Let Us Never Forget the True Heroes of Society

Let us never forget that the true heroes of society quietly get the job done, and do so with incredible dedication, perseverance, and dignity in an environment of steadily diminishing resources. When the 2002 World soccer championships were held jointly in Japan and South Korea, Hugo Enciso, a Los Angeles marketing executive, decided to take his son to Tokyo. Mr. Enciso, Mexican by birth, American by education and lifestyle, worked for La Opinion, the biggest Spanish-language daily in the United States of America. In Japan they met members of the tiny community of Latin Americans who lived there and were introduced to Japanese food, manners and its mania for sports. For Mr. Enciso it was an experience he would long remember. Hundreds of thousands of other foreigners, from all parts of the globe, poured into Korea and Japan to attend the games. We later met Mr. Enciso in California at the wedding of two young software executive—he born in Pakistan, she in India. His family was Muslim, hers Hindu. When the speaker system blared Pashtun music, Mr. Enciso joined the crowd of frenetic, happy dancers, most of whom had never heard a note of Pashtun before that night. Among them where WASP executives, Asian students, American Jewish people, and many with still other ethnic, religious or geographical backgrounds. It was not merely a mixed marriage but a mixed celebration. And it was truly symbolic. We are not only still shifting the center of World economic gravity toward Asia, including South Asia, where the married couple have their ancestral roots. We are not only altering the criteria that will determine where tomorrow’s jobs will be found, where new factories, offices and homes will be built, and where revolutionary wealth will be created. We are expanding something we might call our personal “spatial reach.” Twenty-four hundred years ago in ancient China, where the less affluent were rooted to the soil, the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu declared that people who travel are apt to be “troublesome, false, restless, and engaged in secret plots.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Today an estimated 8 percent of the human race—roughly 640 million people—travel across some national boundary in the course of the year. This number is larger than the entire population of the Earth in the year 1700, which was 603 million, right after the dawn of the industrial age. Troublesome or not, engaging in secret plots or not, searching for a job or just flying to Milwaukee to visit a customer, we are a species on the move. Americans on average drive fifteen thousand miles per year. However, most car trips are back and forth to one’s workplace—an average round-trip journey of twenty-three miles, or to destinations closer to home, like the supermarket or the bank. Vacation travel may take the family father. We could easily track our car travel on a map. A business traveler can also pinpoint the cities to which one has journeyed in the course of the year and the trips within those places. The results would be a map showing one’s “travel reach.” However, we could also show on the map all the locations to and from which we have sent or received e-mail, post office mail, phone calls, text messages, faxes, plus the physical addressed of all the people in our electronic Rolodex and sites visited online. With considerably more difficulty, we could even track the geographical origin of the products we buy and the destinations of the waste matter and pollution we create. Even these do not exhaust all the geographical locations with which we have, or wish to have, some relationship. However, they would give us a rich image of our spatial reach—a continually changing map of our personal geography. Compare our individual spatial reach today with that of the average less affluent European in, say, the twelfth century, who in the course of an entire lifetime was unlikely to ever have traveled more than fifteen miles from one’s village. Except, perhaps, for religious ideas that came over the centuries all the way from Rome, fifteen miles largely bounded in one’s life. That was the less affluent personal footprint on the planet. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

If we apply this kind of mapping to companies, industries or nations, we promptly discover that the spatial reach of each varies and continually changes. Similarly, different segments of each economy require a different “reach.” A country may need to import raw materials or components from many countries in order to sell exports to only a few. Or vice versa. Hollywood uses equipment from Japan and acting talent from Britain, but its films are exported all over the World. However, that is just a simple example. Your personal digital assistant (PDA) or camera phone may include a processor from America, a circuit board from China, chips designed in Taiwan, Austria, Ireland, or India, a color display from South Korea and a lens from Germany. It is the combination of these spatial relationships that together define each company’s spatial reach. The Japanese, for example, have had a decades-long debate over whether to focus their economy on ties with Asia or spread them around globally. During Japan’s momentary triumphalism in 1980s and ‘90s, flag-waving politicians like former governor Shintaro Ishihara, urged Japan to replace the United States of America as the dominant power in Asia. That, however, was before Japan’s economic slowdown and China’s simultaneous rocketlike rise, not to mention its big military buildup and recent explosions of anti-Japanese sentiment. However, Mr. Ishihara new Japan had new vulnerabilities in the region, and called for stronger relations with the United States of America. Today, Japan is one of the World’s most successful democracies and largest economies. The U.S.-Japan Alliance is the cornerstone of the United States of America’s security interests in Asia and is fundamental to regional stability and prosperity. The Alliance is based on shared vital interests and values, including: the maintenance of stability in the Indo-Pacific region: the preservation and promotion of political and economic freedoms; support for human rights and democratic institutions; and, the expansion of prosperity for the people of both countries and the international community as a whole. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

