I only wish that I could take the entire United States of America into the locker room at half time. I would simply say that we must look not at the points we have lost but at the point we can gain. Currently, it is easier for those with the stronger social positions to advance their interests unjustly without being shown to be clearly out of bounds. Of course all this is obvious, and it has always been recognized that ethical principles are vague. Nevertheless they are not all equally imprecise, and the two principles of justice have an advantage in the greater clarity of their demands in what needs to be done to satisfy them. Each person has an equal right to the most extensive liberties compatible with similar liberties for all. Also, social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that they are both to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged persons, and attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of equality of opportunity. Much new knowledge is admittedly remote from the immediate interests of the ordinary person in the street. One is not intrigued or impressed by the fact that a noble gas like xenon can form compounds—something that until recently most chemists swore was impossible. While even this knowledge may have an impact on one when it is embodies in new technology, until then, one can afford to ignore it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Individuals do not enjoy the experience of risk, the actual process of gambling, the resulting measure is nevertheless influenced by attitudes toward uncertainty as defined by the overall probability distribution. However, a good bit of new knowledge, on the other hand, is directly related to one’s immediate concerns, one’s job, one’s politics, one’s family life, even one’s behaviour involving pleasures of the flesh. Interpersonal comparisons depend upon value judgments. While it is obvious that the acceptance of the principle of utility is a matter for moral theory, it is less evident that the very procedures for measuring well-being raise similar problems. A poignant example is the dilemma that parents find themselves in today as a consequence of successive radical changes in the image of the child in society and in our theories of childrearing. At the turn of last century in the United States of America, for example, the dominant theory reflected the prevailing scientific belief in the primacy of heredity in determining behaviour. Mothers who had never heard of Dr. Darwin or Dr. Spencer raised their babies in ways consistent with the World views of these thinkers. Vulgarized and simplified, passed from person to person, these World views were reflected in the conviction of millions of ordinary people that “bad children are a result of bad stock,” that “crime is hereditary,” et cetera. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

In the early decades of the twentieth century, these attitudes fell back before the advance of environmentalism. The belief that environment shapes personality, and that the early years are the most important, created a new image of the child. The work of Dr. Watson and Dr. Pavlov began to creep into the public ken. Mothers reflected the new behavourism, refusing to feed infants on demand, refusing to pick them up when they cried, weaning them early to avoid a prolonged dependency. A study by Martha Wolfenstein has compared the advice offered parents in seven successive editions of Infant Care, a handbook issues by the United States Children’s Bureau between 1914 and 1951. She found distinct shifts in the preferred methods for dealing with weaning, thumb-sucking, masturbation, bowel and bladder training. It is clear from this study that by the late thirties still another image of the child had gained ascendancy. Freudian concepts swept in like a wave and revolutionized childrearing practices. Suddenly, mothers began to hear about “the rights of infants” and the need for “oral gratification.” Permissiveness became the order of the day. Parenthetically, at the same time that Freudian images of the child were altering the behaviour of parents in Dayton, Dubuque and Dallas, the images of the psychoanalyst changed, too. Psychoanalysts became culture heroes. Movies, television scripts, novels and magazine stories represented them as wise and sympathetic souls, wonder-worker capable of remaking damaged personalities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

From the appearance of the movies Spellbound in 1945, through the late fifties, the analyst was painted in largely positive terms by the mass media. By the mid-sixties, however, one had already turned into a comical creature. Peter Sellers in What’s New Pussycat? played a psychoanalyst much crazier than most of his patients, and “psychanalyst jokes” began to circulate not merely among New York and California sophisticates, but through the population at large, helped along by the same mass media that created the myth of the analyst in the first place. I guess that is why the news is labeled “fake news,” they often contradict themselves for ratings and revenue, swaying viewers in the more popular direction, instead of figuring out what is true and just. This sharp reversal in the public image of the psychoanalyst (the public image being no more than the weighted aggregate of private images in the society) reflected changes in research as well. For evidence was piling up that psychoanalytic therapy did not live up to the claims made for it, and new knowledge in the behavioural sciences, and particularly in psychopharmacology, made many Freudian therapeutic measures seem quaintly archaic. At the same time, there was a great burst of research in the field of learning theory, and a new swing in childrearing, this time toward a kind of neo-behaviourism, got under way. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

