If you want to make beautiful music, you must play rhythm and blues together the way Minnie Riperton, The Isley Brothers, Debarge, Diana Ross, Anita Baker, or Patti LaBelle did. As you sit reading this page, receptors for touch and pressure in the seat of your pants are sending nerve impulses to your brain. Although these sensations have been present all along, you were probably not aware of them until just now. This “seat-of-the-pants phenomenon” is an example of selective attention (voluntarily focusing on a specific sensory input). We are able o “tune in on” a single sensory message while excluding others. Another familiar example of the is the “cocktail party effect.” When you are in a group of people, surrounded by voices, you can still select and attend to the voice of the person you are facing. Of if that person gets dull, you can eavesdrop on conversations all over the room. (Be sure to smile and nod your head occasionally!) Actually, if you hear your own name spoken somewhere in the room, no matter how interesting your companion may be, your attention will probably shift away. We do find what others say about us to be very interesting, do we not? One of the things that held me back from Supernaturalism was a deep repugnance to the view of Nature, which, as I thought, Supernaturalism entailed. I passionately desired that Nature should exist “on her own.” The idea that she had been made and altered, by God, seemed to take from her all that spontaneity which I found so refreshing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

In order to breathe freely I wanted to feel that in Nature one reached at last something that simply was: the thought that she had been manufactured or “put there,” and put there with a purpose, was suffocating. I wrote a poem in those days about a sunrise, I remember, in which, after describing the scene, I added that some people liked to believe there was a Spirit behind it all and that this Spirit was communicating with them. And face it, when there is a summer lightning storm, people still feel like primitive people did, that they did something to upset God. Nonetheless, the poem was not much good and I have forgotten most of it: but it ended up by saying how much rather I would feel: “That in their own right Earth and Sky continually do dance for their own sakes—and here crept I to watch the World by chance.” “By chance!”—one could not bear to feel that the sunrise had been in any way “arranged” or had anything to do with oneself. To find that it had not simply happened, that it had been somehow contrived, would be as bad as finding that the fieldmouse I saw beside some lonely hedge was really a clockwork mouse put there to amuse me, or (worse still) to point some moral lesson. The Greek poet asks, “If water sticks in your throat, what will you wash it down?” I likewise asked, “If Nature herself proves artificial, where will you go to seek wilderness? Where is the real out-of-doors?” To find that all the woods, and small streams in the middle of the woods, and odd corners of mountain valleys, and the wind and the grass were only a sort of scenery, only backcloths for some kind of play, and that play perhaps one with a moral—what flatness, what an anticlimax, what an unendurable bore! #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

The cure of this mood began years ago: but I must record that the cure was not complete until I began to study this question of Miracles. At every stage in my discovery, I have found my idea of Nature becoming more vivid and more concrete. I set out on a work which seemed to involve reducing her status and undermining her walls at every turn: the paradoxical result is a growing sensation that if I am not very careful, she will become the heroine of my story. She has never seemed to me more great or more real than at this moment. The reason is not far to seek. As long as one is a Naturalist, “Nature” is only a word for “everything.” And Everything is not a subject about which anything very interesting can be said or (save by illusion) felt. One aspect of things strikes us and we talk of the “peace” of Nature; another strikes us and we talk of the “peace” of Nature; another strikes us and we talk of her cruelty. And then, because we falsely take her for the ultimate and self-existent Fact and cannot quite repress our high instinct to worship the Self-existent, we are all at sea and our moods fluctuate and Nature means to us whatever we please as the moods select and slur. However, when we recognize that Nature is a creature, a created thing, with its own particular tang or flavour, everything becomes different. There is no need any longer to select and slur. It is not in her, but in Something far beyond her, that all lines meet and all contrasts are explained. It is no more baffling that the creature called Nature should be both fair and cruel than the first man you meet in the train should be a dishonest grocer and a kind husband. For she is not the Absolute: she is one of the creatures, with her good points and her bad points and her own unmistakable flavour running through them all. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

