There are only two kinds of politics…the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says: you are encircled by monstrous dangers. The other says: the World is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of humans. We tend to experience ourselves, our identity, our soul, our ego, as located somewhere within the temple, also known as our body, that God has blessed us with. Our skin is a limiting membrane which covers our bodies all over. Some of us feel we live behind our eyes; others feel they live beyond their rib-cage, in the solar plexus, in their private regions, or just all over. Still each individual “I” is normally experienced inside while the rest of the World is felt to be outside. And the other way round also: what is inside my skin is me, what is outside is not me. The skin surface does help to establish a sense of where self ends and not-self begins, but it can lead to a dangerous metaphor, tempting us to use language which cannot accurately describe our experiences. The idea that our boundaries are experienced mainly when we encounter others has been in the background of the developing narrative of our discussion. It solves some theoretical problems, and, though it creates others, the new problems seem to me more manageable, more interesting, and more productive of further insights. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

We experience boundaries in so many different ways: with love, with frustration, with shock—as obstacles, as opportunities, as absences, as stone walls, as bridges. What an interesting difficulty to work with! It seems to suggest, for instance, that boundaries are kinds of relationships: that people are defined, enriched, frustrated, and delimited by their boundaries with others. The boundary between me and a person I love and trust is very different from the boundary between me and someone I experience as indifferent or intrusive. People who love and trust each other feel identified, so that the other person’s well-being feels almost like their own. People in such a relationship will think of themselves as “we.” Then, though you and I are individuals, the boundary between us is very different from the boundary between us and them. The boundary between me and you-who-are-one-of-us is very different from the boundary between me and those-people-over-there: their well-being is not identified with mine. They are different and the boundary is different because the relationship between them and us is different. In an intimate relation, the two concerned are each using the other’s public present in controlling their own irrational desires and fears. To lose a friend is to lose part of one’s public presence: to lose an intimate is to lose part of the bulwark that protects us from our own helplessness. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Each cell we create with the people we are close to consists, then, of a unique combination of intimate relations. We are what we share with those close to us—our parents, our spouses, our children. Experience leave memory-traces—neural processes organized in structures which reflect the experience. Concepts form when similar patterns of experiences repeatedly leave similar structures of memory-traces. Each time a patterned stimuli reappear, the concept will be stronger and clearer. Repeated similar experiences develop simple concepts. Eventually further experiences develop these concepts into more complex organizations. These are to some extent records of the past: more central or higher order processes, and eventually maps. A time comes when these records of the past, built up from experiences, themselves affect new experiences, creating expectations, directing attention, and so on. Phantasies is the word used for such concepts in psycho-analytic circles. To find out what is natural, we must study specimens which retain their nature and not those which have been corrupted. Thus far of humans suffering; but all this time “a plaint of guiltless hurt doeth pierce the sky.” The problem of animal suffering is appalling; not because the animals are so numerous (for, as we have seen, no more pain is felt when a million suffer than when one suffers) but because the Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

So far as we known beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue: therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it. At the same time we must never allow the problem of animal suffering to become the center of the problem of pain; not because it is unimportant—whatever furnishes plausible grounds for questioning the goodness of God is very important indeed—but because it is outside the range of our knowledge. God has given us data which enables us, in some degree, to understand out own suffering: He has given us no such data about beast. We know neither why they were made nor what they are and everything we say about them is speculative. From the doctrine that God is good we may confidently deduce that the appearance of reckless Divine cruelty in the animal kingdom is an illusion—and the fact that the only suffering we know at first hand (our own) turns out not to be a cruelty will make it easier to believe this. After that, everything is guesswork. We may begin by ruling out some of the pessimistic bluff that is common knowledge. The fact that vegetable lives “prey upon” one another and are in a state of “ruthless” competition is of no moral importance at ll. Life in the biological sense has nothing to do with good and evil until sentience appears. The very words “prey” and “ruthless” are mere metaphors. Wordsworth believed that every flower “enjoyed the air it breathes,” but there is no reason so suppose he was right. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