At each stage of this development a widely held set of images was attacked by a set of counter-images. Individuals holding one set were assailed by reports, articles, documentaries, and advice from authorities, friends, relatives, and even casual acquaintances who accepted conflicting views. The same mother, turning to the same authorities at two different ties in the course of raising her child, would receive, in effect, somewhat different advice based on different inferences about reality. While for the people of the past, childrearing patterns remained stable for centuries at a time, for the people of the present and the future, it has, like so many other fields, become an arena in which successive waves of images, many of them generated by scientific research, do battle. In this way, new knowledge alters old. The mass media instantly and persuasively disseminate new images, and ordinary individuals, seeking help in coping with an ever more complex social environment, attempt to keep up. At the same time, events—as distinct from research as such—also batter our old image structures. Racing swiftly past our attention screen, they wash out old images and generate new ones. After the freedom rides and the riots in America only the pathological could hang on to the long-cherished notion that underrepresented people are “happy children” content with their poverty. And after the conflicts in the Middle East and America, how many still cling to the image of people as cheek-turning pacifists or a battlefield coward? #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

In education, in politics, in economic theory, in medicine, in international affairs, wave after wave of new images penetrate our defenses, shake up our mental models of reality. The result of this image bombardment is the accelerated decay of old images, a faster intellectual through-out, and a new, profound sense of the impermanence of knowledge, itself. However, with an insufficiently facilitating environment there may be fatal breaks in the sequence of connecting processes which link the infant’s earliest and most physical experiences of needs and their satisfactions—at the very core of the self—to its later experiences of the World of other people and things. Where, for whatever reasons, the environment is less facilitating, there is not s smooth a sequence of connections and so these integrating links are less strong, or absent. The infant may even come to associate its needs with distress and inadequacy, and not with satisfaction and well-being. In such circumstances—the infant may feel compelled to shift away from an interest in one’s own needs to an interest in the (m)other, before it is developmentally ready to do so. The child then mises out on the idea what when it experiences a need, then is the time to satisfy it. The link is missing. The infant has gratifications but does not connect them with the needs it has experienced. Similarly, the infant at times has deprivations, and these are not connected with their source either. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

When the link is missing, even if there are no other ill effect, there is no cathexis to the arousal of needs: a person will not experience the arousal of a need as a pleasurable or desirable experience, since satisfaction has never become directly associated with excitement or arousal. At worst, the deprivation maybe so intense that the whole biologically-based personality is dissociated, the whole conscious personality may break away from the experience of arousal and interest. This kind of breakaway split is called a Basic Fault (or, at least, one kind of Basic Fault). The infant’s needs, biologically associated with the earliest mapping and the original homunculus, become a matter of emotional indifference or even, in severe cases, the cause of panic fear because they are experienced as dangerous intrusions. Meanwhile, emotional attachments do develop. Through these, arousals and interest come to be connected, not with the needs the infant experiences, but with the perceived or imagined needs of those who bring the infant its gratifications—at times which are connected not to the infant’s biological clock but to the (m)other’s ideas. The (m)other must therefore be watched and taken notice of. Attachments made on this basis will be strong but anxious: insecurity is built in. An anxious infant has to stop “being,” in order to deal with distress and in order to deal with the needs of the (m)other from whom help is needed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Unlike the more relaxed infant, who will eventually start an interest in the (m)others because it begins to explore the interesting environment at the biologically appropriate developmental stage, the more needy and distressed infant will begin to be interested in the environment for what it can get out of it. This infant needs to start doing things. The premature shift from being to doing may mark another point of development which would locate a Basic Fault. For the infant is at the developmental stage at which it needs to feel in tune with the World. It needs to feel confirmed as a secure, interesting, and interested self, in a secure relationship with the interested and interesting World of others. However, the need to survive may make it fearful about the World, and interested mainly in seeing where distress and the alleviation of distress may come from. The question ceases to be “Who am I?” “Who are we?” “Who are you?”, and becomes “What are you good for?”, “How do I have to behave to get what I need from you?” The environment become something to be exploited. So children learn how to hustle, scheme and manipulate as infants and it becomes part of their character. The environment becomes something to be exploited. The self and the other stand over against each other, and the primary relationship is not unified but exploitative. What does such a child see when one looks into the face of the mother? Of course nothing can be said about the single occasions on which the mother could not respond. Many babies, however, have to have a long experience of not getting back what they are giving. They look and they do not see themselves. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