To say that God has created her is not to say that she is unreal, but precisely that she is real. Would you make God less creative than Dr. Shakespeare or Dr. Dickens? What He creates is created in the round: it is far more concrete than Falstaff or Sam Weller. The theologians certainly tell us that He created Nature freely. They mean that He was not forced to do so by any external necessity. However, we must not interpret freedom negatively, as if Nature were a mere construction of parts arbitrarily stuck together. God’s creative freedom is to be conceived as the freedom of a poet: the freedom to create a consistent, beneficial thing with its own inimitable flavour. Dr. Shakespeare need not create Mr. Falstaff: but if he does, Mr. Falstaff must be above average weight. God need not create this Nature. He might have created others, He may have created others. However, granted this Nature, then doubtless no smallest part of her is there except because it expresses the character He chose to give her. It would be a miserable error to suppose that the dimensions of space and time, the death and re-birth of vegetation, the unity in multiplicity of organisms, the union in opposition of genders, and the colour of each particular apple in Herefordshire this autumn, were merely a collection of useful devices forcibly welded together. They are the very idiom, almost the facial expression, the smell or taste, of an individual thing. The quality of Nature is present in them all just as the Latinity of Latin is presented in every inflection or the “Correggiosity” of Correggio in every stroke of the brush. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Nature is by human (and probably by Divine) standards partly good and partly evil. We Christians believe that she has been corrupted. However, the same tang or flavour runs through both her corruptions and her excellences. Everything is in character. Mr. Falstaff does not sin in the same way as Mr. Othello. Mr. Othello’s fall bears a close relation to his virtues. If Mrs. Perdita had fallen she would not have been bad in the same way as Lady Macbeth: if Lady Macbeth has remained good her goodness would have been quite different from that of Mrs. Perdita. The evils we see in Nature are, so to speak, the evils proper to this Nature. Her very character decreed that is she were corrupted the corruption would take this form and not another. The horrors of parasitism and the glories of motherhood are good and evil worked out of the same basic theme or idea. I spoke just now about the Latinity of Latin. It is more evident to us than it can have been to the Romans. “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as I depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay says the Lord. On the contrary: ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him (or her); if he (or she) is thirsty, give him (or her) something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his (or her) head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good,’” reports Romans 12.17-21. The Englishness of English is audible only to those who know some other language as well. In the same way and for the same reason, only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little way from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the World before you can be distinctly conscious of hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her. Come out, look back, and then you will see…this astonishing cataract bears, babies and bananas: this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes and toads. How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her. If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as the scientists tells us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy and half-flamboyant creates, this ogress, this hoyden, this incorrigible fairy, this dumb witch. (However, mother Nature does not die out as long as the plant still exists. She produces polar opposites and extremes and usually, one extreme wins out, either hot or cold, dark or light.) The theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed. The “vanity” to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence. She will be cured, but cured in character: no tamed (Heaven forbid) nor sterilized. We shall still be able to recognise our old enemy, friend, playfellow and foster-mother, so perfected as to be not less, but more, herself. And that will be a merry meeting. When the Earth is left to is natural fertility and covered with immense forests that were never mutilated by the axe, it offers storehouses and shelters at every step to animals of every species. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

Humans, dispersed among animals, observe and imitate their industry, and thereby raise themselves to the level of animal instinct, with the advantage that, whereas each species has only its own instincts, humans, who may perhaps have none that belongs o them, appropriates all of them to oneself, feeds oneself equally well on most of the various foods which the other animals divine among themselves, and consequently finds one’s sustenance more easily than any of the rest can. Accustomed from childhood to inclement weather and the rigours of the seasons, acclimated to fatigue, and forced, naked and without arms, to defend their lives and their prey against other ferocious beasts, or to escape them by taking flight, humans develop a robust and nearly unalterable temperament. Children enter the World with the excellent constitution of their parents and strengthen it with the same exercises that produced it, thus acquiring all the vigour that the human race is capable of having. Nature treats them precisely the way the law of Sparta treated the children of its citizens: it renders strong and robust those who are well constituted and makes all the rest perish, thereby differing from our present-day societies, where the state, by making children burdensome to their parents, kills them indiscriminately before their birth. Since the savage human’s body is the only instrument one knows, one employs it for a variety of purposes that, for lack of practice, our are incapable of serving. #RandolphHarri 7 of 22