No doubt, living plants react to injuries differently from inorganic matter; but an anaesthetized human body reacts more differently still and such reactions do not prove sentience. We are, of course, justified in speaking of the death or thwarting of a plant as if it were a tragedy, provided that we know we are using a metaphor. To furnish symbols for spiritual experiences may be one of the functions of the mineral and vegetable Worlds. However, we must not become the victims of our metaphor. A forest in which half the trees are killing the other half may be a perfectly “good” forest: for its goodness consists in its utility and beauty and it does not feel. When we turn to the beasts, three questions arise. There is, first, the question of fact; what do animals suffer? There is, secondly, the question of origin; how did disease and pain enter the animal World? And, thirdly, there is the question of justice; how can animal suffering be reconciled with the justice of God? In the long run the answer to the first question is, We do not know; but some speculations may be worth setting down. We must begin by distinguishing among animals: for if the ape could understand us, he would take it very ill to be lumped along with the oyster and the earthworm in a single class of “animals” and contrasted to humans. Clearly in some ways the ape and humans are much more like each other than either is like a worm. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

At the lower end of the animal realm, we need not assume anything we could recognize as sentience. Biologists in distinguishing animal from vegetable do not make use of sentience or locomotion or other such characteristics as a layman would naturally fi upon. At some point, however (though where, we cannot say), sentience almost certainly comes in, for the higher animals have nervous systems very like our own. However, at this level we must still distinguish sentience from consciousness. If you happen never to have heard of this distinction before, I am afraid you will find it rather startling, but it has great authority and you would be ill-advised to dismiss it out of hand. Suppose that three sensations follow one another—first A, then B, then C. When this happens to you, you have the experience of passing through the process ABC. However, note what this implies. It implies that there is something in you which stands sufficiently outside A to notice A passing away, and sufficiently outside B to notice B now beginning and coming to fill the place which A has vacated; and something which recognizes itself as the same through the transition from A to B and B to C, so it can say, “I have had the experience ABC.” Now this something is what I call Consciousness or Soul and the process I have just described is one of the proofs that the soul, though experiencing time, is not itself completely “timeful.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

The simplest experience of ABC as succession demands a soul which is not itself a mere succession of states, but rather a permanent bed along which these different portions of the stream of sensation roll, and which recognizes itself as the same beneath them all. Now it is almost certain that the nervous system of the higher animals presents it with successive sensation. It does not follow that it has any “soul,” anything which recognizes itself as having had A, and now having B, and now marking how B glides away to make room for C. If it had no such “soul,” what we call the experience ABC would never occur. There would, in philosophic language, be “a succession of perceptions”; that is, the sensations would, in fact, occur in that order, and God would know that they were so occurring, but the animal would not know. There would not be “a perception of succession.” This would mean that if you give such a creature two blows with a whip, there are, indeed, two pains: but there is n co-ordinating self which can recognize that “I have had two pains.” Even in the single pain, there is no self to say “I am in pain”—for if it could distinguish itself from the sensation—the bed from the stream—sufficiently to say “I am in pain,” it would also be able to connect the two sensations as its experience. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

The correct description would be “Pain is taking place in this animal”; not, as we commonly, say, “This animal feel pain,” for the words “this” and “feels” really smuggle in the assumption that it is a “self” or “soul” or “consciousness” standing above the sensations and organizing them into an “experience” as we do. Such sentience without consciousness, I admit, we cannot imagine: not because it never occurs in us, but because, when it does, we describe ourselves as being “unconscious.” And rightly. The fact that animals react to pain much as we do is, of course, no proof that they are conscious; for we may also react under chloroform, and even answer questions while asleep. How far up the scale such unconscious sentience may extend, I will not even guess. It is certainly difficult to suppose that the apes, the elephant, and the higher domestic animals, have not, in some degree, a self or soul which connects experiences and gives rise to rudimentary individuality. However, at least a great deal of what appears to be animal suffering need not be suffering in any real sense. It may be we who have invented the “sufferers” by the “pathetic fallacy” of reading into the beasts a self for which there is no real evidence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The origin of animal suffering could be traced, by earlier generations, to the Fall of man—the whole World was infected by the uncreating rebellion of Adam. This is now impossible, for we have good reason to believe that animals existed long before humans. Carnivorousness, with all that it entails, is older than humanity. Now it is impossible at this point not to remember a certain sacred story which, though never included in the creeds, has been widely believed in the Church and seems to be implied in several Dominical, Pauline, and Johannie utterances—I mean the story that humans were not the first creature to rebel against the Creator, but that some older and mightier being long since because apostate and is now the emperor of darkness and (significantly) the Lord of this World. Some people would like t reject all such elements from Our Lord’s teaching: and it might be argued that when He emptied Himself of His glory He also humbled Himself to share, as humans, the current superstitions of His time. And I certainly think that Christ, in the flesh, was not omniscient—if only because a human brain could not, presumably, be the vehicle of omniscient consciousness, and to say that Our Lord’s thinking was not really conditioned by the size and shape of His brain might be to deny the real incarnation and become a Docetist. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