In fact, 2020 marked the 60^th anniversary of the signing of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Both countries need each other, and they collaborate closely on international diplomatic initiatives. The countries are also cooperating on a broad range of global issues, including development assistance, global health, environmental and resource protection, and women’s empowerment. Other common goals are also the promotion integrity in Information and Communications Technology supply chains and to ensure a secure transition to 5G networks. There are also common objectives in the fields of science and technology in such areas as brain science, gaining, infectious disease, personalized medicine, and international space exploration. Japan and America are also working towards intensively expanding already strong people-to-people ties in education, science, and other areas. However, the real question has to do with the spatial reach of Japan’s economy. Is Japan a regional or a global player? What is its economic and cultural foot-print on the World? At a time of rising populism and authoritarianism around the World, Japan stands out as a relative island of social and economic stability. And though it owes its current situation to unique economic and geopolitical circumstances, it might still have something to teach other developed countries. By and large, Japan feels relatively stable and peaceful when compared to other advanced economies. Moreover, the Japanese government has been publicizing its efforts to attract certain foreign-born workers having recognized that immigration will be necessary for future growth. Japan is also the third largest source of foreign direct investment (FDI) into the United States of America, behind the United Kingdom, and Canada, with a total stock of FDI in 2020 at $647.72 billion U.S dollars (the total foreign direct investments in the United States of America were valued at approximately 4.63 trillion U.S. dollars in that year). Japan’s FDI positions in the United States on a historical cost basis has grown every year for the past several years from $238 billion in 2009. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Japan’s influence on culture—the Japanese influence on America culture has expanded beyond Sushi, Bento Boxes, and Japanese cars. The Japanese have fully integrated in American culture and are actually starting to leave a lot of their traditional culture behind and are embracing American ways and lifestyles. Although they may still embrace customs inside of the home such as a clean minimal design layout, no shoes in the house, and family dinners, outside of the home, Japanese have started buying American and Germany cars, have desegregated their housing choices, are opening up technology businesses, and working in traditional corporations, and are even marrying other Americans who may not be of the same ethnic background. They have moved outside of the niche as being see as “exotic,” and have become red blooded Americans. They like the American flag, take their kids to baseball games, basketball games, and football games. With American being such a huge melting pot, it is hard to find any traditional cultures still around. Every culture is some blend of American culture and that is generally accepted. Many people love the diversity. America has become like one big international city. And while Japanese are expanding their horizons in fashion and automobiles, many Americans have fallen in love with Japanese cars, food, and clothing. So, that little island has had a tremendous impact on America and the globe. Japan is flourishing as a regional economic power. Its output of cars, SUVs, Sony Play Stations, flat-panel TVs, and computers are marketed around the World. Japanese companies operate plants on virtually every continent. Whether anyone likes it or not, Japan needs resources, markets opportunities, energy, ideas and information from all over the globe, not just from its nearby neighbors. Japan’s global influence is real. The spatial reach or footprint of every person, company and country is undergoing major change. And it is not just people and products that are on the move. Money, too, has spatial reach. And that, too, is changing rapidly, with deep implications for the global economy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

It is common knowledge that trillions of dollars are continually zapping across electronic channels at phenomenal speeds, from nation to nation, bank to bank, and person to person, in a grand unending monetary tango. Most people also know—or should by now know—that international currency trading is a global casino. What most people do not know, however, is that the dollar is not just an American currency. It is popularly believed that Americans use dollars, Germans use euros, Japanese use yen, and Argentineans use pesos. In fact, according to economist Benjamin J. Cohen of the University of California/Santa Barbara, “nothing could be further from the truth.” This idea had become “an outmoded and misleading caricature” because competition has “greatly altered the spatial organization of monetary relations,” and more people are switching to Crypto currencies. Put differently, each currency, like each person, has its