shrinking future more bearable. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10

The infinite inner space of a story, whether from religion or from daily life, is its soul. Over time, our need to call up memories of someone wanes, but we resist the waning of this need as if it is a disloyalty and not a slow process of yielding. Saving a keepsake becomes a refusal to yield. If we deprive sacred stories of their mystery, we are left with the brittle shell of fact, the literalism of a single meaning. However, when we allow a story its soul, we can discover our own depths through it. Fundamentalism tends to idealize and romanticize story, winnowing the darker elements of doubt, hopelessness, and emptiness. It protects us from the hard work of finding our own participation in meaning and developing our own subtle moral values. The sacred object or teaching of a story, which has the potential of deepening the mystery of our own identity, instead is used defensively in fundamentalism, to spare us the anxiety of being an individual with choice, responsibility, and a continually changing sense of self. The tragedy of fundamentalism is any context is its capacity to freeze life into a solid cube of meaning. The capacity to become unencumbered by the past lies in the nature of our leave-taking, not in cutting ourselves off from sentiment. When we attain a flexible relationship with the past, we thrive. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10

Biologically, only the future matters; the aim of all creatures is to go on living. Unique to the human condition is the privilege and burden of the past. When our biological aims recede in prominence, what is most distinctive in us can finally gain ascendance. In this age of psychology, many people convince themselves that they have certain troubles in their lives because of what happened to them in childhood. They take developmental psychology literally and blame their parents for everything they have become. However, unless your parents are still somehow manipulating your life, working with a cult, and prying into your business to try to accomplish something they have been trying to do since you were a child, it is time to let that go. If one could see through those childhood stories, listen to them as myth, grasp their poetry, and hear the eternal mysteries singing through them, the situation might change. Soul provides a strong sense of individuality—personal destiny, special influences and background, and unique stories.  When caring for one’s soul, a person must begin in the simple making sense of one’s story. Many people insist that they find little value in going back over the past, even as their future shrinks and their past becomes their most extensive possession. Sorrow, regret, and guilt accompany their passage into their memories. When they cannot sleep, such people ruminate, captured by the ceaseless reiteration of all that remains unsolved. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10

When they can work, they can put other problems to the back of their mind, but the problems tend to grow out of al proportion, and they occupy the dark hours of the night. Closing oneself off from significant parts of the past is a common self-protection. For some people, it is not good to look back, it makes them more miserable than they have to be. Trying to discern a theme that makes sense or offers solace may seem fruitless. One difficulty is that our most important stories have to be lived before they can be spoken. We repeat painful parts of our past through our actions long before we are able to call them forth as actual memories. When one reproduces an earlier event not in one’s memory, but in one’s behavior, the individual repeats it without of course knowing he or she is repeating it. The soul’s complex means of self-expression is an aspect of its depth and subtlety. When we feel something soulfully, it is sometimes difficult to express that feeling clearly. Since soul is more concerned with relatedness than intellectual understanding, the knowledge that comes from the soul’s intimacy with experience is more difficult to articulate than the kind of analysis that can be done at a distance. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10

Our satisfaction is experiencing the incomplete becoming complete and the Universal law of symmetry fulfilled. Soul is also always in process, having, as its own principle of movement; so it is difficult to pin down with definition or a fixed meaning. When spirituality loses contact with soul and these values, it can become rigid, simplistic, moralistic, and authoritarian—qualities that betray a loss of soul. Recalling earlier versions of ourselves is initially quieting. The life review process is an ongoing one. Peace may be won, but it is usually something like a truce between renewed outbreaks of conflict. Yet, if we persist in the effort to sort through and to make order of our experiences, we may eventually come to peace with conflict itself. Once we are able to discern value in the whole, we may begin to reconcile ourselves to the contradictory pieces that comprise a life. In human life, we resolve the problem of meaning by joining the disparate parts of our lives together into coherent while. When feelings bound to the past are suddenly emancipated, we need someone to take the time to hear us out. This inclination to return to the beginning to make an ending arise in every form of human expression. We read novels for the resolution of the initial themes, and we listen to music with an ear toward the completion of what was set in motion with the first few notes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10