And our industry deprives us of the force and agility that necessity obliges one to acquire. If one had had an axe, would one’s wrists break such strong branches? If one had had a sling, would one throw a stone with so much force? If one had had a ladder, would one climb a tree so nimbly? If one had had a horse, would one run so fast? Give a civilized man time to gather all his machines around him, and undoubtedly one will easily overcome a savage man. However, if you want to see an even more unequal fight, pit them against each other naked or disarmed, and you will soon realize the advantage of constantly having all of one’s forces at one’s disposal, of always being ready for any event, and of always carrying one’ entire self, as it were, with one. Dr. Hobbes maintains that humans are naturally intrepid and seeks only to attack and to fight. On the other hand, an illustrious philosopher thinks, and Cumberland and Pufendorf also affirm, that nothing is as timid as humans in the state of nature, and that one is always trembling and ready to take flight at the slightest sound one hears or at the slightest movement one perceives. That may be the case with regard to objects with which one is not acquainted. And I do not doubt that one is frightened by all the new sights that present themselves to one every time one can neither discern the physical good and evil one may expect from them nor compare one’s forces with the dangers one must one: rare circumstances in the state of nature, where everything takes place in such a uniform manner where the face of the Earth is not subject to those sudden and continual changes caused by the passions and inconstancy of peoples living together. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

However, since savage humans live dispersed among the animals and, finding oneself early on in a position to measure oneself against them, one soon makes the comparison; and, aware that one surpasses them in skillfulness more than they surpass one in strength, one learns not to fear them anymore. Pit a bear or a wolf against a savage who is robust, agile, and courageous, as they all are, armed with stones and a hefty cudgel, and you will see that the danger will be at least equal on both sides, and that after several such experiences, ferocious beasts, which do not like to attack one another, will be quite reluctant to attack a human, having found one to be as ferocious as themselves. With regard to animals that actually have more strength than humans have skillfulness, one is in the same position as other weaker species, which nevertheless subsist. Humans have the advantage that, since they are no less adept than they at running and at finding almost certain refuge in trees, one always has the alternative of accepting leaving the encounter and the choice of taking flight or entering into combat. Moreover, it appears that no animal naturally attacks humans, except in the case of self-defense or extreme hunger, or shows evidence of those violent antipathies towards one that seem to indicate that one species is destined by nature to serve as food for another. [No doubt these are the reasons why some marginalized groups and savages bother themselves so little about the ferocious beast they may encounter in the woods. In this respect, the Caribs of Venezuela, among others, live in the most profound security and without the slightest inconvenience. Although they are practically naked, says Francisco Coreal, they boldly expose themselves in the forest, armed only with bow and arrow, but no one has ever heard of one of them being devoured by animals.] #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

All human groups, from primitive times to today, depend on face-to-face, person-to-person communication. However, systems were needed for sending messages across time and space as well. The ancient Persians are said to have set up towers or “call-posts,” placing humans with shrill loud voices atop them to relay messages by shouting from one tower to the next. The Romans operated an extensive messenger service called the cursus publicus. Between 1305 and the early 1800’s, the House of Taxis ran a form of pony express service all over Europe. By 1628 it employed twenty thousand humans. Its couriers, clad in blue and silver uniforms, crisscrossed the continent carrying messages between princes and generals, merchants and money lenders. During First Wave civilization all these channels were reserved for the rich and powerful only. Ordinary people had no access to them. Attempts to send letter by other means were looked upon with suspicion or forbidden by the authorities. In short, while face-to-face information exchange was open to all, the newer systems used for carrying information beyond the confines of a family or a village were essentially closed and used for purposes of social or political control They were, in effect, weapon of the elite. The Second Wave, as it moved across country after country, smashed this communications monopoly. This occurred not because the rich and powerful grew suddenly altruistic but because Second Wave technology and factory mass production required “mass-ive” movements of information that the old channels simply could no longer handle. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

