When a society offers at its apex a scheme of things, inclusive and integrative of all subordinate orientations, and when that scheme by virtue of being generally accepted as true holds great authority, then that society is unified and cohesive, is an organism. There many different ways consciousness can be studied. Take a watch and look at the second hand, trying to be aware of yourself, and concentrating on the thought, “I am Peter Ouspensky,” “I am now here.” Try not to think about anything else, simply follow the movements of the second hand and be aware of yourself, your name, your existence, and the place where you are. Keep all other thoughts way. You will, if you are persistent, be able to do this for two minutes. This is the limit of your consciousness. And if you try to repeat the experiment soon after, you will find it more difficult than the first time. This experiment shows that a man, in his natural state, can with great effort be conscious of one subject (himself) for two minutes or less. The most important deduction one can make after making this experiment in the right way is that man is not conscious of himself. The illusion of his being conscious of himself is created by memory and thought processes. For instance, a man goes to a theater. If he is accustomed to it, he is not especially conscious of being there while he is there, although he can see things and observe them, enjoy the performance or dislike it, remember it, remember people he met, and so on. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

When he comes home he remembers that he was in the theater, and certainly he thinks that he was conscious while he was there. So he has no doubts about his consciousness and he does not realize that his consciousness can be completely absent while he still can act reasonably, think, observe. For general description, man has possibility of four states of consciousness. They are: sleep, waking state, self-consciousness,and objective consciousness. However, although he has the possibility of these four states of consciousness, man actually lives only in two states: one part of his life passes in sleep, and the other part in what is called “waking state,” though in reality his waking state differs very little from sleep. In ordinary life, man knows nothing of “objective consciousness,” and no experiments in this direction are possible. The third state, or “self-consciousness,” man ascribes to himself’ that is, he believes he possesses it, although actually he can be conscious of himself only in very rare flashes and even then he probably does not recognize it because he does not know what it would imply if he actually possessed it. These glimpses of consciousness come in exceptional moments, in highly emotional states, in moments of danger, in very new and unexpected circumstances and situations; or sometimes in quite ordinary moments when nothing in particular happens. However, in his ordinary or “normal” state, man has no control over them whatever. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

As regards our ordinary memory or moments of memory, we actually remember only moments of consciousness, although we do not realize that this is so. What memory means in a technical sense, and the different kinds of memory we possess, I shall explain later. Now I simply want you to turn your attention to your own observations of your memory. You will notice that you remember things differently. Some things you remember quite vividly, some very vaguely, and some you do not remember at all. You only know that they happened. You will be very astonished when you realize how little you actually remember. And it happens in this way because you remember only the moments when you were conscious. So, in reference to the third state of consciousness, we can say that man has occasional moments of self-consciousness leaving vivid memories of the circumstances accompanying them, but he has no command over them. They come and go by themselves, being controlled by external circumstances and occasional associations or memories of emotions. The question arises: is it possible to acquire command over these fleeting moments of consciousness, to evoke them more often, and to keep them longer, or even make them permanent? In other words, is it possible to become conscious? #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

This is the most important point, and it must be understood at the very beginning of our study that this point even as a theory has been entirely missed by all modern psychological schools without an exception. For with right methods and the right efforts man can acquire control of consciousness, and can become conscious of himself, with all that it implies. And what it implies we in our present state do not even imagine. Only after this point has been understood does serious study of psychology become possible. This study must begin with the investigation of obstacles to consciousness in ourselves, because consciousness can only begin to grow when at least some of these obstacles are removed. In the flowing lectures, I shall speak about these obstacles, the greatest of which is our ignorance of ourselves, and our wrong conviction that we know ourselves at least to a certain extent and can be sure of ourselves, when in reality we do not know ourselves at all and cannot be sure of ourselves even in smallest things. We must understand now that psychology really means self-study. This is the second definition of psychology. One cannot study psychology as one can study astronomy; that is, apart from oneself. And at the same time one must study oneself as one studies any new and complicated machines. One must know the parts of the machine, its chief functions, the conditions of right work, the causes of wrong work, and many other things which are difficult to describe without using special language, which it is also necessary to know in order to be able to study the machine. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