When mirroring is disabled, of course there are consequences. First, the baby’s own creative capacity beings to atrophy, and in some way or other they look around for other ways of getting something of themselves back from the environment. Second, the baby gets settled in to the idea that when one looks, what is seen is the mother’s face. The mother’s face is not then a mirror. So perception takes the place of what might have been the beginning of a significant exchange, a two-way process in which self-enrichment alternates with the discovery of meaning in the World of seen things. Naturally, there are half-way stages in this scheme of things. Some babies do not quite give up hope and they study the object and do all that is possible to see in the object some meaning that ought to be there if only it could be felt. Some babies, tantalized by this type of relative maternal failure, study the variable maternal visage in an attempt to predict mother’s mood, just exactly as we all study the weather. The suppositions and anticipations, the attractions and repulsions of the ego enter into one’s intuitive experiences and impede or change them. Most inner guidance is rarely purely intuitive but more often a mixture of genuine intuition with wishful thinking. Hence it is right in parts and wrong in others. The original intuition itself may be a correct one but its reception is so inexpert and so biased that the version accepted in consciousness has deformed and somewhat falsified it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

The intuitive is so fine and sensitive a faculty that the emanations of another mind may well disturb its activity or distort its truth. The intuitive approach is the most effective of all, provided it is not clouded by suggestion from outside sources or blurred by bias from inside ones. Suffering from the awareness of one’s powerlessness and separateness, humans can try to overcome one’s existential burden by achieving trancelike state of ecstasy (“to be beside oneself”) and thus to regain unity within oneself and with nature. There are many ways to accomplish this. A very transitory one is provided by nature in the act of pleasures of the flesh. This experience may be said to be the natural prototype of complete concentration and momentary ecstasies; it may include the intimate partner but too often remains a narcissistic experience for each of the two, who perhaps share mutual gratitude for pleasure they have given each other (conventionally felt as love). We Other symbiotic, more lasting and intense ways to arrive at ecstasy are found in religious cults, such as ecstatic dances, the use of mind-altering substances, hortatory practices, or self-induced states of trance. The expression of hate, destructiveness, and aggression is actually rooted in some modern cultures are a rite of passage. Therefore, we must guard against the feeling that there is “safety in numbers.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

It is natural to feel that if all humans are bas bad as the Christians say, then badness must be very excusable. If all the boys plough in the examination, surely the papers must have been too hard? And so the masters at that school feel till they learn that there are other schools where ninety percent of the boys passed on the same papers. Then they begin to suspect that the fault did not lie with the examiners. Again, many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of human society—some particular school, college, regiment or profession where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were regarded as merely normal (“Everyone does it”) and certain others as impracticably virtuous and Quixotic. However, when we emerge from that bad society we made the horrible discovery that in the outer World our “normal” was the kind of thing that no decent person ever dreamed of doing, and our “Quixotic” was take for granted as the minimum standard of decency. What had seemed to us morbid and fantastic scruples so long as we were in the “pocket” now turned out to be the only moments of sanity we there enjoyed. It is wise to face the possibility that the whole human race (being a small thing in the Universe) is, in fact, just such a local pocket of evil—an isolated bad school or regiment inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Inside the pocket we do not say that justice, mercy, fortitude, and temperance are of no value, but only that the local custom is as just, brave, temperate and merciful as can reasonably be expected. It begins to look as if the neglected school rules even inside this bad school were connected with some larger World—and that when the terms ends we might find ourselves facing the public opinion of that larger World. However, the worst of all is this: we cannot help seeing that only the degree of virtue which we now regard as impracticable can possibly save our race from disaster even on this planet. The standard which seems to have come into the “pocket” from outside, turns out to be terribly relevant to conditions inside the pocket—so relevant that a consistent practice of virtue by the human race even for ten years would fill the Earth from pole to pole with peace, plenty, health, merriment, and heartsease and that nothing else will. I may be the custom, down here, to treat the regimental rules as a dead letter or a counsel of perfection: but now, everyone who stops to think can see that when we meet the enemy this neglect is going to cost every person of us one’s life. It is then that we shall envy the “morbid” person, the “pedant” or “enthusiast” who really has taught one’s company to shoot and dig in and spare their water bottles. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

