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The Development of the Reality as Well as the Concept of Conscience is Connected!
Deliberation is the work of many humans; we must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden. The early-nineteenth-century discovery of the identity of the elemental building materials appearing in inorganic and organic matter and of the resulting intertransformability of the of the two classes of substance did not, of course, invalidate the original observations that essential differences exist between the properties of substances of inanimate origin and those of substances normally created by life processes. It was still true that organic matter was in general less stable—more vulnerable to heating and other disruptive treatment—then the compounds possessing an inanimate heritage. It was equally true that two houses could have an entirely different architectural properties even though both were constructed of exactly the same kinds of lumber, concrete, flagstone, and tile. It had yet be discovered how, in chemical compounds as in houses, the proportions and detail arrangements of the building materials could be as important as their elemental properties in determining the characteristics of the resulting structure. Insight into the important relations between the construction details and the resulting properties of aggregation of the matter was provided by the development of an understanding of the nature of the structural units of the construction materials—the atoms of which the elements are composed. The inadequacy of our terminology causes us, in the twenty-first century, till to speak of the “atomic theory of matter,” despite the fact that the word “theory” conveys to non-scientist an impression of tenuousness that is completely belied by the breadth and depth of support for the pertinent concepts that have by now been established. Our near-certainty of knowledge about the basic features of the atomic construction and properties of matter is today not far different from our near-certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow morning; each near-certainty arises from the combined effects of many observations made by many people over long periods of time. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
For example, we now know that the gaseous element hydrogen consists of units, or atoms, the most important characteristic of which is that each atom contains a heavy nucleus with a positive charge surrounded by a much larger and lighter region of negative electricity. We know that, in its normal state, the positive charge on the nucleus is electrically balanced by the extranuclear negative charge. We know, further, that the element helium has a nucleus that possesses exactly twice the positive charge of the hydrogen nucleus and is correspondingly surrounded by an ambient cloud of exactly two units of negative electricity. The light metallic element lithium has three units of charge on nucleus and surrounding “electron could.” They beryllium atom has four units of charge, boron five, carbon six, nitrogen seven, oxygen eight, and so on. We know now that the chemical properties of the elements are entirely determined by their configurations of extranuclear charge. Hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, and oxygen are gases (at ordinary temperatures) because the electric forces between nearby atoms are not such as to immobilize the atoms in a rigid solid configuration; lithium, beryllium, boron, and carbon are solids because their nuclear and extranuclear distributions of electric charge lead to forces that do greatly restrict the freedom of movement of the individual atoms. The light-absorbing and reflecting properties of an element, and therefore its colour, are determined by the detailed interactions of the extranuclear cloud of negative electricity with incident rays of light. The chemical combining properties of an element with other elements are determined by the same detailed configuration of electric charge and the resulting ease of difficulty with which the negative clouds of the combining atoms can rearrange themselves into stable pattern that surrounds and at the same time holds together the nuclear components. This development of understanding of the atomic nature of matter, which has progressed without interruption since the English chemist John Dalton suggested in 1803 that all matter is made up of tiny, sub-submicroscopic particles, has made of chemistry a science rather than an art. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
However, in the process the science of chemistry has turned out to be fundamentally indistinguishable from the science of physics. The fact that a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gases combines to form water, when heated to a certain temperature, may appear at first glance to be a purely chemical observation far removed from the considerations of forces, fields, attractions, and repulsions of the physical scientists. However, the difference disappears when the chemical processes is analyzed more deeply and found to be only a manifestation of the operation of forces of electric attraction and repulsion among the positively charged nuclei of hydrogen and oxygen and their surrounding negatively charged electric clouds. Even temperature is found to by only another term for the average speed with which the randomly moving gaseous particles bump into one another, thereby influencing the rate of the resulting “chemical” reaction. If