The human functions are: Thinking (or intellect). Feeling or (emotions). Instinctive function (all inner work of the organism). Moving function (all outer work of the organism, movement in space, and so on. Pleasures of the flesh (the function of two principles, male and female, in all their manifestations). Besides these five there are two more functions for which we have no name in ordinary language and which appear only in higher states of consciousness; one—higher emotional functions, which appears in the state of self–consciousness, and the other, higher mental functions, which appears in the state of objective consciousness. As we are not in these states of consciousness we cannot study these functions or experiment with them, and we learn about them only indirectly from those who have attained or experienced them. In the religious and early philosophical literature of different nations there are many allusions to the higher states of consciousness and to higher functions. What creates an additional difficulty in understanding these allusions is the lack of division between the higher states of consciousness. What is called samadhi or ecstatic state or illumination, or, in more recent works, “cosmic consciousness,” may refer to one and may refer to another—sometimes to experience of self-consciousness and sometimes to experiences of objective consciousness. And, strange though it may seem, we have more material for judging about the highest state, that is, objective consciousness, than about the intermediate state, that is, self-consciousness, although the former may come only after the latter. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Self-study must begin with the study of the four functions, thinking, feeling, instinctive functions, and moving functions. Functions involving pleasures of the flesh can be studied only much later; that is, when these four functions are already sufficiently understood. Contrary to some modern theories, the functions involving pleasures of the flesh are really posterior; that is, it appears later in life, when the first four functions are already fully manifested, and is conditioned by them. Therefore, the study of the functions involving pleasures of the flesh are fully known in all their manifestations. At the same time it must be understood that any serious irregularity or abnormality in the functions involving pleasures of the flesh make self-development and even self–study impossible. In the children’s story about belling the cat, the mice decide that life would be much safer if the cat were stuck with a bell around its neck. The problem is, who will risk one’s life to bell the cat?This is a problem for both mice and men. How can relatively small armies of occupying powers or tyrants control very large populations for long periods? Why is a planeload of people powerless before a single hijacker with a gun? In both cases, a simultaneous move by the masses stands a very good chance of success. However, the communication and coordination required for such action is difficult, and the oppressors, knowing the power of the masses, take special steps to keep it difficult. When people must act individually and hope that the momentum will build up, the questions arises, “Who is going to be first?” Such a leader will pay a very high cost—possibly one’s life. One’s reward may be posthumous glory or gratitude. There are people who are moved by considerations of duty, or honor, but most find the costs exceeds the benefits. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Khrushchev first denounced Stalin’s purges at the Soviet Communist Party’s 20^th Congress. After his dramatic speech, someone in the audience shouted out, asking what Khrushchev had been doing at the time. Khrushchev responded by asking the questioner to please stand up and identify himself. The audience remained silent. Khrushchev replied: “That is what I did, too.” In a sense, we have seen these examples before. They are just a prisoners’ dilemma with more than two people; one might call this the hostages’ dilemma. Here we want to use this dilemma to make a different point—namely, the frequent superiority of punishment over reward. The dictator might keep the populace peaceful by providing it material and even spiritual comforts, but this can be a very costly proposition. Oppression and terror relying on the Hostages’ Dilemma can be a much more efficient alternative. There are many examples of this principle. In a large taxi fleet, cars are often assigned to drivers by a dispatcher. The fleet has some good cars and some marginal cars. The dispatcher can use one’s assignment power to extract a small bribe from each of the drivers. Any driver who refuses to pay is sure to get a marginal car, while those who cooperate are given the luck of the draw from the remainder. (If everyone pays, not everyone will end up with a premium vehicle. However, if the marginal vehicles are randomly assigned, no driver faces a great chance of the bad draw. In contrast, the first driver who refuses to pay can expect to drive the marginal car quite regularly.  #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

In the meanwhile, the dispatcher gets rich, and the drivers as a group end up with the same set of cabs that they would have if no on used bribery. If the drivers acted in collusion, they probably could stop this practice. The problem lies in getting the movement organized. The point is not so much that the dispatcher can reward those who bribe one, but that one can punish severely those who do not. A similar story can be told about evicting tenants from rent-controlled apartments. If someone buys such a building in New York, one has the right to evict one tenant so as to be able to live in one’s own building. However, this translates into a power to clear the whole. A new landlord can try the following argument with the tenant in Apartment 1A: “I have the right to live in my building. Therefore, I plan to evict you and move into your apartment. However, if you cooperate and leave voluntarily, then I will reward you with $5,000.” This is a token amount in relation to the value of the rent-controlled apartment (although it still buys a few subway tokens in New York). Faced with the choice of eviction with $5,000 or eviction without $5,000, the tenant takes the money and runs. The landlord then offers the same deal to the tenant in 1B, and so on. The United Auto Workers have a similar advantage when they negotiate with the auto manufacturers sequentially. A strike against Ford alone puts it at particular disadvantage when General Motors and Chrysler continue to operate; therefore Ford is more likely to settle quickly on terms favorable to the Union. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Such a strike is also less costly to the Union as only one third of their members are out. After winning against Ford, the Union takes on GM and then Chrysler, using each previous success as precedent and fuel for their fire. In contrast, Japanese union incentives work the other way, since they are organized by a company and have more profit sharing. It Toyota unions strike, their members’ incomes suffer along with Toyota’s profits and they gain nothing from the precedent effect. We are not saying that any or all of these are good outcomes or desirable policies. In some cases there may be compelling arguments for trying to prevent the kinds of results we have described. However, to do so effectively, one has to understand the mechanism by which the problem arose in the first place—namely, an “accordion effect,” where each fold pushes or pulls the net. This phenomenon arises again and again; but it can be countered, and we will show you how soon. Every ten years the United States of America is invaded. Recently an army of 400,000 fanned out from twelve beachheads and moved across the nation in a six-week campaign. At the end of that period the army withdrew, vanishing into the surrounding society along with all the logistics, telecommunications, and computers that linked its units together during its field operations. Though seldom studied, the plans for this massive campaign hold lessons for many American businesses. For the goal of this “army” is to collect the detailed intelligence on which millions of business decisions will be based. Moreover, the very way in which the campaign is organized will provide insight to many an executive. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

