The 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

In 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

The 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

Money 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

For 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

Life 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

Money 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

Currency, 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

The 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

We 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

However, 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

Money 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

Most 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

Money 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

Occasionally 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

 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

When 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

Sometimes 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

Guard 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 19

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

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