The information needed for economic production in primitive and First Wave societies is comparatively simple and usually available from someone near at hand. It is mostly oral or gestural in form. Second Wave economies, by contrast, required the tight coordination of work done at many locations. Not only raw materials but great amounts of information had to be produced and carefully distributed. For this reason, as the Second Wave gained momentum every country raced to build a postal service. The post office was an invention quite as imaginative and socially useful as the cotton gin or the spinning jenny and, to an extent once forgotten, but becoming more popular in modern times as people question the security and privacy of electronic messages, look to be more humane and send handwritten notes, and also are doing more commerce online and like to have packages delivered by the post office so they can access locked buildings and communities. The American orator Edward Everett declared: “I am compelled to regard the Post-office, next to Christianity, as the right arm of our modern civilization.” For the post office provided the first wide open channel for industrial-era communications. By 1837 the British Post Office was carrying not merely messages for an elite but some 88 million pieces of mail a year—an avalanche of communications by the standards of the day. By 1960, at about the time the industrial era peaked and the Third Wave began its surge, that number had already climbed to 10 billion. That same year the U.S. Post Office was distributing 355 pieces of domestic mail for every man, woman, and child in the nation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

The surge in postal messages that accompanied the industrial revolution merely hints, however, at the real volume of information that began to flow in the wake of the Second Wave. An even greater number of messages poured through what might be called “micro postal systems” within large organizations. Memos are letters that never reach the public communications channels. In 1955, as the Second Wave crested in the United States of America, the Hoover Commission peeked inside the files of three major corporations. It discovered, respectively, thirty-four thousand, fifty-six thousand, and sixty-four thousand documents and memos on file for each employee on the payroll! Nor could the mushrooming informational needs of industrial societies be met in writing alone. Thus the telephone and telegraph were invented in the nineteenth century to carry their share of the ever-swelling communications load. By 1960 Americans were placing some 256 million phone calls per day—over 93 billion a year—and even the most advanced telephone system and networks in the World were often overloaded. All these were essentially systems for delivering message from one sender to one receiver at a time. However, a society developing mass production and mass consumption needed ways to send mass messages, too—communications from one sender to many receivers simultaneously. If need be, unlike the preindustrial employer, who could personally visit each of one’s handful of employees in their own homes, the industrial employer could not communicate with his thousands of workers on a one-by-one basis. Still less could the mass merchandiser or distributor communicate with one’s customer one by one. Second Wave society needed—and not surprisingly invented—powerful means for ending the same message to many people at once, cost effectively, rapidly, and reliably. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

Postal services could carry the same message to millions—but not instantly. Yet in the year 2020, the United States Post Office had an annual operating revenue of $73.1 billion, 495,941 career employees, and mail volume of 129.2. In addition, with cyber security concerns and President Trump being banned from social media, this reminds people of the freedom the post office and telephone still provide as a means communicate with the country. Although the post office cannot deliver messages instantly at this time, telephones have the ability carry massages in an instant—but not always legally to millions of people simultaneously. This gap came to be filled by the mass media. Today, of course, the mass circulation newspaper and magazine are so standard a part of daily life in every one of the industrial nations that they are taken for granted. Yet the rise of these publications on a national level reflected the convergent development of many new industrial technologies and social forms. Thus, they were made possible by the coming together of trains to transport the publications throughout a [European-size] country in a single day; rotary presses capable of turning out dozens of millions of copies in several hours; a network of telegraphs and telephones…above all a public taught to read by compulsory education, and industries needing to mass distribute their products. In the mass media, from newspaper and radio to movies and television, we find once again an embodiment of the basic principle of the factory. All of them stamp identical messages into millions of brains, just as the factory stamps out identical products for use in millions of homes. Standardized, mass-manufactured “fact,” counterparts of standardized, mass-manufactured products, flow from a few concentrated image-factories out to millions of consumers. Without this vast, powerful system for channeling information, industrial civilization could not have taken form or functioned reliably. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

