The greatest power of war is the faithful transformation of our children–into heroes. The challenge is to preserve the truth of that person without distorting what the person says. Miracles, we must now consider the subject on a somewhat deeper level. The question is whether Nature can be known to be such a kind that supernatural interferences with her are impossible. She is already known to be, in general, regular: she behaves according to fixed laws, many of which have been discovered, and which interlock with one another. There is, in this discussion, no question of mere failure or inaccuracy to keep these laws on the part of Nature, no question of chancy or spontaneous variation. The only question is whether, granting the existence of a Power outside Nature, there is any intrinsic absurdity in the idea of its intervening to produce within Nature events which the regular “going on” of the whole natural system would never have produced. Three conceptions of the “Laws” of Nature have been held. First, that they are mere brute facts, known only by observation, with no discoverable rhyme or reason about them. We know that Nature behaves thus and thus; we do not know why she does and can see no reason why she should do opposite. Second, that they are applications of the law of averages. The foundations of Nature are in the random and lawless. However, the number of units we are dealing with are so enormous that the behaviour of these crowds (like the behaviour of very large masses of humans) can be calculated with practical accuracy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24

What we call “impossible events” are events to overwhelmingly improbably—by actuarial standards—that we do not need to take them into account. And third of all, the fundamental laws of Physics are really what we call “necessary truths” like the truths of mathematics—in other words, that if we clearly understand what we are saying we shall see that the opposite would be meaningless nonsense. Thus it is a “law” that when one billiard ball shoves another the amount of momentum lost by the first ball must exactly equal the amount gained by the second. People who hold that the laws of Nature are necessary truths would say that all we have done is to split up the single events into two halves (adventures of ball A, and adventures of ball B) and then discover that “the two sides of the account balance.” When we understand this, we see that of course they must balance. The fundamental laws are in the long run merely statements that every event is itself and not some different event. It will at once be clear that the first of these three theories gives no assurance against Miracles—indeed no assurance that, even apart from Miracles, the “laws” which we have hitherto observed will be obeyed tomorrow. If we have no notion why a thing happens, then of course we know no reason why it should not be otherwise, and therefore have no certainty that it might not some day be otherwise. The second theory, which depends on the law of averages, is in the same position. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24

The assurance it gives us is of the same general kind as our assurance that a coin tossed a thousand times will not give the same result, say, nine hundred times and that the longer you toss it he more nearly the number of Heads and Tails will come to being equal. However, his is so only provided the coin is an honest coin. If it is a loaded coin our expectations may be disappointed. However, the people who believe in miracles are maintaining precisely that the coin is loaded. The expectations based on the law of averages will work only for undoctored Nature. And the questions whether miracles occur is just the question whether Nature is ever doctored. The third view (that laws of Nature are necessary truths) seems at first sight to present an insurmountable obstacle to miracle. The breaking of them would, in that case, be a self-contradiction and not even Omnipotence can do what is self-contradictory. Therefore, the Laws cannot be broken. And therefore, we shall conclude, no miracle can ever occur? We have gone too quickly. It is certain that the billiard balls will behave in a particular way, just as it is certain that if you divide a shilling unequally between two recipients then A’s share must exceed the half and B’s share fall short of it by exactly the same amount. Provided, of course, that A does not be sleight of hand steal some of B’s pennies at he very moment of the transaction. In the same way, you know what will happen to the two billiard balls provided nothing interferes. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24

If one ball encounters a roughness in the cloth which the other does not, their motion will not illustrate the law in the way you had expected. Of course what happens as a result of the roughness in the cloth will illustrate the law in some other way, but your original prediction will have been false. Or again, if I snatch up a cue and give one of the balls a little help, you will get a third result: and that third result will equally illustrate the laws of physics, and equally falsify your prediction. I shall have “spoiled the experiment.” All interferences leave the law perfectly true. However, every prediction of what will happen in a given instance is made under the proviso “other things being equal” or “if there are no interferences.” Whether other things are equal in a given case and whether interferences may occur is another matter. The arithmetician, as an arithmetician, does not know how likely A is to steal some of B’s pennies when the shilling is being divided; you had better ask someone who knows me. In the same way the physicist, as such, does not know how likely it is that some supernatural power is going to interfere with them: you had better ask a metaphysician. However, the physicist does know, just because one is a physicist, that if the billiard balls are tampered with by any agency, natural or supernatural, which one has not taken into account, then their behaviour must differ from what one expected. Not because the law is false, but because it is true. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24