The organization involved is, of course, the U.S. Bureau of the Census, and its decennial operations cast revealing light on that future form of enterprise, the flex-firm. As the post-smokestack economy grows increasingly diverse, companies will be compelled to invent new, more varied business formats. This is not just an academic theory. It has to do with survivability. Cybernetician W. Ross Ashby coined the phrase “requisite variety” many years ago to describe one of the preconditions for the survival of any system. Today’s businesses simply lack the requisite variety to make it in the 21 century. As they cast about for more adaptive ways of doing business, they will uncover—or rediscover—many arrangements now overlooked, suppressed, misunderstood, or misused by bureaucratic management. They will look for ideas everywhere: in other businesses, as well as in nonbusiness institutions like governments, political parties, universities, the military—and census bureaus. At this time, there is little convergence among theorists who have begun to study complex systems as a class. It is not a field in which a crisp and unified theory has already been developed, nor is one expected in the next few years. For example, there is no agreement yet on the best way to measure the amount of complexity in a given system. In many ways we are sympathetic to a proposal of Murray Gell-Mann’s, which captures the sense that a system should be called complex when it is hard to predict not because it is random but rather because the regularities it does have cannot be described. This distinguishes complexity from randomness, and it aligns with our focus on difficulty of prediction. However, there are a number of other careful definitions of complexity that have other desirable properties.  #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

If there will be a consensus on a precise definition of complexity, it lies well in the future. Xavier de C*** (his last name is secret) is a spy. He is also an adventurer, scholar, and adviser to governments. And he is the author of a startling proposal for Europe to help create “the United States of the West” by hitching its own wagon directly “to the America star,” forming one new supernation and jointly policing the various barbarians in the rest of the World. Making this case in a witty essay, Xavier scathingly punctures what he regards as France’s oversized ego and explains why he has actually given up his French passport to become an American citizen. In listing the many advantages that would accrue to an enlarged West, Xavier writes about culture, military cooperation and expansion of the American tax base by brining in the Europeans. What is more, it would give Europe the right to vote in U.S. elections—Xavier’s view, the only ones that matter. The essay drew bitter protests from French nationalists and left-wingers who took it proposal at face value—even though Xavier, as it turned out, was a fictional character. He was created by Regis Debray, the intellectual stormy petrel best known for his friendships in the 1960s with Che Guevera and Fidel Castro. What Xavier does not offer, however, is any half-serious analysis of the economics of the imagined unification. What could Europe bring to the marriage? What could Europe count on getting in return? Where are the economies of each heading in the decades ahead? Which way would wealth flow between them? #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

We may need to consult Scientism for more guidance. Scientism is not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researcher to be applying the aims and procedures of natural science to the human World. Scientism is in all of these, but something profoundly more. It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called “science” can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a superhuman basis for answers to the questions like “What is life, and when, and why?” “Why is death, and suffering?” “What is right and wrong to do?” “What are good and evil ends?” “How ought we to think and feel and behave?” It is Scientism on a personal level when one says, President Trump did, that he personally believes that abortion is wrong but we must leave it to science to tell us when a fetus enters life. It is Scientism on a cultural level when no scientist rises to demur, when no newspaper prints a rebuttal on its “science” pages, when everyone cooperates, willfully or through ignorance, in the perpetuation of such an illusion. Science can tell us when a heart begins to beat, or movement begins, or what are the statistics on the survival of neonates of different gestational ages outside the womb. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