the essential identity of the laws of chemistry and physics could not have been established, in a treatment such as this one, concerned with the thesis that living organisms are subject to the same laws of nature as those which determine the properties of inanimate objects and humanmade machines, it would have been awkward. If it were still thought, as it used to be, that chemistry and physics are distinct fields of science with separate governing principles, although it remains to be seen whether the same set of laws is sufficient for the explanation of biological phenomena, we would clearly be wasting our time. However, we have digressed. The present discussion has as its aim the development of certain concepts bearing on the construction and properties of inorganic and organic compounds. To this point we have explicitly dealt with the electrical nature of both an atom of an element and the forces that permit atoms of more than one element to bind themselves together in a stable configuration by redistributing among themselves the clouds of negative electric charge that each isolated, neutral atom normally possesses. Such a stable combination of two or more atoms is, of course, a molecule of a chemical compound. Just as the atom is the indivisible building block of an element, so the molecule is the building block out of which a compound is composed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Two atoms of hydrogen bound together with one atom of oxygen form a molecule of water. Again, this is not simply formal terminology. The properties we association with water—its liquidity, wetness, colourlessness, freezing and boiling characteristics, and all the rest—are determined solely by the detailed spatial configuration of positive and negative electric charge automatically established when 1 oxygen and 2 hydrogen atoms join together. The implications are similar when we speak of 1 nitrogen and 3 hydrogen atoms combining to form a molecule of ammonia, of 1 silicon, and 2 oxygen atoms combining to form quartz, and so on. These are inorganic substances. Chemical formulas can similarly be specified for organic substances. Historic urea, for example, is a compound with a molecule consisting of 1 atom of carbon, 4 atoms of hydrogen, 1 atom of oxygen, and 2 atoms of nitrogen. Glucose, an important sugar that is formed in most living organism, has for its molecule 6 atoms of carbon, 12 of hydrogen, and 6 of oxygen. A molecule of morphine, another organic substance that was analyzed not long after Dr. Wohler synthesized urea contains 17 carbon atoms, 19 hydrogen, 3 oxygen, and 1 nitrogen. At about the same early period, the strychnine molecule was found to be made up of 21 atoms of carbon, 22 of hydrogen, 2 of oxygen, and 2 of nitrogen. From the foregoing paragraph, the alter reader will have noted a curious point: every organic molecule referred to possesses more atoms than any of the inorganic molecules described. Is this accidental, just the result of inept choices of illustrative examples by the author, or does it mean something? From the very origin of analytic techniques permitting the determination of atomic constitution it was found that inorganic molecules were typically mush less complex than molecules of animate origin. To be sure, there was a sort of continuity: unusually big organic molecules that were more complex than unusually small organic molecules could be found. Nevertheless, the strong general rule was that the one kind of molecule was made up of only a few atoms, the other kind of many. There is another important characteristic of organic molecules related to the element carbon. Here again, the examples we have cited are typical: carbon is not an especially common ingredient of inorganic compounds; it is almost always a constituent of organic material. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Thus, before the middle of the nineteenth century, it was apparent to the chemists an biologists that life processes tend to produce large and complex molecules and that these molecules usually contain many carbon atoms. While quantitative differences, in this case their magnitude is impressive. In carbon content, for example, 48 percent of the dry weight of the human body consists of the element, compared to only about 0.03 percent in the surface layers of the Earth. And the difference in complexity between organic and inorganic molecules can be as large or larger. Molecules composed of many thousands of atoms are commonplace in living organisms; a half dozen or so atoms are commonplace in living organisms; a half dozen or so atoms make up even the most complex of the inorganic molecules. Could it be that the success of Dr. Wohler and his followers in synthesizing the simpler organic material from inorganic components was not the major accomplishment that it appeared to be, that there does indeed exist an unbridgeable chasm between different classes of chemical substances but that the position of the chasm is further up the line toward the gigantic carbon-based molecules of living organisms rather than at the boundary between what we have defined as organic and inorganic matter? It is fair to say that such a doctrine of modified vitalism did not have a great deal of currency even in the later nineteenth century—by that time most chemists and biologists were convinced that the properties of all molecules, large and small alike would ultimately be explained in terms of the same set of physico/chemical laws. However, the prominent