If we mock that which we do not understand, we may learn too late that the penalty for such arrogance is annihilation. One mystery remains. Industrialism was a flash flood in history—a brief three centuries lost in the immensity of time. What caused the industrial revolution? What sent the Second Wave surging across the planet? Many streams of change flowed together to form a great confluence. The discovery of the New World sent a pulse of energy into Europe’s culture and economy on the eve of the industrial revolution. Population growth encouraged a movement into the towns. The exhaustion of the Britain’s timber forests prompted the use of coal. In turn, this forces the mine shafts deeper and deeper until the old horse-driven pumps could no longer clear them of water. The steam engine was perfected to solve this problem, leading to a fantastic array of new technological opportunities. The gradual dissemination of indust-real ideas challenged church and political authority. The spread of literacy, the improvement of roads and transport—all these converged in time, forcing open the floodgates of change. Any search for The cause of the industrial revolution is doomed. For there was no single or dominant cause. Technology, by itself, is not the driving force of history. Nor, by themselves, are ideas or values. Nor is the class struggle. Nor is history merely a record of ecological shifts, demographic trends, or communications inventions. Economics alone cannot explain this or any other historical event. There is no “independent variable” upon which all other variable depends. There are only interrelated variables, boundless in complexity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Faced with this maze of casual influences, unable even to trace all their interactions, the most we can do is focus on those that seem most revealing for our purposes and recognize the distortion implicit in that choice. In this spirit, it is clear that of all the many forces that flowed together form the Second Wave civilization, few had more traceable consequences than the widening split between producer and consumer, and the growth of that fantastic exchange network we now call the market, whether capitalist or socialist in form. The greater the divorce of producer from consumer—in time, in space, and in social and psychic distance—the more the market, in all its astonishing complexity, with all its train of values, its implicit metaphors and hidden assumptions, came to dominate social reality. As we have seen, this invisible wedge produced the entire modern money system with its central banking institutions, its stock exchange, its World trade, its bureaucratic planners, its stock exchanges, its World trade, its bureaucratic planers, its quantitative and calculating spirit, its contractual ethic, its materialist bias, is narrow measurement of success, its rigid reward systems, and its powerful accounting apparatus, whose cultural significance we routinely underestimate. From this divorce of producer from consumer came many of the pressures toward standardization, specialization, synchronization, and centralization. From it came differences in gender roles and temperament. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
However we evaluate the many other forces that launched the Second Wave, this splitting of the ancient atom of production, consumption must surely rank high among them. The shock waves of that fission are still apparent today. Second Wave civilization did not merely alter technology, nature, and culture. It altered personality, helping to produce a new social character. Of course, women and children shaped Second Wave civilization and were shaped by it. However, because humans were drawn more directly into the market matrix and the new modes of work, they took on more pronounced industrial characteristics than women, and women readers will perhaps forgive the use of the term Industrial Man to sum up these new characteristics. Industrial Man was different from all his forerunners. He was the master of “energy slaves” that amplified his puny power enormously. He spent much of his life in a factory-style environment, in touch with machines and organizations that dwarfed the individual. He learned, almost from infancy, that survival depended as never before on money. He typically grew up in a nuclear family, and went to a factory-style school. He got his basic image of the World from the mass media. He worked for a large corporation or public agency, belonged to union, churches, and other organizations—to each of which he parceled out a piece of his divided self. He identified less and less with his village of city than with his nation. He saw himself standing in opposition to nature—exploiting it daily in his work. Yet he paradoxically rushed to visit it on weekends. (Indeed, the more he savaged nature, the more he romanticized and revered it with words.) He learned to see himself as part of a vast, interdependent economic, social, and political systems whose edges faded into complexities beyond his understanding. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