The more certain we are of the law the more clearly, we know that is new factors have been introduced the result will vary accordingly. What we do not know, as physicists, is whether Supernatural power might be one of the new factors. If the laws of Nature are necessary truths, no miracle can break them: but then no miracle needs to break them. It is with them as with the laws of arithmetic. If I put six pennies into a drawer on Monday and six more on Tuesday, the laws decree that—other things being equal—I shall find twelve pennies there on Wednesday. However, if the drawer has been robbed by the Shekel Brothers, I may in fact find only two. Something will have been broken (the lock of the drawer or the laws of America) but the laws of arithmetic will not have been broken. The new situation created by the Shekel Brothers will illustrate the laws of arithmetic just as well as the original situation. However, if God comes to work miracles, He comes “like a thief in the night.” Miracle is, from the point of view of the scientist, a form of doctoring, tampering, (if you like) cheating. It introduces a new factor into the situation, namely supernatural force, which the scientist has not reckoned on. One calculates what will happen, or what must have happened on past occasion, in the belief that the situation, at that point of space and time, is or was A. However, if supernatural force has been added, then the situation really is or was AB. And no one knows better than the scientist that AB cannot yield the same result as A.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 24

The necessary truth of the laws, far from making it impossible that miracles should occur, makes it certain that if the Supernatural is operating they must occur. For if the natural situation by itself, and the natural situation plus something else, yielded only the same result, it would be then that we should be faced with a lawless and unsystematic Universe. The better you know that two and two make sour, the better you know that two and three do not. This perhaps helps to make a little clearer what the laws of Nature really are. We are in the habit of talking as if they caused events to happen; but they have never caused any event at all. The laws of motion do not set billiard balls moving: they analyse the motion after something else (say, a human with a cue, or a lurch of the liner, or, perhaps, supernatural power) has provided it. They produce no events: they state the pattern to which every event—if only it can be induced to happen—must conform, just as the rules of arithmetic state the pattern to which all transactions with money must conform—if only you can get hold of any money. Thus in one sense the laws of Nature cover the whole field of space and time; in another, what they leave out is precisely the whole real Universe—the incessant torrent of actual events which makes up true history. That must come from somewhere else. To think the laws can produce it is like thinking that you can create real money by simply doing sums. For every law, in the last resort, says “If you have A, then you will get B.” However, first catch you’re a: the laws will not do it for you. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24

It is therefore inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It does not. If I knock out my pipe, I alter the position of a great many atoms: in the long run, and to an infinitesimal degree, of all the atoms there are. Nature digests or assimilates this event with perfect ease and harmonizes it in a twinkling with all other events. It is one more bit of raw material for the laws to apply to, and they apply. I have simply thrown one event into the general cataract of events and it finds itself at home there and conforms to all other events. If God annihilates or creates deflects a unit of matter He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately all Nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born. We see every day that physical nature is not in the least incommoded by the daily inrush of events from biological nature or from psychological nature. If events ever come from beyond Nature altogether, she will be no more incommoded by them. Be sure she will rush to the point where she is invaded, as the defensive forces rush to a cut in our finger, and there hasten to accommodate the newcomer. The moment it enters her realm it obeys all her laws. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24