According to some people, the larger society to which I here contrast the human “pocket” may not exist, and at any rate we have no experience of it. We do not meet Angels, or unfallen races. However, we can get some inkling of the truth even inside our own race. Different ages and cultures can be regarded as “pockets” in relation to one another. Different ages excelled in different virtues. If, then, you are ever tempted to think that we modern people in the Old World and the New World cannot really be so bad because we are, comparatively speaking, humane—if, in other words, you think God might be content with us on that ground—ask yourself whether you think God ought to have been content with the cruelty of cruel ages because they excelled in courage of chastity. You will see at once that this is an impossibility. From considering how the cruelty of our ancestors looks to us, you may get some inkling how our softness, Worldliness, and timidity would have looked to them, and hence how both must look to God. Before humans complain that they are unable to get intuition, one should remember that one’s own moral fault may be responsible for this. It can prevent one not only from receiving true intuitions but also from responding to them in action. Amid the general rush of today’s events, it is easy to miss an intuitive feeling. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Nor when the answer first comes, may we understand it aright. We may mix it up with out own ideas or wishes, our own expectations or fancies, and the result will be that the help received will not work out quite as it should have done. We may have to spend further years straightening out the message and, incidentally, ourselves. However, again, it is worth doing and nothing else is so much worth doing. One will come to find that the guidance one receives is perfect but one’s reception of it may still be imperfect. Perhaps harping on the word “kindness” has already aroused a protest in some reader’s minds. Are not really an increasingly cruel age? Perhaps we are: but I think we have become so in the attempt to reduce all virtues to kindness. For Plat rightly taught that virtue is one. You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues. If, being cowardly, conceited and slothful, you have never yet done a fellow creature a great mischief, that is only because your neighbour’s welfare has not yet happened to conflict with your safety, self-approval, or ease. Every vice leads to cruelty. Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty. Most atrocities are stimulated by accounts of the enemy’s atrocities; and pity for the oppressed classes, when separated from the moral law as a whole, leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a region of terror. #RandolphHarris 14 of #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Their problem is that they have rejected God, for whatever reason, and have chosen to live life of their own. They have not surrendered their will to Him. They do not want to do what God says to do, but what they think is best. And they are lost because of that. They do not know what their real needs are and do not think of themselves as rebels and outlaws who must radically change because they are not acceptable to God. They do not think they need the grace of God for radical transformation of what they are, but that they just need a little help. They are good people. Or so it seems to them. It might be easy to lose faith, but sometimes, mysteriously, one feels one is not alone. One has family, friends, and church members praying for them. Some modern theologians have, quite rightly, protested against an excessively moralistic interpretation of Christianity. The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfect: His claim upon us is something more and other than the claim of moral duty. I do not deny it: but this conception, like that of corporate guilt, is very easily used as an evasion of the real issue. God ay be more than moral goodness: He is not less. The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending for it for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them, and then tried with all their strengths to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