Faced with this reality, he rebelled without success. He fought to make a living. He learned to play the games required by society, fitted into his assigned roles, often hating them and feeling himself a victim of the very system that improved his standard of living. He sensed straight-line time bearing him remorselessly toward the future with its waiting grave. And as his wristwatch ticked off the moments, he approached death knowing that the Earth and every individual on it, including himself, were merely part of a larger cosmic machine whose motions were regular and relentless. Industrial Man occupied an environment that would have been in many respects unrecognizable to his ancestors. Even the most elementary sensory signals were different. The Second Wave changed the soundscape, substituting the factory whistle for the rooster, the screech of tires for the chirruping of crickets. It lit up the night, extended the hours of awareness. It brought visual images no eye had ever seen before—the Earth photographed from the sky, or surrealist montages in the local cinema, or biological forms revealed for the first time by high-powered microscopes. The odor of night soil gave way to the smell of gasoline and the stench of phenols. The tastes of meat and vegetables were altered. The entire perceptual landscape was transformed. So too was the human body, which for the first time grew what we now regard as its full normal height; successive generations grew taller than their parents. Attitudes toward the body changed as well. Norbert Elias tells us in The Civilizing Process that, whereas up to the sixteenth century in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, “the sight of total nakedness was an everyday rule,” nakedness came to be regarded as shameful when the Second Wave spread. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
Other changes with the Second Wave: Bedroom behaviour changed as special nightclothes came into use. Eating became technologized with the diffusion of forks and other specialized table implements. From a culture that took active pleasure in the sigh of a dead animal on the table came a shift toward one in which “reminders that the meat dish has something to do with the killing of an animal are to be avoided to the utmost.” Marriage became more than an economic convenience. War was amplified and put on the assembly line. Changes in the parent-child relationship, in opportunities for upward mobility, in every aspect of human relations brought for millions a radically changed sense of self. Faced by so many changes, psychological as well as economic, political as well as social, the brain boggles at evaluation. By what criteria do we judge an entire civilization? By the standard of living it provided for the masses who lived in it? By its influence on those who lived outside its perimeter? By its impact on the biosphere? By the excellence of its arts? By the lengthened life span of its people? By its scientific achievements? By the freedom of the individual? Within its borders, despite massive economic depression and a horrifying waste of human life, Second Wave civilization clearly improved the material standard of living of the ordinary person. Critics of industrialism, in describing the mass misery of the working class during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, often romanticize the First Wave past. They picture that rural past as warm, communal, stable, organic, and with spiritual rather than purely materialist values. Yet historical research reveals that these supposedly lovely rural communities were, in fact, cesspools of malnutrition, disease, poverty, homelessness, and tyranny, with people helpless against hunger, cold, and the whips of their landlords and masters. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
Much has been made of the hideous slums that sprang up in or around the major cities, of the adulterated food, disease-bearing water supplies, the poorhouses and daily squalor. Yet, terrible as these conditions unquestionably were, they surely represented a vast improvement over the conditions most of these same people left behind. The British author John Vaizey has noted, “the picture of bucolic yeoman England was an exaggerated one,” and for significant numbers the move to the urban slum provided “in fact a dramatic rise in the standard of living, measured in terms of length of life, of a rise in the physical conditions of housing, and an improvement in the amount and variety of what they had to eat.” In terms of health, one need only read The Age of Agony by Guy Williams of Death, Disease and Famine in Pre-Industrial England by L.A. Clarkson to counteract those who glorify First Wave civilization at the expense of Second. Christina Larner, in review of these books, states, “The work of social historians and demographers has highlighted the overwhelming presence of disease, pain and death in the open countryside as well as the noxious towns. Life expectancy was low: about 40 years in the 16th century, reduced to the mid-thirties in the epidemic-ridden 17th century, rising to the early forties in the 18th…It was rare for married couples to have long years together…all children were at hazard.” However justly we may criticize today’s crisis-ridden, misdirected health systems, it is worth recalling that before the industrial revolution official medicine was deadly, emphasizing bloodletting and surgery without anesthesia. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