The process of attaining completion may not be as orderly in life as it is in music and literature, but the striving for symmetry is the same. A recollection plays out the original experience and changes it, just as an octave both repeats the beginning note and alters it. An event gains meaning by its repetition, which is both the recall of an earlier moment and a variation of it. We construct endings by returning to familiar events and making more of them than we did before. In telling our most painful stories to someone else, we simultaneously repeat out suffering and allow it to evolve into something we can bear. We all desire a satisfying ending, to have our lives culminate in something that makes sense. Sense-making requires that the disparate parts of our lives fit together into one whole, comprehensive story. Such consonance is necessary for the attainment of meaning. For even the highest and strictest forms of spirituality can coexist with soulfulness. The problem is never spirituality in itself, which is absolutely necessary for human life, but the narrow fundamentalism that arises when spirituality and soul are split apart.  There are many different kinds of spirituality. The kind with which we are most familiar is the spirituality of transcendence, the lofty quest for the highest vision, Universal moral principles, and liberation from many limitations of human life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10

We know that most mental and emotional congestions, with their inner repressions and unconscious conflicts, are due to a lack of proper assimilation of emotional ideas. We widen our solitudes by esteeming our memories and making use of them, instead of hoarding them, disregarding them, or keeping them to ourselves. There cannot be proper circulation in the mental body unless the spiritual body, to which the mental is attached, circulates through the mental; we cannot even be physically whole until there is a circulation of the spirit through the mind, and the mind through the body. The divine spirit is already perfect, inwardly. Be therefore, perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect. We believe that humans are rooted in pure spirit; we are a spiritual entity right now, here in this World, and it is impossible for a person to be completely well physically unless one is happy mentally. Equally, we believe that it is difficult for one to be happy mentally unless one’s mind has the assurance that it is rooted in something stable and permanent, something transcendent and altogether whole within itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10

Humans are spirit, soul, and body. Try to live in the physical organism without the mind is impossible. Try to live on the intellectual thoughts without feeling is equally impossible. However, not to realize that even the mind, wonderful as it is, is dependent upon something greater than itself, is disastrous. For if many of our physical troubles are the result of an inward emotional conflict based on a sense of inadequacy or defeat, and an unconscious feeling of guilt and rejection, then nothing is more certain than that the mind and the feeling must have the assurance of a power greater than themselves, governing, guiding, and enveloping. In God we live, and move, and have our being. If we seek the truth, develop faith in God, and sincerely repent, we will receive a spiritual change of heart which only comes from our Savior. Our hearts will become new again. This is how we assist the healing process of the soul. Draw near unto God and he will draw near unto you; seek God diligently and you shall find God. God knows the heart of each of us. He knows the pains of our hearts. If we seek the truth, develop faith in God, and if necessary, sincerely repent, we will receive a spiritual change of heart which only comes from our Savior. Our hearts will become new again. Repentance brings about a spiritual healing of the soul. The demands of divine justice do awaken our immortal soul. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10

March 5, 2018 12:15 am

The Lord’s mill of justice grinds slowly, but exceedingly well. In the Lord’s economy, no one will escape the consequences of unresolved violations of his laws. In his time, and in his way, God’s full payment will be required for unrepented evil acts. In the broadest sense, spirituality is an aspect of any attempt to approach or attend to the invisible factors of life and to transcend the personal, concrete, finite particulars of the World. Religion stretches its gaze beyond this life to the time of creation. It also concerns itself with afterlife and with the highest values in this life. This spiritual point of view is necessary for the soul, providing the breadth of vision, the inspiration, and the sense of meaning it needs. Spirituality is not always specifically religious. Mathematics is spiritual in the board sense, abstracting from the concrete details of life. A walk through the woods on a sunny winter day can be a spiritual acidity, if only because it is a way of getting away from home and routine and being inspired by tall, antiquated trees and the processes of nature, which are far beyond human scale. Spirit lifts us out of the confines of human dimensions, and in doing so nourishes the soul. The February afternoon grew dark. The ground was covered in feet of white sheets of snow. He grew more tired. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