own, continually changing spatial reach. At present the dollar, despite its recent plunge, has the longest reach, some countries actually forgoing a currency of their own in favor of “dollarization.” They make the U.S. dollar legal tender, and it becomes their own official currency. In other countries, the dollar unofficially supplants local money for many purposes. The American dollar was introduced as the official currency of the United States of America in 1785 and is used as official currency in 16 countries ranging from Panama and Ecuador to East Timor. In addition, there are numerous countries where the U.S. dollar is readily accepted even in regular retail transactions. Internationally, it has established itself as a reserve currency and is the most traded currency in the World. In fact, according to the Federal Reserve, more U.S. dollars are held by foreigners than by Americans—somewhere between 55 and 70 percent, mostly in hundred-dollar bills. The dollar is not the only currency that has supplemented or supplanted another. For all practical purposes, before the introduction of the euro, one could use the German mark in the Balkans, the French franc in parts of Africa, the Swiss franc in Liechtenstein, the Indian rupee in Bhutan, the Danish krone in Greenland. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

In all, a study by the International Monetary Fund found eighteen countries in which foreign currency makes up more than 30 percent of the money supply and another thirty-four in which it averages 16.4 percent or more. According to Dr. Cohen, currencies “increasingly are employed outside their country of origin, penetrating other national monetary spaces. The rapid acceleration of cross-border currency competition has transformed the spatial organization of global monetary relations. National currency domains are more interpenetrated today than at any time since the dawn of the era of territorial money.” In short, money had been unleashed from its former spatial limits. This shift carries important power consequences. An “invading” currency (our term) does not always benefit the nation from which it comes. Many factors play a role, and it can sometimes prove costly. The “invaded” country’s government usually loses a degree of control over its domestic monetary policy and is weakened in the eyes of its citizens. It loses a part of what economists call “seigniorage”—the money it makes for its own money, that is, printing and issuing it. And if it ranks low in the World pecking order of currencies, it can, as a rule, be more easily whipsawed by the action of other economies. The much bigger change, however, according to Dr. Cohen, is not in the relationship of nations to one another but in the relationship between governments and markets. Thus the use of more than one currency in a country opens more options for companies and financial institutions doing business there. It may offer choices with respect to currency risk, taxes, regulations, accounting rules, transaction and conversion costs, financial instruments and the like. Conversely, it reduces the local government’s influence or control. Finally, it also makes the “invaded” country more sensitive to, and potentially responsive to, World financial markets. Which is why the first stop of many a new president or prime minister is a de rigueur visit to Wall Street to perform a reassurance ritual promising financial prudence during the ensuing term of office. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

What we have seen so far—the great wealth shift toward Asian, the creation of cyberspace, the change in criteria by which locations are appraised, the expansion of global reach, and the geographical spread of the currently shaky dollar—are only some of the changes taking place in our relationship to the deep fundamental space. The public spokesman asks for new inspiration to give us a “more meaningful existence.” However, other public spokesmen say that the juvenile delinquents get that way because they do not attend the churches we have. One explanation of this contradiction, of course, is that we are human and have new problems, but the boys are hardly human and ought to be better socialized to the appropriate institutions. This is not serious. What is the actual religious plight of a young man growing up in our society? Let us discuss it theologically, though I am aware that this vocabulary is at present puzzling. If a person asks “How am I justified? What is the meaning of my life?” he will surely find no rational answer. The bother is that the question has arisen and begun to plague one. If the question arises, as an important question, something is wrong; he will feel unworthy and damned, and wasted. Historically, appeal has then been had to psychological techniques of revivalism or physical techniques of sacramental magic. (Dr. Douglass’ intellectual approach cannot work.) However, if the question, as that question, never gets to be asked—if the matter is mentioned, if at all, as a moment of reflection in an ongoing process of life, it is possible to avoid the imputation of being damned. This non-asking can happen in two ways. First, if certain life behavior is necessary, no questions are asked. (We shall return to this first alternative.) However, secondly, if a man’s developing needs and purposes do indeed keep meeting with real opportunities and duties, no “final” questions are asked. You do not need to finish the task, and neither are you free to leave it off. The opportunities need not be such as to satisfy a human and make one happy—tht would be paradise; the duties must not be such that he must succeed in performing them—that would be hell; if he is earnest, if there are simply possible ways for his activity and achievement, so that he knows the World is a World for him, it is sufficient. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