The major cause of death were plague, typhus, influenza, dysentery, smallpox, and tuberculosis. “It is often observed by the sages,” Larner writes dryly, “that we have merely replaced these by a different set of killers, but these do leave us till a little later. Pre-industrial epidemic disease killed the young indiscriminately with the old.” Moving from health and economics to art and ideology—was industrialism, for all its narrow-minded materialism, any more mentally stultifying than the feudal societies that preceded it? Was the mechanistic mentality, or indust-reality, any less open to new ideas, even heresies, than the medieval church or the monarchies of the past? For all we detest our giant bureaucracies, are they more rigid than the Chinese bureaucracies of centuries ago, or ancient Egyptian hierarchies? And as for art, are the novels and poems and paintings of the past three hundred and fifty years in the New World any less alive, profound, revealing, or complex than the works of earlier periods or different places? The dark side, however, is also present. While Second Wave civilization did much to improve the conditions of our fathers and mothers, it also triggered violent external consequences—unanticipated side effects. Among these was the rampant, perhaps irreparable damage done to the Earth’s fragile biosphere. Because of its indust-real bias against nature, because of its expanding population, its brute technology, and its incessant need for expansion, it wreaked more environmental havoc than any preceding age. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
I have read the accounts of horse dung in the streets of preindustrial cities (usually offered as reassuring evidence that pollution is nothing new). I am aware that sewage filled the streets of ancient towns. Nevertheless, industrial society raised the problems of ecological pollution and resource use to a radially new level, making the present and past incommensurable. Never before did any civilization create the means for literally destroying not a city but a planet. Never did whole oceans face toxification, whole species vanish overnight from the Earth as a result of human greed or inadvertence; never did mines scar the Earth’s surface so savagely; never did hair-spray aerosols deplete the ozone layer, or thermopollution threaten the planetary climate. Similar but even more complex is the question of imperialism. The enslavement of Indians to dig the mines of South America, the introduction of plantation farming in large parts of Africa and Asia, the deliberate distortion of colonial economies to sui the needs of the industrial nations, all left agony, hunger, disease, and deculturation in their wake. He racism exuded by Second Wave civilization, the forced integration of small-scale self-sufficient economies into the World trade system, left festering wounds that have not yet begun to heal. However, once again it would be a mistake to glamorize these early subsistence economies. It is questionable whether the populations of even the non-industrial regions of the Earth are worse off today than they were three hundred and fifty years ago. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
In terms of life span, food intake, infant mortality, literacy, as well as human dignity, hundreds of millions of human beings today, from the Sahel to Central America, suffer indescribable miseries. Yet it would be a disservice to them to invent a fake, romantic past in our rush to judge the present. The way into the future is not through reversion to an even more miserable past. Just as there is no single cause that produced Second Wave civilization, so there can be no single evaluation. I have tried to present a picture of Second Wave civilization with its faults included. If I appear on the one hand to condemn it and on the other to approve, it is because simple judgments are misleading. I detest the way industrialism crushed First Wave and primitive peoples. I cannot forget the way it massified war and invented Auschwitz and unleashed the atom to incinerate Hiroshima, Japan. I am ashamed of its cultural arrogance and its depredations against the rest of the World. I am sickened by the waste of human energy, imagination, and spirit in our low-income communities. Yet unreasoning hatred for one’s own time and people is hardly the best basis for creation of the future. Was industrialism an air-conditioned nightmare, a wasteland, an unmitigated horror? Was it a World of “single vision” as claimed by the enemies of science and technology? No doubt. However, it was far more than that as well. It was, like life itself, a bittersweet instant in eternity. However one choses to evaluate the fading present, it is vital to understand that the industrial game is over, its energies spent, the force of the Second Wave diminishing everywhere as he next wave of change begins. Two changes, by themselves, make the “normal” continuation of industrial civilization no longer possible. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