After a while, he whispered, “Do something for me? Leave a little early. Walk a few blocks and look at the sky. Walk the World for me.” From his hospital bed, a seventeen-year-old cancer patient yearned to look at the whole sky. He could not move, but he looked at that bright blue sky with such love. The snow had stopped and in its place was a blazing, brilliant Sunshine. Not being isolated, not being in pain, and not being dead are privileges which we relish most after we endure loneliness, agony, and a glimpse of death. Under duress, the human capacity to make meaning out of the barest circumstances assets itself. We cannot shed our awareness that this fate could just as easily be ours. Sometimes people get caught up in playing at rituals that they have no essence. They play with the rubrics in too light a manner. The deep sense of how things can be accomplished, with style, to evoke a dimension that truly nourishes the soul is when you know it is genuine. When someone who has not yet been personally initiated into the World of illness visits someone in a hospital or nursing home, the rift between health and illness is most pronounced. People who are experience impairments often do not have much to day because their lives are so empty. If as an innocent victim have been seriously wronged, do not harbour feelings of hatred, anger at what appears to be unjust. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

The soul needs an intense, full-bodies spiritual life as much as and in the same way that the body needs food. The layout of care facilities compels us to walk through a wrenching silence on our way to the person we are visiting. The lobby and hallways are full of people sitting in wheelchairs, staring into space and not speaking to one another. By the time we reach our friend or relative’s room, we may already feel strangled, wanting to flee the silence or to force the exuberance of the outside World into such a speechless place. The soul might be cared for better through our developing a deep life of ritual rather than through many years of counseling for personal behavior and relationships. If we had more ritual in our lives and less psychology adjustment, we might even have a better time of it in such soul matters as love and emotion. We confuse purely temporal, personal and immediate issues with deeper and enduring concerns of the soul. Medical civilization is planned and organized to eliminate pain, alleviate sickness, and to abolish the for an art of suffering and dying. When standing at someone’s bedside in a hospital or nursing home, we find ourselves at a loss for words and believe that we are failing. We rush to arrange flowers or report on the weather, trying to cover our awkwardness with falsely cheerful banter. The Savior has made it clear that to receive forgiveness we must forgive others their offenses against us. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

Spirituality is powerful, and therefore has the potential for evil, as well as for good. The soul needs spirit, but our spirituality also needs soul—deep intelligence, a sensitivity to the symbolic and metaphoric life, genuine community, and attachment to the World. We who walk away from the bedside and resume the freedoms of the outside World must be careful not to judge the person suffering from an ailment on our own terms. Inflated by good health, our standards are likely to render our judgments too severe and cause us to miss nuances of pleasure and meaning. The very conditions which evoke our revulsion may be all that someone has left of satisfaction. In our spirituality, we reach for consciousness, awareness, and the highest values; in our soulfulness, we endure the most pleasurable and the most exhausting of human experience and emotions. These two directions make up the fundamental pulse of human life, and to an extent, they have an attraction to each other. This same merging of feelings lessens the loneliness of someone who is grieving the loss of health and independence. People do not need or want to feel like a lump of flesh, like we have to get them out of the way as fast as we can. Yet, try as you might, you will not find enduring happiness until, through repentance, you satisfy personally broken law to restore peace to a troubled conscience. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