Thus, if Our Lord had committed Himself to any scientific or historical statement which we knew to be untrue, this would not disturb my faith in His deity. However, the doctrine of Satan’s existence and fall is not among the things we know to be untrue: it contradicts not the facts discovered by scientists but the mere, vague “climate of opinion” that we happen to be living in. Now I take a very low view of “climates of opinion.” In one’s own subject every human knows that all discoveries are made and all errors corrected by those who ignore the “climate of opinion.” It seems to me, therefore, a reasonable supposition, that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material Universe, or the solar system, or, at least, the planet Earth, before ever humans came on the scene: and that when man fell, someone had, indeed, tempted him. This hypothesis is not introduced as a general “explanation of evil”: it only gives a wider application to the principle that evil comes from the abuse of free will. If there is such a power, as I myself believe, it may well have corrupted the animal creation before humans appeared. The intrinsic evil of the animal World lies in the fact that animals, or some animals, live by destroying each other. That plants do the same I will not admit to be an evil. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

The Satanic corruption of the beasts would therefore be analogous, in one respect, with the Satanic corruption of humans. For one result of man’s fall was that his animality fell back from the humanity into which it had been taken up but which could no longer rule it. In the same way, animality may have been encouraged to slip back into behaviour proper to vegetables. It is, of course, true that the immense morality occasioned by the fact that many beasts live on beasts is balanced, in nature, by an immense birthrate, and it might seem, that if all animals had been herbivorous and healthy, they would mostly starve as a result of their own multiplication. However, I take the fecundity and the death rate to be correlative phenomena. There was, perhaps, no necessity for such an excess of the sexual impulse: the Lord of this World thought of it as a response to carnivorousness—a double scheme for securing the maximum amount of torture. If it offends less, you may say that the “life-force” is corrupted where I say that living creatures were corrupted by an evil angelic being. We mean the same thing: but I find it easier to believe in a myth of gods and demons than in one of hypostatized abstract nouns. And after all, our mythology may be much nearer to literal truth than we suppose. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Let us not forget that Our Lord, on one occasion, attributes human disease not to God’s wrath, not to nature, but quite explicitly to Satan. If this hypothesis is worth considering, it is also worth considering whether humans, at their first coming into the World, had not already a redemptive function to perform. Humans, even now, can do wonders to animals: my bird and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of human’s functions to restore peace to the animal World, and if one had not joined the enemy one might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable. Finally, there is the question of justice. We have seen reason to believe that not all animals suffer as we think they do: but some, at least, look as if they had selves, and what shall be done for these innocents? And we have seen that it is possible to believe that animal pain is not God’s handiwork but begun by Satan’s malice and perpetuated by human’s desertion of one’s post: still, if God has not caused it, He has permitted it, and once again, what shall be done for these innocents? I have been warned not even to raise the question of animal immorality, least I find myself in company with nature lovers. However, I believe maybe that animals are reborn into human form, but then, they would be missed in Heaven. Only God knows. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Nonetheless, the complete silence of Scripture and Christian tradition on animal immortality is a more serious objection; but it would be fatal only if Christian revelation showed any signs of being intended as a systeme de la nature answering all questions. However, it is nothing of the sort: the curtain has been rent at one point only, to reveal our immediate practical necessities and not to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. If animals were, in fact, immortal, it is unlikely, from what we discern of God’s method in the revelation, that He would have revealed this truth. Even our own immortality is a doctrine that comes late in the history of Judaism. The argument from silence is therefore very weak. The real difficulty about supposing most animals to be immortal is that immortality has almost no meaning for a creature which is not “conscious” in the sense explained above. However, thinking animals are reborn as humans is, in a way, a belief that being human is a blessing, and an assumption that animals would like the freedom of being human. Yet, for all we know, they may consider their own forms a blessing and just mimic human traits because they are around humans and terrestrial beings also. If the life of a newt is merely a succession of sensations, what should we mean by saying that God may recall to life the newt that died today? #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