This condition of meeting the World is called being in a state of grace. In such a case the questions that are really asked are practical and specific to the task in hand. The question, “How am I justified? what is the meaning of my life?” is answered by naming the enterprise that one is engaged in, and by the fact that it is going on. As Kafka said, “The fact of our living is in itself inexhaustible in its proof of faith.” (By analogy, if a young couple has had a good dinner without external or internal interruptions, they do not feel guilty for indulging and are fortified against criticism. The behavior justifies itself. However, if the dinner had worked out badly, they are disappointed, resentful of one another, and vulnerable to being made guilty by others for eating such rich food.) The sense that life is going on and the confidence that the World will continue to support the next step of it, is called Faith. It is hard to grow up without Faith. For then one is subject to these nagging unanswerable questions: Am I worthless? How can I prove myself? What chance is there for me? Did I ever have a chance? (These will be recognized as “questions of a juvenile delinquent to his soul.”) Children, if we observe then, seem normally to be abounding in simple faith. They rush headlong and there is ground underfoot. They ask for information and are told. They cry for something and get it or are refused, but they are not disregarded. They go exploring and see something interesting. It is the evil genius of our society to blight, more or less disastrously, this faith of its young as they grow up; for our society does not, for most, continue to provide enough worth-while opportunities and relevant duties, and soon it ceases to take them seriously as existing. Desperately, then, people may try to fill the void of worthlessness-and-abandonment by seeking money or status, or by busy work, or by self-proving exploits, both to silence critics and to silence own doubts. They substitute role playing, conforming, and belonging for the grace of meeting objective opportunity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

However, there is no justification in such “works,” for they are not really the man’s own works, nor God’s providence for him. As the theologians have said, Real works are the natural products of faith taking its next step. Or alternately, people may spurn the false roles that are available and try for formless mystical experiences. This seems to be the aim of the Beat Generation, which is a kind of brotherhood of Quietism plus stimulants. Or alternatively, again, where the despair of abandonment is acute, as with many juveniles, they rush fatalistically to punishment, to have it over with and be received back. Finding a new ethics or esthetics, as Dr. Douglass asks, will not put us in a state of grace. Existence is not given meaning by importing into it a revelation from outside. The meaning is there, in more closely contacting the actual situation, the only situation that there is, whatever it is. As our situation is, closely contacting it would surely result in plenty of trouble and perhaps in terrible social conflicts, terrible opportunities and duties, during which we might learn something and at the end of which we might know something, even a new ethics; for it is in such conflicts that new ethics are discovered. However, it is just these conflicts that we do not observe happening. Everybody talks nice. At most there is some unruliness and dumb protest, and some withdrawal. So urging the juveniles to go to church is not serious, for how will the church give them faith? What opportunity will it open? Often, celibacy is an unbidden state, imposed by circumstances—a lack of available partners, for instance, as in modern China with its skewed gender ratio, or in apartheid-bound South African, where rigid work and travel permits could confine one marriage partner to the white city, the other to a black township. The American Civil War, which killed a generation of young men, also doomed their sisters to spinsterhood as maiden aunts burdensome family charges, and underpaid schoolmarms. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

In societies with strict social and moral standards, financial constraints may also necessitate celibacy. In Victorian England, middle-class spinsters were expected to abstain from pleasures of the flesh until marriage, and most brides sashayed chastely up the aisle. However, they often took an inordinately long time to do so because before the final vows were exchanged, the bridegroom was supposed to accumulate enough money to buy a proper house in an approved neighborhood: “Virtue is good, but a house in Belgravia is better,” as the aphorism went. As the young men waited out their long courtships and engagements, they practiced frugality but not always celibacy; thanks to the license the double standard permitted English males, the percentage of women of the evening in England was higher than in anywhere else in Europe. In the twentieth century, the Great Depression squeezed more than pockets and stomachs as it pushed millions into unemployment and underemployment. This relentless poverty forced the postponement of thousands of marriages, and it convinced the unmarries to remain celibate or face the unmentionable—another mouth to feed when their own were flapping with unsated hunger. Country folks who lacked access to reliable birth control or who had religious or moral concerns about it simply waited it out. Social values may produce the same effect. In Asian societies that bar young women from marrying before their older sisters are suitably disposed of, unwelcome premarital celibacy may be extended indefinitely by the impossibility of marrying off a homely, disabled, or disagreeable sibling. In India, even if they were widowed as children and were forced into lifelong celibacy, Hindu widows could not remarry. Even today, this has changed only slightly. In some societies, lack of dowries has also doomed women to celibacy, and as we have seen, medieval convents expanded their numbers and their coffers by accepting dowries far too modest for a mortal husband. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Other times, celibacy is directly coerced. A man or a woman is tossed into prison, where pleasures of the flesh is forbidden Until this century, European domestic servitude entailed celibacy for life. In England, some male servants could marry, but women could not because employers refused to inconveniences themselves by dealing with the pregnancies and babies their domestics’ marriages would produce. The countries of Carlisle aggressively monitored her female servants, instructing her head housemaid to tattle on any underlings not regularly washing their monthly-napkins which proved they were not having a baby. Many women lived out their lives in chaste service, fending off advances of their domineering employers. Bachelorhood or celibacy was also mandated for certain trades and professions. Apprentices could not marry even when they became journeymen, but had to wait for years until they were masters. Often their delayed marriages followed either resentful chastity or cheap solicitation. In the Middle Ages, male serfs were often lifetime bachelors. Educators on all levels faced a traditional ban on marriage—celibacy or your job was a common choice. Quite unlike brahmacharya, the orthodox learning tool for Indian students and scholars, celibacy was often inflicted on reluctant Western academics. Until 1882, when the requirement was relaxed, Oxford and Cambridge dons accepted their positions on condition of celibate bachelorhood. Some observed it cynically, in the breach, keeping mistresses or frequenting women of the evening, but many dons were conscientious men who lived in scholarly celibacy in the comfortable, well-catered, and companionable digs of their ivory towers. Until the twentieth century, throughout Europe and North America, female teachers faced the same stricture from rigid, misogynist, educational bureaucracies that cringed at the thought of women with child being active in pleasures of the flesh while forming tender young minds. Instances of coerced or de facto celibacy are legion, and those mentioned above represent a tiny sampling. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Nonetheless, any kind of celibacy unwillingly embraced is substantively different from committed celibacy. The hormonal young women pledged to chastity because it will guarantee her a suitable marriage or the athlete striving for greatness in the next competition is motivated in ways the coerced or happenstance celibate is not. A look at five cases of such unwilling celibacy confirms this. A special conference was held in November, 1831, at Hiram, Ohio. At this time it was decided to print the revelations which the church had received through the prophet Joseph Smith. Up to this time the revelations of Joseph had received from the Lord had been written on paper by hand. The priesthood in preaching could quote them only from memory. Now that W.W. Phelps had a printing shop in Independence, it was thought the revelation could now be printed so all could read them. Joseph met with a group of elders to get the material ready for the new book of revelations, which Oliver Cowdery was to take to Independence for printing. The preface to the Doctrine and Covenants was given at this time, and it was placed in the beginning of the book and numbered, “One.” In this preface, given November 1, 1831, the Lord said: “Hearken, O ye people of my church….Hearken ye people from afar, and ye that are upon the islands of the sea, listen together. The voice of the Lord is unto all humans, and there is none to escape, and the voice of warning shall be unto all people, by the mouths of my disciples, whom I have chosen in these last days, for I the Lord have commanded them. Wherefore I the Lord, knowing the calamity which should come upon the inhabitants of the Earth, called upon my servant Joseph Smith, Jr., and spake unto him from Heaven, and gave him commandments, and also gave commandments to others, that they should proclaim these things unto the World; and all this that it might be fulfilled, which was written by the prophets; that faith also might increase in the Earth; that mine everlasting covenant might be established; that the fullness of my gospel might be proclaimed unto the ends of the World, and before kings and rulers.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

The Lord proclaimed that He had given Joseph Smith, Jr., the power to translate the Book of Mormon, and had given his latter-day disciples power to lay the foundation of this church—“To bring it forth out of obscurity, and out of darkness, the only true living church upon the face of the whole Earth, with which I the Lord am well pleased, speaking unto the church collectively and not individually. For I the Lord can not look upon sin with the least degree of allowance; nevertheless, one that repents and does the commandments of the Lord shall be forgiven. And one that repents not, from one shall be taken even the light which one has received, for my Spirit shall not always strive with humans, saith the Lord of Hosts. O inhabitants of the Earth, I, the Lord, am willing to make these things known unto all flesh, for I am not respecter of persons, and will that all humans shall know that the day speedily cometh when peace shall be taken from the Earth, and the Devil shall have power over his own dominion. And also the Lord shall have power over his saints, and shall reign in their midst. Search these commandments, for they are true and faithful, and the