Miraculous cranberry juice will sooth the bladder, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern. It does not violate the law’s proviso, “If A, then B”: it says, “However, this time instead of A, A2,” and Nature, speaking through all her laws, replies, “Then B2” and naturalize the immigrant, as she well knows how. She is an accomplished hostess. A miracle is empathically not an event without cause or without results. Its cause is the activity of God: its results follow according to Natural law. In the forward direction (id est, during the time which follows its occurrence) it is interlocked with all Nature just like any other event. Its peculiarity is that it is not in that way interlocked backwards, interlocked with the previous history of Nature. And this is just what some people find intolerable. The reason they find it intolerable is that they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent. I agree with them. However, I think they have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for the whole. That being so, the miracle and the previous history of Nature may be interlocked after all but not in the way the Naturalist expected: rather in a much more roundabout fashion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24

The great complex event called Nature, and the new particular event introduced into it by the miracle, are related by their common origin in God, and doubtless, if we knew enough, most intricately related in His purpose and design, so that a Nature which had had a different history, and therefore been a different Nature, would have been invaded by different miracles or by none at all. In that way the miracles and the previous course of Nature are as well interlocked as any other two realities, but you must go back as far as their common Creator to find the interlocking. You will not find it within Nature. The same sort of thing happens with any partial system. The behaviour of fishes which are being studied in a tank makes a relatively closed system. Now suppose that the tank is shaken by an earthquake in the neighbourhood of the laboratory. The behaviour of the fishes will now be no longer fully explicable by what was going on in the tank before the earthquake happened: there will be a failure of backward interlocking. This does not mean that the earthquake and the previous history of events within the tank are totally and finally unrelated. It does not mean that to find their relation you must go back to the much larger reality which includes both the tank and the earthquake—the reality of earthquake season in America in which earthquakes are happening and but some laboratories are still at work. You would never find it within the history of the tank. In the same way, the miracle is not naturally interlocked in the backward direction. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24

To find out how the miracle is interlocked with the pervious history of nature, you must replace both Nature and the miracle in a larger context. Everything is connected with everything else: but not all things are connected by the short and straight roads we expected. The rightful demand that all reality should be consistent and systematic does not therefore exclude miracles: but it has a very valuable contribution to make to our conception of them. If they occur, it reminds us, must, like all event, be revelations of that total harmony of all that exists. Nothing arbitrary, nothing simply “stuck on” and left unreconciled with the texture of total reality, can be admitted. By definition, miracles must of course interrupt the usual course of Nature; but if they are real they must in the very act of so doing, assert all the more the unity and self-consistency of total reality at some deeper level. They will not be like unmetrical lumps of prose breaking the unity of a poem; they will be like that crowning metrical audacity which, though it may be paralleled nowhere else in the poem, yet, coming just where it does, and effecting just what it effects, is (to those who understand) the supreme revelation of the unity in the poet’s conception. If what we call Nature is modified by supernatural power, then we may be sure that the capability of being so modified is of the essence of Nature—that the total events, if we could grasp it, would turn out to involve, by its very character, the possibility of such modifications. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24

If Nature brings forth miracles, the doubtless it is as “natural” for her to do so when impregnated by the masculine force beyond her as it is for a woman to bear children to a man. In calling them miracles, we do not mean that they are contradictions or outrages; we mean that, left to her own resources, she could never produce them. Joseph Smith does not tell us in his writings how all the revelations recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants came to him from the Lord, but he was able to know what was the word of the Lord because of the Holy Spirit which accompanied the word. He does not say that at times the Lord communicated with him as he looked into the Urim and Thummim. While some of the revelations (perhaps fifteen of them) may have been so received, we know that not all of them were received in this manner. We know that people—prophets and individuals—also receive revelations from God through their own natural power, but in a miraculous manner. Sometimes the Lord speaks in an audible voice, one that is actually heard, and that voice may be loud or merely a whisper. The word of the Lord may come into a person’s mind plainly as though the words had been spoken, and yet no voice is actually heard. Sometimes God reveals Himself in dreams and visions. Often the person prepares oneself to receive the word of God by earnest prayer, fasting, and study upon the matter in question. Then God enlightens one’s mind and the Holy Spirit causes a warm feeling within. Thus one feels that it is right and the will of the Lord. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24