It would not recognize itself as the same newt; the pleasant sensation of any other newt that lived after its death would be just as much, or just as little, a recompense for its Earthly suffering (if any) as those of its resurrected—I was going to say “self,” but the whole point is that the newt probably has no self. The thing we have to try to say, on this hypothesis, will not even be said. There is, therefore, I take it, no question of immortality for creatures that are merely sentient. Nor do justice and mercy demand that there should be, for such creatures have no painful experience. Their nervous system delivers all the letters, A, P, N, I, but sine they cannot read they never build it up to the word PAIN. And all animals may be in that condition. If, nevertheless, the strong conviction which we have of a real, though doubtless rudimentary, selfhood in the higher animals, and specially in those we tame, is not an illusion, their destiny demands a somewhat deeper consideration. The error we must avoid is that of considering themselves. Humans are to be understood only in their relation to God. The beats are to be understood only in their relation to humans and, through humans, to God. Let us here guard against one of those untransmuted lumps of atheistical thought which often survive in the minds of modern believers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Atheists naturally regard the co-existence of humans and the animals as a mere contingent result of interacting biological facts; and the taming of an animal by a human as a purely arbitrary interference of one species with another. The “real” or “natural” animal to them is the wild one, and the tame animal is an artificial or unnatural thing. However, a Christian must not think so. Humans were appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a human does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by Divine right. The tame animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only “natural” animal—the only one we see occupying the place it was made to occupy, and it is on the tame animal that we must base all our doctrine of beasts. Now it will be seen that, in so far as the tame animal has a real self or personality, it owes this most entirely to its master. If a good sheepdog seems “almost human” that is because a good shepherd has made it so. I have already noted the mysterious force of the word “in.” I do not take all the sense of it in the New Testament to be identical, so that humans are in Christ and Christ in God and the Holy Spirit in the church and also in the individual believer in exactly the same sense. They may be sense that rhyme or correspond rather than a single sense. I am now going to suggest—though with great readiness to be set sight by real theologians—that there may be a sense, corresponding, though not identical, with these, in which those beasts that attain a real self are in their masters. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

That is to say, you must not think of a beast by itself, and call that a personality and then inquire whether God will raise and bless that. You must take the whole context in which the beast acquires its selfhood—namely “The-goodman—and—the—goodwife—ruiling—their—children—and—their—beasts—in—the—good—homestead.” That whole context may be regarded as a “body” in the Pauline (or a closely sub-Pauline) sense; and how much of that “body” may be raised along with the goodman and the goodwife, who can predict? So much, presumably, as is necessary for not only the glory of God and the beatitude of the human pair, but for that particular glory and that particular beatitude which is eternally coloured by that particular terrestrial experience. And in this way it seems to me possible that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters. And the difficulty about personal identity in a creature barely personal disappears when the creature is thus kept in its proper context. If you ask, concerning an animal thus raised as a member of the whole Body of the homestead, where its personal identity resides, I answer “Where its identity always did reside even in the Earthly life—in its relation to the Body and, specially, to the master who is the dead of that Body.” In other words, the human will know one’s dog: the body will know its master and, in knowing one, will be itself. To ask that the dog should, in any other way, know itself, it probably to ask for what has no meaning. Animals are not like that, and do not want to be. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

The utter incomprehensibility of the ultimate Source makes it impossible for any religion to offer more than its own symbols to the human mind. From them humans create their own mental pictures. However, one does not and cannot touch the Untouchable. God is unpicturable by human imagination, truth is unattainable by human thinking. There is a grand mystery at the heart of things. Why then degrade the Unique by confounding its symbols or traditions (in all religions) with its reality? If, remembering the infinitude of the Ultimate Reality, we refuse to personify it and refuse to worship such a personification, we lift ourselves from the exclusively religious to the integrally religio-mystical-philosophic stand point. In ancient Mexico, the Highest Godhhead was the Idea that could not be reproduced and no personification or representation of it of any kind was allowed. However, this doctrine only for upper classes and he intellectually cultivated. The masses were given a God who was visible and comprehensible. The ultimate reality cannot be represented with any fidelity nor can the ultimate truth be communicated with any accuracy. Let no one confuse this grand concept of the Absolute, the Unbounded, the Timeless, with the lesser concept of a God made in a semi-human image. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