First, we have reached a turning point in the “war against nature.” The biosphere will simply no longer tolerate the industrial assault. Second, we can no longer rely indefinitely on nonrenewable energy, until now the main subsidy of industrial development. These facts do not mean the end of technological society, or the end of energy. However, they do mean that all future technological advance will be shaped by new environmental constraints. They also mean that until new sources are substituted, the industrial nations will suffer recurrent, possibly violent withdrawal symptoms, with the struggle to substitute new forms of energy itself accelerating social and political transformation. One thing is apparent: we are at the end—at least for some decades—of affordable energy. Second Wave civilization has lost one of its two most basic subsidies. Simultaneously that other hidden subsidy is being withdrawn: inexpensive raw materials. Faced with the end of colonialism and neoimperialism, the high technology nations will either turn inward for new substitutes and resources, buying from one another and gradually lessening their economic ties with the non-industrial countries but under totally new terms of trade. In either case costs will rise substantially, and the entire resource base of the civilization will be transformed along with its energy base. These external pressures on industrial society are matched by disintegrative pressures inside the system. Whether we focus on the family system in the United States of America or the telephone system in France (which is worse today than in some banana republics), or the commuter rail system in Tokyo (which is so bad that riders have stormed the stations and held rail official hostage in protest), the story is the same: people and systems strained to the ultimate breaking point. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Second wave systems are in crisis. Thus we find crisis in the welfare systems. Crisis in the postal systems. Crisis in the housing system. Crisis in the school systems. Crisis in the news media operations. Crisis in the health-delivery systems. Crisis in the urban systems. Crisis in the international financial system. He nation-state itself is in crisis. The Second Wave value system is in crisis. Even the role system that held industrial civilization together is in crisis. This we see most dramatically in the struggle to redefine gender roles. In the women’s movement, in the demands for the legalization of alternative lifestyles, in the spread of gender neutral fashions, we see a continual blurring of the traditional expectations for the genders. Occupational role-lines are blurring, too. Nurses and patients alike are redefining their riles vis-à-vis doctors. Police and teachers are breaking out of their assigned roles and talking illegal strike actions. Paralegals are redefining the role of attorney and form clicks with politicians, law enforcement, and reports to spread “legal” gossip (nothing about the slanderous messages are actually lawful, it is called legal gossip because people involved with laws produce it). Workers, more and more, are demanding participation, infringing on traditional management roles. And this society-wide crack-up of the role structure upon which industrialism depended is far more revolutionary in its implications than all the overtly political protests and marches by which headline writers measure change. Furthermore, this convergence of pressures—the loss of key subsides, the malfunctioning of the main life-support systems of the society, the break-up of the role structure—all produce crisis in that most elemental and fragile of structures: the personality. The collapse of Second Wave civilization has created an epidemic of personality crisis. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Today we see millions desperately searching for their own shadows, devouring movies, plays, novels, and self-help books, no matter how obscure, that promise to help them locate their missing identities. In the United States of America, as we shall see, the manifestation of the personality crisis are bizarre. Its victims hurl themselves into group therapy, mysticism, or games involving pleasures of the flesh. They itch for change but are terrified by it. They urgently wish to leave their present existences and leap, somehow, to a new life—to become what they are not. They want to change jobs, spouses, roles, and responsibilities. Even supposedly mature and complacent American businessmen are not exempt from this disaffection with the present. The American Management Association finds in a recent survey that fully 40 percent of middle managers are unhappy in their jobs, and over a third dream of an alternative career in which they feel they would be happier. Some act on their dissatisfaction. They drop out, become farmers on ski bums, they search for new life-styles, they return to school or simply chase themselves faster and faster around a shrinking circle and eventually crack under the pressure. Rooting about in themselves for the source of their discomfort, they undergo agonies of unnecessary guilt. They seem blankly unaware that what they are feeling inside themselves is the subjective reflection of a much larger objective crisis: they are acting out an unwitting drama within a drama. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
One can persist in viewing each of these various crises as an isolated event. We can ignore the connections between the energy crisis and the personality crisis, between new technologies and new gender roles, and other such hidden interrelationships. However, we do so at our peril. For what is happening is larger than any of these. Once we think in terms of successive waves of interrelated change, of the collision of these wave, we grasp the essential fact of our generation—that industrialism is dying away—and we can begin searching among signs of change for what is truly new, what is no longer industrial. We can identify the Third Wave. It is this Third Wave of change that will frame the rest of our lives. If we are to smooth the transition between the old dying civilization and the new one that is taking form, if we are to maintain a sense of self and the ability to manage our own lives through the intensifying crises that lie ahead, we must be able to recognize—and create—Third Wave innovations. For if we look closely around us we find, crisscrossing the manifestation of failure and collapse, early signs of growth and new potential. If we listen closely, we can hear the Third Wave already thundering on not so distant shores. While the first generation of post-World War suburban studies discovered alleged widespread suburban conformity, the 1960s research saw the effects of suburbanization as being far more problematical. Sociologists such as Bennett M. Berger, William Dobriner, and Herbert Gans began examining how much of the popularly accepted view of suburbia was reality and how much was myth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