It is hardly true that the attainment of spiritual consciousness automatically brings perfect health, only partly true that it brings better health, and only in certain cases does it even do that. The present-day human body too often has a toxic condition and a poisoned environment. The spiritual disciplines for attainment purify body and mind, thus leading to less sickness. It will not be until a future and better race of humanity has worked out these bad qualities and created a purer environment that a state of perfect health will be actualized. If we shoot a bullet in the wrong direction, we cannot control its course once it has left the gun. However, if we realize our error, we can change the direction of a second shot. We can continue our efforts, nonetheless, to change our first thinking, to get rid of negative and harmful thoughts and feelings and thus improve our character. For if we do this, the type of physical karma manifesting as the sickness which they create will at least not come to us in the future, if we cannot avoid inheriting it in the present from our former lives. Study of this picture would reveal what sickness as a karma of wrong thinking really means and why it often cannot be healed by a mere change of present thought alone. The proof of this statement lies in the fact that some people are born with certain sicknesses or with liability to certain diseases, or else acquire them as infants or as children before they have even had the opportunity to think wrongly at all and while they are still in a state of youthful innocence and purity of thought. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24

Therefore it is not the wrong thoughts of this youthful or innocent person in this present incarnation which could have brought on such sickness in their case. Nor can it be correct to suggest that they have inherited these sicknesses, for the parts maybe right-thinking and high-living people. By depriving themselves of faith in the belief in successive lives on Earther, the Christian Scientists deprive themselves of a more satisfactory explanation of the problem of sickness than the one they have. They say that it was caused by wrong thinking, and yet they cannot say how it is that a baby or a child has been thinking wrongly to have been born with or to have acquired at an early age a sickness for which it is not responsible and for which it parents are not responsible. It might be said that most organic physical disease is karmically caused and most functional physical sickness is mentally caused. The recognition that one is a victim of serious disease embitters one human but humbles another. Which of these two effects will arise depends on one’s past life-experience and present mentally. Deep hurts and bitter experiences from a former unknown incarnation throw their shadows on the present one. From this suffering they derive some strength to amend their ways. Another cause of illness is that God sends us tests and ordeals on this path, which may take the form of illness. However, in that case we emerge spiritually stronger and wiser, if they are passed, and so benefit. There is no inevitability of physical suffering on this path generally, but there is for certain individuals. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24

Universal laws come down more plentifully at certain times for certain aspirants, but as mind and body are highly interrelated, this is offset by the purification of body and emotions. Hence student need not be afraid of this. Again, spiritual healing is a real fact, but it works in a mysterious way dependent on divine grace; but here also it applies only to certain individuals. No matter how the revelation comes, the faithful one knows it is the will of the Lord because of the Holy Spirit which accompanies it. When a revelation came to Joseph Smith, he wrote the words. Later, at the Lord’s command, Joseph had the revelations printed in a book called the “Doctrine and Covenants.” This book contains the words of the Lord, Jesus Christ, to His people today, and all revelations in this story are taken from that book. About the time the Book of Mormon manuscript was lost, Joseph’s baby son died and Emma became so ill she almost died. Joseph was distressed over the illness of his wife and the death of his children. He was concerned about earning a living for his family. Therefore, after the trouble with the lost manuscript was over, Joseph did not translate any more for some time. He worked on his farm. That winter, in February, 1829, his parents visited him. They were anxious for him to continue the work of translating, but Joseph was busy earning money to buy stocks, tools, and furniture for his farm and home. At this time a revelation was given to Joseph’s father through Joseph Smith. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24

The Lord said: “Now, behold, a marvelous work is about to come forth among the children of men. Therefore, O ye that embark in the service of God, see that ye serve him with all your heart, might, mind, and strength, that ye may stand blameless before God at the last day. Therefore, if ye have desires to serve God ye are called to the work, for, behold, the field is white already to harvest. And lo, he that thrusteth in his sickle with his might, the same layeth up in store that he perish not, but bringeth salvation to his soul. And faith, hope, charity, and love, with an eye single to the glory of God, qualified him for the work. Remember, faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, godliness, charity, humility, diligence. Ask and ye shall receive, knock and it shall be opened unto you. Amen.” About a month later Martin Harris came to Joseph and begged him to ask the Lord for permission to let him see the golden plates so that he might tell others he had seen them. Joseph was so anxious that his good friend might have his desire that he prayed God for this permission. By revelation the Lord said: “I, the Lord, have given these things unto you and have commanded you that you should stand as a witness of these things. You should not show them except to those persons to whom I command you.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 24