We may not personalize the Absolute except at the terrible cost of utterly deceiving ourselves. So philosophy holds that no words can ever describe, no concept ever express, no human leader ever incarnate the ineffable truth, and that all assertion to the contrary merely defile truth. IT cannot be confined. It is totally incommunicable, but thoughts about it can be communicated in words or formed into pictures. It is totally incommunicable, but thoughts about it can be communicated in words or formed into pictures. So far as truth can appear in words, this is so. However, on the ultimate level, that is but an echo of an echo infinitely multiplied. It is merely a statement about reality, but it is not reality itself. It is a sound in the air (if voiced) or a mark on paper (if printed) but not truth. Nothing that words could say could give any proper description of That Which Is, for it belongs to a totally different dimension. So this is God, or more correctly, as near as humans can get to Go. No one can describe the Absolute, or speak on its behalf, for that would impose one’s human consciousness upon it and merely create a private imagination about it. The Real cannot be put under any label or classification because it is what it is of itself. Yet it pervades all things. We must separate, in our human thought, Mind as passive reality (the void) from Mind as active being (World-Mind). #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

All our understanding and interpretation of such words as are affixed to this state, by they Overself, Divine Being, Absolute, or Reality, is inevitably drawn from, and associated with, our experience in the World of time-space and relativity. It is what these words mean for our minds, not what they mean in themselves, that constitutes our use of them. We easily fall into self-deception about them, for the meaning given them is what we imagine, not what we know. Being especially above all relationships and contrasts that the intellect can make or the imagination can create, it cannot be rightly called “The One” as it so often has been, for that implies that a second or a third entity of the same kind could be added to it, which is false. The intellect may attempt the task during its highest flights, but in the end what does it produce? Only more thoughts! This is the Godhead, of which, in nearly all the ancient religious Mysteries, lawfully humans may make no image and to which one may give no name. This is simply because all names attached to it and all descriptions made of it cannot help being incomplete. Each word which can be used for the first goal tells of some particular aspect, be it knowledge, awakening, or enlightenment. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Beyond that incomplete description words cannot go, except negatively. The last thought that intelligence can make is about this divine mystery which lies beyond everything thinkable: but it will necessarily have to be a negative thought, that is, it can only say what the Godhead is not, deny any and every affirmation about it, unknow all that it has previously known about Go. Every attempt at understanding the Great Mystery, and very much more at representing it, merely leads to self-deception. It is not only the Uncontradictable, but also the Unapproachable. We may ascribe no attributes to Mind nor confine it within any limitations. The great mysterious emptiness—that is all humans can know of God. Although nothing can be written about IT that is truly descriptive, everything can be written about what leads up to the revelation of IT; that can be written with precision and luminosity. The inside must forever elude words, but the outside need not. The greatest of questions, “What is Truth?” is answered best by Silence; this answer is inherent in the question. Metaphysics and poetry may provide a medium for clues and hints, symbols and images. One will find, if one accepts this intuitive leading, that although the unfavourable circumstances may remain the same, unchanged, one’s attitude towards them does not. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Out of this inner change there will be given one the strength to deal with them, the calm t deal with them unmoved, and the wisdom to deal with them properly. There is no single pattern that an intuitively guided life must follow. Sometimes one will see in a flash of insight both course and destination, but at other times one will see only the next step ahead and will have to keep an open mind both as to the second step and as to the final destination. May I not forget in the midst of despair that all things are born from God, so that even the trials that come to afflict me are the children of those who are my blessed parents. Grant peace, well-being and blessings unto the Word, with grace, loving kindness and mercy for us and for all America, Thy people. Please bless us, O our Father, all of us together, with the light of Thy presence; for by that light Thou hast given us, O Lord our God, the Bible of life, loving kindness and righteousness, blessing and mercy, life and peace. O may it be good in Thy sight at all times to bless Thy people America with Thy peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who blesses Thy people America with peace. In the book of life, blessing, peace and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who establishest peace. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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At nearly 3,000 square feet, the largest home at #MillsStation is Residence 4, with 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, and all that natural light. Family nights are even better with an open floor plan between the Kitchen and Great Room! 😍🙌

You can check out an interactive floor plan of this residence on our website. Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-4/

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