prophecies and promises which are in them shall all be fulfilled. And though the Heavens and the Earth pass away, my word shall not pass away. For behold, and lo, the Lord is God, and the Spirit beareth record, and the record is true, and the truth abideth for ever and ever. Amen.” As the elders were preparing the revelations for publication, some of them objected to the language of some of the revelations and wanted Joseph to change them. Because of this the Lord gave a revelation in which he said: “I, the Lord, give unto you a testimony of the truth of these commandments.” Then the Lord suggested that they choose the wisest man among them to try to write one which would compare with any of the revelations which had been given through Joseph. William E. McLellin made an effort to imitate one of the revelations, and all the elders realized that the best he could write was far inferior to the revelations. This renewed the faith of these man in truth of the revelations the Lord had given to his church through his prophet, Joseph Smith. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Another revelation given at this time contained instructions for parents concerning their children. The Lord, Jesus Christ, said: “Inasmuch as parents have children in Zion, or in any of her stakes which are organized, that teach them not to understand the doctrine of repentance; faith in Christ the Son of the Living God; and of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of the hands when eight years old, the sin be upon the head of the parents. For this shall be a law…and their children shall be baptized for the remission of their sins when eight years old, and receive the laying on the hands. And they shall also teach their children to pray, and to walk uprightly before the Lord.” One Angel enlightens another. To make this clear, we must observe that intellectual light is nothing else than a manifestation of truth. All that is made manifest is light. Hence, to enlighten means nothing else but to communicate to others the manifestation of the known truth. “To me the least of all the saints is given this grace to enlighten all humans, that they may see what is the dispensation of the mystery which hath been hidden from eternity in God,” reports Ephesians 3.8. Therefore one Angel is said to enlightened another by manifesting the truth which one knows oneself. Theologians plainly show that the orders of the Heavenly beings are taught Divine science by the higher minds. Now since two things concur in the intellectual operation, as we have said, namely, the intellectual power, and the likeness of the thing understood; in both of these one Angel can notify to another the known truth to another. First, by strengthening one’s intellectual power; for just as the power of an imperfect body is strengthened by the neighbourhood in corporeal things. Secondly, one angel manifests the truth to another as regards the likeness of the thing understood. For the superior Angel receives the knowledge of truth by a kind of universal conception, to receive which the inferior Angel’s intellect is not sufficiently powerful, for it is natural to one to receive truth in a more particular manner. Therefore the superior Angel distinguishes, in a way, the truth which one conceives universally, so that it can be gasped by the inferior Angel; and thus one proposes it to one’s knowledge. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Thus it is with us that the teacher, in order to adapt oneself to others, divides into many points the knowledge which one possesses in the universal. Every intellectual substance with provident power divides and multiples the uniform knowledge bestowed on it by one nearer to God, so as to lead its inferiors upwards by analogy. All Angels see the Essence of God immediately, and in this respect one does not teach another. It Is of this truth that the prophet speaks; wherefor one adds: “They shall teach no more every man his brother, saying: ‘Know the Lord’: for all shall know Me, from the least of them even to the greatest.” However, all the types of the Divine works, which are known in God as their cause, God knows in Himself, because he comprehends Himself; but of others who see God, each one knows the more types, the more perfectly one sees God. Hence a superior Angel knows more about the types of the Divine works than an inferior Angel, and concerning these the former enlightens the latter; and as to this, the Angels are enlightened by the types of existing things. An Angel does not enlighten another by giving one the light of nature, grace, or glory; but by strengthening one’s natural light, and by manifesting to one the truth concerning the state of nature, of grace, and of glory, as explained above. The rational mind is formed immediately by God, either as the image from the exemplar, forasmuch as it is made to the image of God alone; or as the subject by the ultimate perfecting form: for the created mind is always considered to be uniform, except it adhere to the first disposition to this ultimate form. Within the circles of our lives, we dance the circles of the year and undergo a moderate discipline for this purpose. This is a time for the more advanced quester who seek to attain the highest possible standard and who is willing to pay in self-denial and self-training the corresponding price. Prayer teaches us what to aspire for. So often we do now know what to cling to. Prayer implants in us the ideals we ought to cherish. Prayer is no panacea, no substitute for action. It is, rather, like a beam thrown from a flashlight before us into the darkness. It is in this light that we who grope, stumble and climb, discover where we stand, what surrounds us, and the course which we should choose. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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