Joseph was told that it was not important that people see the golden plates. The Lord said: “Behold, if they will not believe my words, they would not believe you, my servant Joseph Smith, if it were possible that you could show them all these things which I have committed unto you.” However, the Lord promised that an Angel would show the plates to three people so they would surely know, and that those three people were to bear witness of it as long as they lived. The Lord said: “I have reserved those things which I have instated unto you for a wise purpose in me, and it shall be made known unto future generations; but this generation shall have my word through you; and in addition to your testimony, the testimony of three of my servants, who I shall call and ordain, unto whom I will show these things.” The Lord said that Martin Harris might have the privilege of being one of these three witnesses under certain conditions: “If he will bow down before me, and humble himself in mighty prayer and faith, in the sincerity of his heart, then will I grant unto him a view of the things which he desires to see. And then he shall say unto the people of this generation, Behold, I have seen the things which the Lord has shown unto Joseph Smith, Jr., and I know of a surety that they are true, for I have seen them; for they have been shown unto me by the power of God and not of man.” In this same revelation Joseph was commanded to repent and walk more uprightly before God, and to pay no attention to human’s pleadings. He was promised that if he would be firm in keeping the commandments of God, he would have eternal life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24

The Lord said: “I will provide means whereby thou mayest accomplish the thing which I have commanded thee; and if thou art faithful in keeping my commandments, thou shalt be lifted up at the last day. Amen.” It is a result which several persons have experienced that the Glimpse which came while reading some inspired passages of a book or verses of a poem, returns again at a later time. The belief that one must wait many years before one can find a glimpse of one’s Godly self is not accurate. Those frightened away from the Quest by the high qualifications demanded, may find some comfort in the fact that these “glimpses” increasing in number, depth, and frequency can be had even at an early stage. It is as silly to fix the age for such an experience at thirty-six, as the late author of Cosmic Consciousness did, as it is to assert that it always lasts about twenty-four hours merely because St. Francis Xavier was illuminated for such a period. How near to the glimpse do the mass of people come who claim they have never had one? Perhaps the feeling of awe to which certain buildings or persons or idea may give rest is the nearest. In ordinary life such glimpses are all too rare but they are not so rare as is generally believed. For their true nature may not be recognized. The external surroundings or the external situations which lead to their internal appearance may disguise them so that their independent nature is not understood. Such surroundings as an impressive natural landscape or such situations as a perfectly relaxed physical body are not an absolutely indispensable condition of their existence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24

Moments like this have come to many humans who have not recognized the preciousness, the special value, and the uncommon nature of the experience. Often there are only half-glimpses, but even they afford a vague satisfaction. The time will come when it will be found that glimpses are a proper part of human existence, are within the area of a normal life, are valid topics for study and examination by science. The Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist David Hubel is right to suppose that such “fundamental changes in our view of the human brain cannot but have profound effects on our view of ourselves and the World.” Scientific advances shape our assumptions about reality. Few assumptions are more fundamental than those involved in the perennial mind-body problem: How does the mind relate to the body? For centuries the min-body relationship has puzzled philosophers and scientists. On the one hand, brain activity is tightly linked to mental activity. On the other hand, the mind directs bodily activity: when we become embarrassed, we blush. One therefore wonders: What is the mind? Is it something immaterial? Does it exist apart from the material brain? (If so, how does it affect the brain?) Or is the mind a manifestation of brain activity? One set of views emphasize dualism. Dualism presumes that the mind and body are two distinct entities—the mind nonphysical, the body physical—but entities that somehow manage to interact with each other. The ancient Greeks saw the mind and body as rider and horse. The Roman philosopher Seneca referred in his Morals to our bodies as our luggage—something we carry around with us. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24