The empirical question being asked was whether the commonly accepted “facts” regarding suburbia were indeed facts or simply widely accepted beliefs. In simple terms, did moving from city to suburb change social behaviour? A major attempt to answer this question was Bennett M. Berger’s Working Class Suburbs. Berger carried out an empirical study of the actual effects of suburbanization on new working-class suburbanites. Berger was able to carry out a natural experiment by studying a group of northern California autoworkers who were forced to suburbanize from industrial Richmond, California, in order to keep their jobs at a Ford Motor Car assembly line that was being relocated to a suburban location at Milpitas, California. The possible effects of social class were all controlled, since all the workers were working class and from the same plant. Berger thus was able to examine the effect of the change of location on the workers’ behaviours, attitudes, and values. He was particularly interested in the effects of the move on political behaviour, religion, leisure activities, and social mobility. What Berger, somewhat surprisingly, discovered was that two years after the move, the workers’ values and social behaviours were virtually unaffected by the suburban move. They did not join neighbourhood groups, change their religious affiliation or practice, or switch from the Democratic part. Nor did they have expectations of social mobility; they knew they were going to remain at their current level. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Berger thus labeled the widely held belief that suburbanization affected beliefs and behaviours “the myth of suburbia.” As stated by Berger: “The studies that have given rise to the myth of suburbia have been studies of middle–class, that is suburbs of very large cities populated primarily by people in the occupational groups often thought of as making up the new middle-class—the engineers, teachers, and organization men.” William Dobriner further reinforced this view that there was not one suburban lifestyle but rather that there were a number of lifestyles. He focused on differences between middle-class and working-class suburbs by showing how the original Levittown on Long Island was becoming more heterogenous as more blue-collar and Catholic families moved into the suburb. Social classes rather than suburban residence was the important variable. Suburban newcomers, for instance, were voting on the bases of socioeconomic and ethnic factors rather than the location of their homes. Dobriner also pointed to the age of the community as a second defining variable. Reinforcing the above was Herbert Gans’s now classic participant observation study, The Levittowners (Gans, 1967). This was a detailed look at a new Levitt and Sons suburban development being constructed 17 miles east of Philadelphia in New Jersey. (The community later changed its nae to Willingboro to escape the Levittown stereotype.) A new Levittown of 12,000 homes was being constructed, and Gans and his wife became two of the new homeowners. He wanted to discover how living in such an instant suburb would affect social behaviour. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
After two years of residence and a study of two sets of Levittown newcomers, Gans found there were few differences that occurred in lifestyle that could be attributed to city-suburban differences. There were some differences, such as more sociability among neighbourhood couples over back fences while doing lawnwork. Gans, however, suggested that the sociability that occurred within Levittown was not a result of suburban residence, but rather a direct consequence of the homogeneity of residents’ backgrounds, particularly in age and income. He also discovered that there was more diversity in terms of ethnicity, regional background, and religious beliefs than critics of suburbs had allowed. Active sociability only occurred when neighbouring residents shared common values and tastes and had similar child-rearing practices. Gans also discovered that Levittown more than met the social and limited cultural needs of most of its residents while providing good housing for the price. There was no evidence of the suburb creating mental illness or social pathologies. He suggested that any differences from city dwellers that occurred were because of suburbs attracting people with different needs and interests rather than because of the suburban environment per se. In other words, suburbs and cities were home to different sorts of people. Rather than the suburbs forcing people to conform, the move allowed the new suburbanites to have the greater interaction with neighbours they had always wanted. The effect of the environment itself was seen as negligible. If any, residence was seen little effect on behaviour—a view we have had to modify as being as extreme as the earlier view the residence determined behaviour. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