Thus there sprang up in all industrial societies, capitalist and socialist alike, an elaborate info-sphere—communication channels through which individual and mass messages could be distributed as efficiently as goods or raw materials. This info-spere intertwined with and serviced the techo-sphere and the socio-sphere, helping to integrate economic production with private behaviour. Each of these spheres performed a key function in the larger system, and could not have existed without the others. The techno-sphere produced and allocated wealth; the socio-sphere, with its thousands of interrelated organizations, allocated role to individuals in the system. And the info-sphere allocated the information necessary to make the entire system work. Together they formed the basic architecture of society. We see here in outline, therefore, the common structures of all Second Wave nations—regardless of their cultural or climatic difference, regardless of their ethnic and religious heritage, regardless of whether they call themselves capitalist or communist. These parallel structures, as basic in Russia and Hungary as in Germany, France, or Canada, set the limits within which political, social, and cultural differences were expressed. They emerged everywhere only after bitter political, cultural, and economic battle between those who attempted to preserve the older First Wave structure and those who recognized that only a new civilization could solve the painful problems of the old. The Second Wave brought with it a fantastic extension of human hope. For the first time men and women dared to believe that poverty, hunger, disease, and tyranny might be overthrown. Utopian writers and philosophers, from Abbe Morelly and Robert Owen to Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Edward Bellamy, and scores of others, saw in the emerging industrial civilization the potential for introducing peace, harmony, employment for all, equality of wealth or of opportunity, the end of privilege based on birth, the end of all those conditions that seemed immutable or eternal during the hundreds of thousands of years of primitive existence and the thousands of year of agricultural civilization. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

If today industrial civilization seems to us something less than utopian—if it appears, in fact, to be oppressive, dreary, ecologically precarious, war-prone, and psychologically repressive—we need to understand why. We will be able to answer this question only if we look at the gigantic wedge that split the Second Wave psyche into two warring parts. Cities of the pre-Civil War era were compact walking cities. The radius of even the largest cities did not extend over three miles. Even in New York a walk of an hour would bring the stroller from the central city to open countryside. If one were adventurous and could afford it, a three-quarters-of-an-hour ride from Wall Street on the new horse-drawn streetcars would bring one to the norther boundary of the city, where a swampy area of suburban shacks was being transformed into what would become Central Park. Not that many people rode in private or even public transportation. While the streets evidenced many carriages, owning such was a privilege restricted to the upper and some of the upper middle classes. Maintaining a horse and carriage in the city—with keeping the coachman and stable hands that were part of such ownership—was an expense beyond the means of ordinary citizens. Most cities, by the 1850s, had public omnibuses for middle-class usage. Omnibuses were essentially overcrowded urban stagecoaches. The poor qualities of urban streets, however, made the omnibuses uncomfortable as well as crowded, slow, and expensive. Thus, before the advent of horse-pulled streetcars in the 1850s, most middle-class urban dwellers got where they were going by walking. In good weather it was both faster and more comfortable than riding the omnibuses. The poor, regardless of weather or distance, always walked. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

The decades prior to the Civil War (1861-1865) saw the rapid expansion of existing cities and the founding of many new ones. All were densely packed walking cities. In the two score of years prior to 1860, cities grew at a pace faster than they grew before or ever since. Of the fifty largest cities today, only seven were incorporated before 1816; thirty-nine were incorporated between 1816 and 1876; and only four have been incorporated since 1876. The effect of environmental factors on the growth of pre-Civil War cities is evident from the fact that of the nine cities that had surpassed a population of 100,000 by 1860, eight were major ports. The one exception really was not ana exception. It was Brooklyn, which was an independent city until 1898, when it was incorporated into New York. Brooklyn, of course, shared the best natural harbour on the east coast with New York. New York was by far the most important American city of the eve of the Civil War. It had a population of over 1 million in 1860 (only London and Paris were larger); it was the financial center of the nation; and its docks handled a third of the country’s exports and a full two-thirds of its imports. However, in spite of its tremendous growth, even New York retained many preindustrial-city characteristics. The urban economy was still in a commercial rather than industrial stage. Business people were primarily merchants, although they intermittently took on subsidiary functions such as manufacturing, speculating, and banking. In spite of the ready availability of land, the eighteenth—and nineteenth-century American city was remarkably densely packed. An examination today of the old central area of cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, or Charleston reveals block after block of tightly packed town houses. Lots were commonly only twenty feet wide and occasionally even narrower, with houses built right on the lot line. Front yards were nonexistent, with houses even of the wealthy fronting on the sidewalk, which in turn was immediately adjacent to the street. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