Descartes in the seventeenth century assumed, “I am lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel.” More recently, the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield argued that “the mind seems to act independently of the brain in the same sense that a programmer acts independently of one’s computer.” Two distinguished thinkers, the philosopher Sir Karl Popper and the neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, took such a view by suggesting that the human brain must have some special point at which it is open to the nonphysical influence of the mind. “The self in a sense plays on the brain, as a pianist plays on a piano or a driver plays on the controls of the car,” wrote Popper. Most brain scientists find this dualistic view hard to accept, partly with natural phenomena, cannot have any knowledge of. They instead generally favour some form of monism, which assumes that mind and body are one. Thus the psychologist Donald Hebb could say that, however implausible it may be to say that consciousness “consist of brain activity, it nevertheless begins to look very much as though the proposition is true.” Monism, sometimes called physicalism, holds that humans are one and only one substance—that is, a physical body. Typically, however, the concept has been associated with reductive materialism and determinism, views difficult to reconcile with religious views of people. Recently, Warren Brown and his colleagues have suggested an alternative version of monism more compatible with Christian belief. They call it nonreductive physicalism.  #RandolphHarris 19 of 24

Warren Brown and his colleagues agree with physicalizing about the biological nature of humans. Yet by qualifying this physicalism with nonreductive they want to assert that conscious decisions are real phenomena effective in exerting “top-down” causal influence on the brain’s neurophysiology. This view agrees that thinking and deciding depend on lower-level neural processes, but claims that they are causal in their own right—that is, that they have top-down causal influence on the lower-level processes. Not surprisingly, there is an ongoing lively debate among philosophers and others about this way of thinking. While we tend also to favour a monist view, we would prefer to express in somewhat differently. When we bring together evidence from studies of brain-damaged people, monitoring the brain activity of normal people engaged in tasks designed to mobilize language or memory or to produce particular emotional reactions, from recording with electrodes from the brains of animals, and from studying the brains of people who have suffered from neurological diseases, the one thing that emerges repeatedly is the interdependence of what we think, remember, and see, and how we feel and express our feelings, with what is happening in our brains. Indeed, the interdependence is so all pervasive that we could label it as an “intrinsic” interdependence, meaning it is the way the World is as regards the links between brains and cognitive behaviour. It is also very important to remember that it is people who speak, think, and feel—not brains. You cannot reduce language to brains any more than you can reduce the word Exit over an emergency door to the circuits and physical processes in which it is embodied. Both are necessary to give a full account of what you are observing. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24

It is this irreducible aspect of mental life that makes it sensible to further qualify “intrinsic interdependence” and describe it as an “irreducible intrinsic interdependence.” This way we avoid using words like monism, dualism, and physicalism. They have such a long history, and bring with them so much philosophical baggage, that they mean different things to different people. Thus we see mental activity “embodied” in brain activity. The link is not a causal one in the most common way of using causal in science, with one physical force causing another. The relationship is between two interdependent levels. Description at both levels is necessary to give a full account of what is happening. Having said all that, one key point remains. It is as conscious agents that we are able to consider these matters, to think about the, and to write about them as we have done here. In this sense it is the mental events, the conscious-agency aspect, that ultimately has primacy. This is a point underlined repeatedly by scientist from different disciplines. Everything we know, we know by means of the conscious mind. There is something peculiar about consciousness as a subject of science, for consciousness itself is the individual, personal process each of us must possess in working order to proceed with any scientific explanation. In the revised mind-brain model, consciousness becomes an integral working component in the brain function, an autonomous phenomenon in its own right, not reducible to electro-chemical mechanisms. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24