However, science has no more authority than you do or I do to establish such criteria as the “true” definition of “life” or of human state or of personhood. Social research can tell us how some people behave in the presence of what they believe to be legitimate authority. However, it cannot tell us when authority is “legitimate” and when not, or how we must decide, or when it may be right or wrong to obey. To ask of science, or expect of science, or accept unchallenged from science the answers to such questions is Scientism. And it is Technopoly’s grand illusion. Toward the end of his life, Dr. Sigmund Freud debated with himself what he called The Future of an Illusion. The illusion he referred to was the belief in a supernatural and suprahuman source of being, knowledge, and moral authority: the belief in God. The question Dr. Freud debated was not whether God exists, but whether humankind could survive without the illusion of God—or, rather, whether humankind would fare better psychologically, culturally, and morally without that illusion than with it. Dr. Freud states his own doubts (expressed through the device of an alter ego with whom he debates) in the strongest possible voice, but in the end it is the voice of Dr. Freud’s reason (or faith in reason) that “wins”: humankind may or may not fare better, but it must do without the illusion of God. Dr. Freud did not see that, even as he wrote, his own work was lending substance to another illusion: the illusion of a future in which the procedures of natural and social science would ultimately reveal the “real” truth of human behavior and provide, through the agency of objectively neutral scientists, an empirical source of moral authority. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Had Dr. Freud foreseen the peculiar transformation that the image of ultimate authority would take in our own time—from an old man in a long white beard to young men and women in long white coats—Dr. Freud might have changed the question that was the focus of his inquiry. He could not. And so I will change it here, not to provide an answer, but in the hope of stirring renewed debate: as among the illusion of God, the illusion of Scientism, and no illusion or hope at all for an ultimate source of moral authority, which is most likely to serve the human interest, and which to prove most deadly, in the Age of Technopoly? Whatever the theoretical virtues of this fusion, the unfortunate reality is that the United States of America and Europe are growing apart, not closer together. While it is true that re-globalization has caused both to adopt some common rules of the financial time and to speak in a common vocabulary about corporate issues such as “transparency,” far more profound forces are driving them apart. The rise of China, having thrown a giant rock into the global pool, is sending out powerful riptides that affect all the major currencies and trade relationships and disrupt long-standing alliances. Historically, Europe and the United States of America have been each other’s chief trading partner. Since 1985, however, as each increased its trade with China and other emerging countries, the flow of imports and exports between the two has been declining as a percentage of their total trade. If you do not believe it, go buy a Vuitton bag. Chances are it was manufactured in China, legally or otherwise. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

The reduction in transatlantic economic interdependency has been accompanied by increasingly contentious trade disputes as the European Union banned the import of genetically modified food and raised tariffs on American goods ranging from honey, bananas and roller skates to nuclear reactors. In addition, as William A. Reinsch of the National Foreign Trade Council points out, the European Union killed a proposal by Honeywell and General Electric in 2001 and find Microsoft $613 million for anti-competitive behavior, ordering it to unbundle its media player from its Windows software. On its side, the United States of America imposed duties or suspended imports from European steel, cold cuts, ball bearings and pasts. By 2004, CFO was reporting that “even on traditional trade issues, relations between the United States of America and the EU are at an all-time low.” All of this was further fraught by China expanding its arms exports beyond Asia to the Middle East and Eastern Europe. From 2017 to 2021, China’s arms exports accounted for 5 percent of the global total, making it the fourth largest arms exporter in the World after the United States of America, Russia, and France. And European countries are supplying China with over $5 billion in weapons and military technology. This confronted the United States of America with an unlikely but dangerous possibility: If China were to attack Taiwan, which the United States of America is obligated to defend, American troops could face weapons supplied by its European “partners.” All of these conflicts can be seen as early skirmishes pointing to larger transatlantic conflicts to come. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

As inflation produces the illusion that costs rise, when the real story is that the value of money is falling. In the short term, real costs usually do not change very quickly, and this can produce the illusion that costs are stable facts of nature, like the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. In the real World, though, most costs have been falling by a crucial measure: the amount of human labor needed to make things. People can afford more and more. This change is dramatic measured on a scale of centuries, and equally dramatic across the gulf between Third World and developed countries. The rise from Third World to First World standards of living has raised income (dropped the cost of labor time) by more than a factor of ten. What can molecular manufacturing do? Larger cost reductions have happened, most dramatically in computers. The cost of a computer of a given ability has fallen by roughly a factor of 10 every seven years since the 1940s. In total, this is a factor of a million. If automotive technologies had done likewise, a luxury car would now cost less than one cent. (Personal computer systems still costs hundreds of dollars both because they are far more powerful than the giant machines of the 1940s and because the cost of buying any useful computer system includes much more than just the costs of a bare computer chip.) But the fact stands that property takes precedence over human life in the old culture also follows logically from scarcity assumptions. If possessions are scarce relative to people, they come to have more value than people. This is especially true for people with few possessions, who come to be considered so worthless as to be subhuman and hence eligible for extermination. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA |

Now Selling!

From foyer through dining, this Residence 4 Cresleigh Meadows at Plumas Ranch home has an entertianment area infused with light, views and seamless outdoor connectivity.

Echoing the angled axis, the kitchen island anchors this fluid layout, and dining gains separate identity from alcove design. Comprehensive attention to luxury and seclusion defines the owners’ suite. An intimate study and second suite off foyer complete ground level retreats.

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