 The church of Jesus Christ is vital and alive and changing the World—whether individual believers obey Him, live out His Word, and love Him. The Lord does give us the desires of our heart. Becoming a disciple is a matter of giving up your life as you have understood it to that point. Jesus made this starkly clear in Luke 14 and elsewhere. And without that “giving up,” you cannot be his disciple, because you will still think you are in charge and just in need of a little help from Jesus for your project of a successful life. However, our idea of a successful life is precisely our problem. The groups and times where individual and social transformation unto Christlikeness have manifestly taken place and have shaken the human order to its foundations all verify this completely: the early Christians, the early monastic, the early Franciscans or Dominicans, the early Quakers and early Methodists, for example. Note how in all these cases the word “early” has to be used. This is because the “vessel” that emerges in the course of a particular outbreak of radical discipleship gradually overwhelms the Heavenly “treasure” it initially served to convey. That is a primary satanic energy in defeating the cause of Christ on Earth. Then we have yet another tradition on exhibit in the museum of Christian history. Usually that means an institution of some sort, perhaps a local church or a denomination, whose perpetuation and survival becomes the main concern of the people associated with it. Discipleship to Christ is either dropped altogether from the basic objectives or is redefined as devotion to the institution. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Spiritual formation then in some cases is actually and explicity understood as the process of conforming to the tradition. Being disciples and making disciples in the obvious sense of the New Testament is omitted from the local congregations and their higher groupings. Clearly, then, the first stage of Jesus’ plan for spiritual formation in local congregations, as stated in Matthew 28.18-20, has to do with the vision and intention in our Vision, Intention, Mission (VIM) pattern of spiritual growth. If spiritual formation is to be the central focus of the local congregation, the group must be possessed by the vision of apprenticeship to Jesus in kingdom living as the central reality of salvation and as the basic good news, and they must have formed the clear intention to be disciples and to make disciples, as the central protect of their group. It is not enough to know what World-Mind has put forth in this Universe by its presence. We must also know, intellectually at least, what it is in itself. Out of this vast void comes the Universe. What then must be the ineffable and incredible Mystery hidden behind it from our sightless eyes? Take the beginning and the end of the Greek alphabet and suppose that the first letter, Alpha, is the first faint stirring of the Universe. And take the last letter, Omega, to be the last vanishing trace of that Universe. Imagines that Alpha is the reincarnation of the previous Omega, and you will have a key to what is really happening. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

However, what is this mysterious invisible intangible source whence all this is derived into which all this passes. The notion of a Personal God includes truth and an error. So far as there is a World-Mind, manifesting along with a World itself, the notion is true. However, so far as there is only the Unique, the One without a Second, both are appearances, phenomena out of the Noumenon. In the case of the World, it appears in time out of the Timeless; but in the case of the World-Mind, all times are embraced in its Duration. Yet it too withdraws into its other aspect, Mind—only. There has been so much friction and clash between the difference religions because of this idea: whether God is personal or impersonal—so much persecution, even hared, so unnecessarily. I say unnecessarily because the difference between the two conceptions is only an apparent one. Mind is the course of all; this is Mind inactive. Mind as World-Mind-in-manifestation is the personal God. Between essence and manifestation the only difference is that essence is hidden and manifestation is known. World-Mind is personal; Mind is totally impersonal. Basically, the two are one. On the two view of God—transcendence and immanence: One view conditions your conception of God, the other sets limits to Him. However, if you simultaneously affirm both one and the other point of view, you will be exempt from error. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

As Mind, it is beyond all the relativities of this World, beyond time and space, human thought and human imagination. As World Mind it is immanent in the World itself, the Lord of All, the God whom human worship, yet cyclic in Its existences. The World-Mind, however, has a double life. As Mind, it is eternally free but as the World-Mind, it is eternally crucified, as Plato said, on the cross of the World’s body. “Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages. Who will not fear you, O Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed,” reports Revelation 15.3-4. As citizens of a country that supports religious freedom, we should take our religion into our civic duties, and we should gladly seek to support and to guide our country’s institutions with prayer. I pray to the God of my people, and I ask this: May what is done be done well. May what is done be done rightly. May what is done be done according to justice. May truth prevail, may falsehood fail, may words and deeds and thoughts be just. O Lord of our strength, sheltering Rock, Shield of our salvation, Thou art a stronghold unto us. The blessed God, great in knowledge, designed and made the radiance of the Sun. The beneficent One thus wrought glory unto His name. He set luminaries round about His strength. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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