No one needs to be told that we live in a time of materialism and consumerism, of lost values and a shift in ethical standards. We find ourselves tempted to call for a return to the old values and ways. It seems that in the past we were more religious as a people and that traditional values had more influence throughout the society. However, whether or not that is a blurry, nostalgic view of the past, we want to keep in mind that we have been warned about dealing with present difficulties by wishing for a return to former conditions. This maneuver is a regressive restoration of the persona. Mercy most affects us when we are in the hospital or care facility. We become primitive, hungry for a loving hug and comfort. Time slows down. It can seem that all we have been and done has come to nothing. In this situation, someone taking the time to heed our cravings and recognize our needs means more than we can say. Societies can fall into a defensive strategy, attempting to restore what is imagined to be a better condition from the past. The trouble is, memory is always part imagination, and tough times of another era are later unconsciously gilded into the good old days. If we can resist this temptation to improve the present by restoring the past, we can start to face our current challenges. We can regain peace of conscience by repenting of personal transgressions that cause us internal turmoil. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

In the science of the mind we do not say everything is all right when it is all wrong. We do not say peace when there is no peace, but rather we try to discover what is wrong and why we do not have peace. We do not say that people are not poor, sick, or unhappy. We ask why these things should be if the original cause of all things is harmonious, perfect, radiant, and happy. We have no one to denounce and nothing to antagonize. The key to lost spirituality and numbing materialism is not merely to intensify our quest for spirituality, but to reimagine it. For healing a split between spirituality and Worldliness we must establish soul in the middle, between spirit and body, as a way to prevent the two from becoming extreme caricatures of themselves. We must find concrete ways of getting soul back into our spiritual practices, our intellectual life, and our emotional and physical engagements with the World. Seeking cooperation with all, we should endeavor to relieve the mind of the burden of fear, doubt, and uncertainty. All of these attitudes could be wrapped in one package and labeled a lack of faith in ourselves, in each other, and in life. Let us not fool ourselves by thinking that a few idle statements will do this. Challenges can often bring blessings to others when their needs have caused the disturbed feelings in our mind. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

A true resolution calls for a calm, insistent determination to reorganize the whole body of our thinking, until at last the little irritations and vexations of life, the too harsh differences of belief, and the disagreements with everything and everyone are redeemed. This redemption can only through a conscious sense of our union with something greater than we are. In doing this, we shall discover love is the lodestone of life. There is nothing cold or unfeeling about the philosophy of religious science and the practice of the science of the mind. As it reaches back to the original source, it must bring some knowledge of the Kingdom of Heaven into the consciousness of humanity. Coldness, criticism, unkindness have no place in this philosophy or in this science. We must be willing to place ourselves in the other person’s position and, with true compassion, enter into the thoughts and feelings of others, not as one caught in them or distraught by them, but as one who comes as a redeemer, a savior, to bring light of truth to those who have lost the way. However, we must have a deep desire and willingness to sympathize with the person who suffers. Our efforts will be stepping-stones to greater personal growth as Spirit-guided solutions are found. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

There is no place in this practice for arrogance or the holier-than-thou attitude. The great have always been humble. The great have always been kind. The great have always been lovers of humanity. Peace of mind is restored by resolving the external forces that disturb it. Not so with a troubled conscience, for it is unrelenting, ever present, a constant reminder of the need to correct one’s past mistakes, to resolve an offense to other, or to repent of transgression. The ability to have an unsettled conscience is a gift of God to help us succeed in this moral life. The divine power or influence emanates from God, and it gives light and life to all things. It prompts all rational individuals throughout the Earth to distinguish truth from error, right from it. It activates your conscience. The divine power’s influence can be weakened through transgressions and addiction and restored through proper repentance. The light of God is a power and influence that comes when followed and can lead a person to quality for the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Ghost. It is well to remember that even with peace of conscience we can have temporary periods when our peace of mind is interrupted by external concerns. However, our understanding of the causes can relive much of the pressure they generate. As our personal lives conform to the teachings of the Lord, we can seek his help in resolving the troubling issues. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8

March 4, 2018 9:42 am