This tight housing pattern was in part a carryover of the European pattern. European cities were tightly packed in part because of the existence of city walls. Cities in North America were not constrained by external ramparts as were the cities in Europe. Where longwall fortifications had once existed, such as Wall Street in New York or Fort Dearborn in Chicago, they were rapidly dismantled once the surrounding Indian populations had been extinguished and the threat of Indian attack eliminate. The Canadian exceptions of the stone-walled cities of Montreal and Quebec reflected a French rather than English tradition. They were exceptions that proved the rule. A hundred and fifty years ago affluent town houses abutting Fifth Avenue in New York City represented the ideal of urban life. In upper-class neighbourhoods, there was minimal traffic, but a lot of congestion in the central business district. The high density did not occur in United States of America cities as a result of crowding within the walls for defense purposes. Far more important was the maintenance of high-density neighbourhoods because of custom and fashion. The new homes of the wealthy in Georgian London were built cheek to jowl, and the eastern seaboard cities of the United State of America followed the London fashion. The existence of nearby open land did not, at first, sway American cities from following the European pattern. Even small towns built housing side by ide while surrounded by mile upon mile of vacant land. Overall, the American city mixed commercial, residential, and even manufacturing activities, but each large city had a few blocks of home of wealthy residents crowded near the center of the city. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

Often these elite homes were only a block or two from far more humble housing. Traces of this preindustrial walking city pattern of centrally located elite areas can still be seen in Beacon Hill in Boston, Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, and Washington Square in New York. Having a central location was a sign of social and economic achievement. It was fashionable to have a central core address. Thus small central-city lots were extremely valuable, while within walking distance there was unbuilt-upon open land. Cities were also densely packed as a matter of practicality. Before the era of rapid and inexpensive mass transit, it was a major inconvenience to be outside of the central area. Thus, peripheral areas were given over largely to the less affluent and those on the fringes of society. In an era of slow, uncomfortable, and expensive transportation, the families of means took the center, and the poor were more likely to be relegated to the periphery. Within the city one walked to work in the morning, walked home for lunch, walked back to work, and then walked home again in the evening. This was not a major chore, since home and business were never far removed. They might, in fact, be in the same building: The first floor was given over to commerce, the second and third reserved for family and clerks, and the fourth perhaps for storage. People lived and worked in the same house or at last in the same neighbourhood. The separation of workplace and residence that was to become a hallmark of the industrial city was limited in the preindustrial American city. Virtually everyone lived in less than a mile from their place of work. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

The result of all of the above was that the walking city had little spatial separation of economic activities and residential areas. Nor was there the sharp division and spatial separation of socioeconomic status that we associate with contemporary urban areas. The wealthy clearly lived far more comfortable lives and on better blocks than the urban poor, but they did not live in neigbourhoods that were physically far removed from the poor. Spacial and social separation of socioeconomic classes would be a product of the technologies of the post-Civil War industrial era. O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain; for purple mountains’ majesty, above the fruited plain. America, America, God shed His grace on thee, and crown Thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom during the days of out life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, bleed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessing that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. The light streaming from a table lamp proves the existence of electricity. The light streaming into the mind in these exalted moments proves the existence of the Soul. Whoever approaches the Divine Source of all things comes into the aura of its Power and the perception of its Light. This is not ordinary light: it is holy, transcendental, and awe-inspiring. #RandolphHaris 19 of 22