It also deserves noting that the limitations of suburban life stressed by critics have not been echoed by suburban residents. National surveys going back several decades indicate that suburban residents have a higher degree of satisfaction with their communities than do city residents. Suburbanites also are more likely to rate the cultural opportunities and activities in their areas slightly higher than do city dwellers. Suburbanites, additionally are much more satisfied with a whole range of community facilities and services including schools, police protection, parks and community services. Suburbanites are also more likely to know their neighbours and have friends among neighbours. Residents of new fast-growing suburbs tend to express somewhat lower satisfaction than longer-term residents in fast-growing suburbs are more satisfied with their communities than are city residents. It is likely that differences in evaluation of suburbs and central cities reflects some self-selection, with those desiring a more familistic and neighbouring orientation gravitating toward suburbs. For those seeking home ownership and yard space, the suburb clearly is the preferred choice. Also listed as influencing satisfaction with suburbs have been the general economic advantage of the suburbs and the greater predominance of traditional family patterns. Greater length of residence in the community has also been found to encourage neighbouring. The end result, whatever the causes, is that suburbanites clearly and consistently indicate a preference for suburban living. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
If decades of suburbanites have been living the shallow lives of quiet desperation portrayed by some novelists and critics, it has been kept secret from most of them. If we teach our children by example, then we only have ourselves to blame for whom they become. Just as philosophy seeks a full rounded development of the psyche in its approach to spiritual self-realization, so does it seek a full adequate treatment in its approach to the problem of curing sickness. It recognizes that even if a sickness began with evil thought or wrong feelings or disharmonious courses of action, these have already worked their way into and affected the physical body and brought about harmful changes in it, either causing its organs to work badly, or introducing poisons into its blood system, or even creating malignant growth in its tissues. Therefore physical means must also be used to treat these physical conditions, as well as the spiritual means to get rid of wrong thoughts to make an adequate treatment. Consequently philosophy does not, like Christian Science, deny the utility of necessity of ordinary medical treatment. On the contrary, it welcomes such treatment, provided it is not narrow-minded, materialistic, or selfishly concerned more with fees than with healing. Why should we no unite working on the body by physical means with working on it by the healing power of the higher self? Why not give the latter a chance to repair its own work, since the physical-mental ego is its own projection? There is no need to make the mistake of those cults which avoid mention of the body and its sickness, which pretend that both are not here. Let the fact of their existence be there but, at the same time, hold the thought of the Overself’s superior power over them. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
The art of healing needs all the contributions it can get, from all the worthy sources it can find. It cannot realize all its potentialities unless it accepts them all: the homeopath along with the allopath, the naturopath along with the chiropractor, the psychiatrist along with the spiritual ministrant. It does not need them all together at one and the same time, of course, but only as parts of is total resources. A philosophic attitude refuses to bind itself exclusively to any single form of cure. The integrity of the personality can be disrupted by splits which come about after a period of what had seemed to be normal integration. Psychic structures which were at one time organized together may lost their interconnections and fall apart. This return to simpler structures is variously called “dissociation,” “dedifferentiation,” “disintegration,” “regression” to a simpler state of mind. It is how we feel—to a mild extent—when we feel not very well, as in a bad bout of flu. Everything is simplified, we do not have the energy to maintain a highly differentiated set of responses. We feel surprisingly fretful and in need of indulgence. We revert to childish comforts which we thought we had outgrown—sweet, mouth-filling, warm, relaxing things. Ego-functioning is slack; we are more child-like, more easily distracted, more vulnerable to slights and hurts we can usually take in our stride. The controls are weaker. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the World.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