I am surging for some kind of an active role for consciousness, and indeed a powerful one with a strong selective advantage. However, does consciousness arise from brain activity? Somewhere near the top of our list of the great wonders of the World is the emergence of mind from the unimaginably complex interaction of the brain’s subsystems. So far as we can tell, mind is not an extra entity that occupies the brain. Everything in science to date seems to indicate that conscious awareness is a property of the living brain and inseparable from it. Yet there they are: our memories, our wishes, our creative ideas our moment-to-moment awareness—somehow arising from the coordinated activity of billions of nerve cells, each of which communicates with hundreds or thousands of other nerve cells. An analogy may help us see that the properties of a whole system, such as the brain-mind system, may be untied with, yet not be reducible to, its physical parts. Another of the World’s wonders is the behaviour of the social insects—the ants, the bees, the termites. An ant colony, of example, is a sort of intelligent organism. It “knows” how to grow, how to move, how to build. This intelligence is not reducible to the individual ants; a solitary ant, with only a few neurons strung together, is a witless, thoughtless creature. Yet from the interactions of a dense mass of thousands of ants a collective intelligence somehow emerges. There is nothing extra plugged into the ants to create this intelligence, yet to look no further than the individual ants would be to miss the miracle of the living colony. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24

Likewise, to stop with the story of the brain cells would be to miss the miracle of the human experience. The human part of you and me is not a ghost in a body but rather the whole unified system of brain and mind. Our human experiences of pain and pleasures, of self-awareness and abstract thought, emerge from brain activity, yet can be understood at their own level. We may indeed have been created from dust, over eons of time, but the end result is a priceless creature, one rich with potentials beyond our imagining. The devout child of God takes time to plan ahead for market day. However, one’s sinful desires will suggest that any other day of the week would be just as good for carting and hauling. Nonetheless, the holy person bends the to one’s own purpose; that is to say, subjects the willful horses to the tight reins in one’s strong hands. What is the moral? No one has a greater struggle than the one who tries to conquer oneself? And this ought to be our business each and every day, to harness ourselves and pull our ever increasing weight. Every perfection in this life comes with its own imperfection. For example, every window glass, every polished piece of metal, returns to the viewer’s eye a distorted image. No great matter! Every humble person, when one looks at one’s own likeness, may see just a lump. However, in that lumpkin, that unpromising mass of Humankind, is more of a portrait of God than the most profound scientific experiment can produce. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24

You should entreat trees and rocks to preach the Scriptures, and you should ask rice fields and gardens for the truth. Ask pillars for the Holy Scriptures and learn from hedges and walls. Long ago the great God honoured humanity by becoming a man, who knows what other forms the omnipresent may take on? Now there is no need to blame the complexities of logical inquiry or the simplicities of natural observation. Both ways of looking at things have their own perfections and themselves mirrors of God. We thank Thee also for the miraculous and mighty deeds of liberation wrought by Thee, and for Thy victories in the battles our forefathers fought in the days of old, at this season of the year. In the days of the High Priest Mattathias, son of Johanan, of the Hasmonean family, a tyrannical power rose up against Thy people of Israel to compel them to forsake Thy Torah, and to force the to transgress Thy commandments. In Thine abundant mercy Thou didst stand by them in time of distress. Thou didst rise to their defense and didst vindicate their cause. Thou didst bring retribution upon the evil doers, delivering the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the wicked into the hands of the just, and the arrogant into the hands of those devoted to Thy Torah. Thou didst thus make Thy greatness and holiness known in Thy World, and didst bring great deliverance to America. Then Thy children came into Thy dwelling place, cleansed the Temple, purified the Sanctuary, kindled lights in Thy sacred courts, and they designated these great states of giving thanks and praise unto Thy great name. For all this, Thy name, O our King, shall be blessed and exalted for ever and ever. Warriors may be forged in the fire of battles, but heroes are found in the most unlikely places. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24

Cresleigh Homes

The pretty walk in pantry is one of our favorite parts about the kitchen in the Meadows Res 2 model! And the glass door gives plenty of motivation to keep things organized! 👌

This single story home boats an ideal layout with 2,372 square feet, of thoughtfully designed living space, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a three car garage.

The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters with a butler’s pantry to provide easy access to the dining room. The great room is spacious and its open floor plan allows all parts of the home to flow. The Owner’s suite nestled away from the secondary bedrooms allowing for maximum privacy, yet still accessible.

Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!

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