The experience of divine Light is no hallucination but an actuality, an entirely real one, even a thrilling one. If the Light is not resisted, by timidity, ignorance, or egoism, it will work upon the entire human being, radically transforming one’s outlook, life, and consciousness. In its Light human beings to see what one has not seen with the body’s eyes, the intellect’s understanding. If one can hold oneself in the Light steadily and unfalteringly, one’s consciousness will be raised to a higher plane. The inner light will give one a glimpse of an ennobled and purified life and inspire one with the urge to realize it. Generally the seeing of light during prayer is a favourable sign of present experience or good omen of future experience. It indicates that prayer in depth is being attained or will be later. The light may seem spread out in space or as a thin ray alone. It may appear as a tiny black-centered sun or as a large round ball. There are still other forms—such as lightning and stars. Generally, too, there will be a living dynamic quality in it, a movement, a winking, and a fiery flickering. Light manifestations: (a) throbbing with Energy, (b), as Overself, (c) thought-free Peace or Joy. Without a prayer is anyone who put one’s hope in anthropoids and hominoids, said Jeremiah (17.5). One should put it in Jesus Chris, for the love of whom one should serve the poor and even be mistaken for the poor. What shame can there be in that? asked Saint Paul in his Second Letter to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 4.5). #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

Do not rise above your station. Just place your hope in God who is above all stations. Do what you think you should do, and God will be the witness of your goodwill. Do not rely on your own counsel or seek the counsel of another. Rely instead on the grace of God, who helps the humble and humbles those who think they have no need of help. That is the encouragement of the Letter of James (4.6). Do not glory in wealth, said the  pauperous Jeremiah (9.23), especially if you have a stash. Do not brag about your friends, especially if they have positions of importance. If you have to glory at all, then take great pride in God, who surpasses all created things and desires above all else to give Himself as a gift. That is what Saint Paul urged the First Corinthians to do (1.31). Do not boast about your magnitude or your pulchritude! It takes only a sniffle to snuff your life out, corrupt your corpse, bury your bones. Do not whistle at the snappiness of your talent or the snazziness of your attire. God will not like that, and He is the whole of whim you are only a part. Do not think better of yourself than others. Why? Because at that very moment God might just think you worse than others. He, if anybody, should know what stuffings are found in Humankind, as the Gospel of John has hinted (2.15). Do not be proud of your good works. Why? Because your judgments are not necessarily God’s. What tickles your fancy might make God sneeze, and then who would say Gesundheit? #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

If you do something god, believe better in others; that they will keep your humility fresh. Prefer others to yourself to another, and there is no telling which of your legs God will break first. The humble soul’s vista is shimmering with peace. The heart of the proud soul, however, is frequently clouded with jealousy or rage. The piers are pummeled by the waves; in a lonely field the rain lashes an abandoned train; outlaws fill the mountain caves. Fantastic grow the evening gowns; agents of the Fisc purse absconding tax-defaulters through the sewers of provincial towns. Caesar’s double-bed is warm as an unimportant clerk writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK on a pink official form. Unendowed with wealth or pity, little bird with scarlet legs, sitting on their speckled eggs, eye each flu-infected city Altogether elsewhere, vast herds of reindeer move across miles and miles of golden moss, silently and very fast. The clouds of adverse fortune and ill health pass and change over the Earth of human’s body. In that body there is ultimately reflected one’s own mental and emotional reactions to them. The human being is whole, but has different aspects. What manifests itself as an emotional disturbance in one aspect may also manifest itself later as a bodily sickness. The body’s health and the ego’s fortune eventually match the good or ill shape of the ego’s thought. To overlook the psychological factor in the cause of sickness and to concentrate solely on the physical factor is much too narrow-mined and not truly scientific. At the present stage of human knowledge, it is too simple and naïve an attitude to cover all cases. Mental causes cannot be put in a test tube and examined; this is one reason why they have been overlooked. If you prejudge everyone, you will end up losing yourself and becoming one of “them,” but still be rational and use great discernment. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.

Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.

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! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/