The values at the center do not feel connected with the impulses demanding expression. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. And yet, as the final lines suggest, new and very constructive things may come from such anarchic states. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” This poem by Yeats describes a deep and mysterious process of dissolution and relevant to many kinds of creative work. Nina Coltart (1985) used it to illustrate the work of psycho-analysts. Ehrenzweig (1967) based his whole theory of art on similar premises. If we cannot tolerate incoherence, disorganization, and splitting, we cannot create anything new. Splits which may fragment structures does not seem integrated until a moment of stress cases disruption. The personality is like a landscape with geological history. In this landscape are features caused by long-ago events: mountains and oceans, scraps, crags, and valleys left behind after major upheavals; millennia of weather and the slow grind of glaciers have had their effects. Now plants cover the Earth; not immediately apparent in the landscape are faults in the geological structure—faults not in the sense of errors or sins, but weaknesses in the terrain, where the ground may crumble and crack in times of strain. A number of writers have contributed to our understanding the causes and development of such faults. One kind of fault or permanent weakness is the result of bodily damage. Regardless of a parent’s loving wishes, it may happen that an individual is left for long periods in extreme conditions of hunger, heat, cold, sensory deprivation or whatever. Or it can happen that an individual is born with a physical disability. Or permanent damage may be done by disease, or when an individua is accidently badly hurt in wars or famines or earthquakes—or modern traffic. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
The effect of disaster at a bodily level may be to inflict so great a wound on the self-image—“a narcissistic wound”—that the memories of it are kept so isolated forever, and the rest of the personality develops out of touch with those memory-traces. That is where the weakness will be, the fault. There is an example of a traumatic bodily event leading to a young woman’s breakdown. In this story, the trauma happened when the child was four. She was not helped to recognize, put into words, express, or accept the pain and the outrage she had experienced at the time of a surgical operation. On the contrary, all around her denied that anything bad had been happening. The experience remained so isolated that the girl had no idea of it, but she did feel the feelings associated with it. She tried to be good, living in a family which was certainly “good enough” in spite of some shortcomings, but she battled ineffectually with the sullen resentment, hatred, and contempt which kept rising up in her, which no one could understand. To me, it seems urgent to have more research into the consequences of injury to the body before body-imagery is stabilized. Body-imagery is the precursor of self-imagery, with which the sense of identity is closely connected. It is surely important to know more about the psychological effects of the incubators used to protect very premature or very ill infant, who necessarily must put up with an abnormal amount of sensory deprivation. And how are those infants affected, whose eyes are treated with a tincture at birth, as a medically approved preventative measure—a procedure which blinds them for the first few days of life? There must be many ways in which the normal gradual development of imagery about what it means to be a bodily person—and of imagery about what the World has to offer—is so disruptive as to leave ill effects which we do not know how to eradicate. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Moreover, we must do more research on damage caused, not by bodily distress or injury, but by other bodily circumstances. Who can tell the good and bad effect of living infant on their own in cots for long periods, instead of letting them be in touch with a human being much of the time? Who can tell the psychological advantages and disadvantages of the rocking cradle? Generally the experience starts with inability to sleep at night causing a restless feeling, but around midnight a throbbing of the solar plexus start and this powerful force is felt there. It mounts and then there is a kind of change of consciousness, a feeling of not being the body, almost of being out of it and separated from it, of being weightless and in space yet near to the body, developed. The dynamic character of the experience is followed by a sense of utter peace. Nevertheless, the infant seems to know that there was something beyond this which one has not attained. One wants to attain it so one resolves to continue the experience by crying, if they do not fall asleep first. People need to be shown something besides materialism, and when our spirit leaves our body, it is not the end. We are here to realize Oneness with God and will come back until we achieve this. Do you not think that humanism is a more beneficial answer, one that pleases God just as well as all that spirituality? Many people are not spiritual, yet are god and compassionate. What should a human do to live a perfect life in Gods eyes? Simply reaffirm the oneness of your soul with the Infinite Soul. Prayer means to know that you are one with God. Practical experience in prayer is simply to recognize oneness with God, omnipresence of God, and activity of God within one here and now. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Suburbs are like incubators for people who want protection from abnormal aspects of the World. Here churches become country clubs. When we call on Him, how close is Christ! If only Churches would encourage worshippers to look within as the only place to find God! Light is only the opening of the door, the beginning. The final state is oneness with infinite intelligence. In everything we do we ought to think of God, and thus reduce ego to nothingness. That which is behind our eyes, never dies. Sometimes a beautiful white star appears in the blue light another time intercessionary prayer. “Quiet”, a fourteenth-century Mount Athos mystical system: Its chief tent was that by perfect quiet of body and mind man is able to arrive at vision of the “Uncreated Light of the Godhead.” The result of these practices was ineffable joy and seeing the Light, which surrounded Our Lord on Mount Tabor. It was held that this Light was not God’s essence, which is unapproachable, but his Energy which can be perceived by the senses, and that it was this Light, and not, as Western theologians hold, God’s Essence, which is the object of the beatific Vision. Philotheus Kokkinus in his contribution to the anthology called Hagiortic Tome, written at Mount Athos about 1339, states that the Mount Athos doctrine of Divine Light was revealed experientially to the contemplatives who lived there. The Russian Staretz (experienced spiritual guide) Silouan, who lived on Athos for more that forty years until he died in 1938, saw the Christ at the door leading to the sanctuary of church joining his monastery, saw too a great light all around, felt himself transported to Heaven while joy and peace filled his heart. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
The vision was ever after regarded as the peak of his inner life, but the uplift it brought slowly faded away. It did not exempt him from further struggles and strains of his ascetic existence, as well as dark nights of the soul. These gave him a great humility, which smashed any pride the glimpse might have engendered. Dionysios, the founder of one of the Athos monasteries, lived in a cave as a hermit high up on a mountainside; he saw one day a strange supernatural light shinning lower down. He felt inspired to build a monastery at the spot and eventually persuaded the emperor to materialize his inspiration. This was in the fourteenth century and the buildings are still there. The first thing that God gave the created World was physical light. The firs communication God makes to the man who has attained His presence is the vision of supernatural Light. This is the doctrine held by the Eastern Church, which calls what is seen “the Uncreated Light.” During this rare experience the man feels that he is free from Earthly attachments and Worldly desires, that the intense peace one enjoys is the true happiness, that God’s reality is the overwhelming fact of existence. This vision is a gift, a grace, so it may come suddenly, unexpectedly, but more often it comes to someone who has prepared himself or herself for it by purification and contemplation. Long ago, the ancients say this land was free and we shared it all with the mountains and the sea, the birds and the trees, we lived in peace long ago. As time went on and the population grew, the birds sang less, trees were cut down; without trees the land became dry. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
Without the bird to plant the flowers, we too became quiet, watching our mountains die, listening for the birds that no longer flew—but still we lived in peace. What sustained us through those years? The nights of silence and the songs of the frogs, for we know as the ancients said this land will again be free and we will again share it all with the mountains and the sea, the birds and the trees for we still live in peace and we wish you the same for we are all one. Please give us insight this hour of grief, that from the depths of suffering may come a deepened sympathy for all who are bereaved, that we may feel the heart-break of our fellow humans and find our strength in helping them. Heartened by this hymn of praise to Thee, we bear our sorrow with trustful hearts, and knowing Thou art near, shall not despair. With faith in Thine eternal wisdom, we who mourn, rise to sanctify Thy name. Almighty and eternal Father, in adversity as in joy, Thou, our source of life, art ever with us. As we recall with affection those whom Thou, our source of life, art ever with us. As we recall with affection those whom Thou hast summoned into Thee, we thank Thee for the example of their lives, for our sweet companionship with them, for the cherished memories and the undying inspiration they leave behind. In tribute to our departed who are bound with Thee in the bond of everlasting life, may our lives be consecrated to Thy service. Comfort, we pray Thee, all who mourn. Though they may not comprehend Thy purpose, keep steadfast their trust in Thy wisdom. Do Thou, O God, give them strength in their sorrow, and sustain their faith in Thee as they rise to sanctify Thy name. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
Cresleigh Homes
Whether you’re admiring the guest bedroom or getting ready for spa night in the Primary bedroom’s ensuite, living life at #MillsStation Residence 2 means enjoying clean, modern lines in a familiar family home layout. 😍
Check out the interactive floor plan on our website! Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/
Randolph Harris II International 