role played in life process by mammoth carbon-rich molecules was worrisome. Until progress could be made in the analysis and synthesis of these peculiarly organic particles, it could not truly be said that the essential identity of the laws underlying the properties of all the molecules of living and nonliving matter had been established. Many of the largest organic molecules, which also seem to be of the greatest importance in life processes, belong to a class of substances that has been named protein. Our narrative caries us next to a consideration of protein molecules and the extent to which the physically based principle of chemistry have been found capable of explaining their properties and their formation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The most certain way to succeed is always to try one more time. It is not just child-rearing, education, and work that will influence personality development in Fourth Wave civilization. Even deeper forces are playing on tomorrow’s psyche. For there is more to the economy than jobs or paid work. We might conceive of the economy as having two sectors, one in which we produce goods for exchange, the other in which we do things for ourselves. One is the market or production sector, the other the prosumer sector. And each has its own psychological effects on us. For each promotes its own ethic, its own set of values, and its own definition of success. During the Third Wave the vast expansion of the market economy—both capitalist and socialist—encourage an acquisitive ethic. It gave rise to a narrowly economic definition of personal success. The advance of the Fourth Wave, however, is accompanied, as we have seen, by a phenomenal increase in self-help and do-it-yourself activity, or presumption. Beyond mere hobbyism, this production for use is likely to assume greater economic significance. And as it comes to occupy more of our time and energy, it too begins to shape lives and model social character. Instead of ranking people by what they own, as the market ethic does, the prosumer ethic places a high value on what they do. Having plenty of money still carries prestige. However, other characteristics count, too. Among these are self-reliance, the ability to do things with one’s own hands—whether to build a fence, to cook a great meal, to make one’s own clothes, or to restore an antique chest. Moreover, while the production or market ethic praises singlemindedness, the prosumer ethic calls for roundness instead. Versatility is “in.” As the Fourth Wave brings production for exchange and production for use into a better balance in the economy, we begin to hear a crescendo of demand for a “balanced” way of life. This shift of activity from the production sector to the presumption sector also suggests the coming of another kind of balance into people’s lives. Growing numbers of workers engaged in producing for the market spend their time dealing with abstractions—words, numbers, models—and people known only slightly, if at all. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
For many, such “headwork” can be fascinating and rewarding. However, it is often accompanied by the sense of being dissociated—but off, as it were, from the down-to-earth sights, sounds, textures, and emotions of every day existence. Indeed, much of today’s glorification of handcrafts, gardening, peasant, or blue-collar fashions, and what might be called “truck-driver chic” may be a compensation for the rising tide of abstraction in the production sector. By contrast, in presumption we usually deal with a more concrete, immediate reality—in firsthand contact with things and people. As more people divine their time, serving as part-tie workers and part-time prosumers, they are in a position to enjoy the concreate along with the abstract, the complementary pleasures of both headwork and handwork. The prosumer ethic makes handwork respectable again, after 300 years of being looked down upon. And this new balance, too, is likely to influence this distribution of personality traits. Similarly, we have seen that with the rise of industrialism, the spread of highly interdependent factory work encouraged humans to become objective, while staying home and working at low-interdependency tasks promoted subjectivity among women. Today more women are drawn into jobs producing for the marketplace, they too are increasingly objective. They are encouraged to “think like a president of a company.” Conversely, as more men stay home, undertaking a greater share of the housework, their need for “objectivity” is lessened. They are “subjectivized.” Tomorrow, as many Fourth Wave people divine their lives between working part-time in big, interdependent companies of organizations and working part-time in big, interdependent companies or organizations and working part-time for self and family in small autonomous, prosuming units—we may well strike a new balance between objectivity and subjectivity in both genders. Instead of finding “male” attitude and “female” attitude, neither of them well-balanced, the system may reward people who are healthily able to see the World though both perspectives. Objective subjectivists—and vice versa. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
In short, with the rising importance of prosumption to the overall economy, we touch off another racing current of psychological change. The Combined impact of the basic changes in production and prosumption added to the deep changes in child-rearing and educations, promises to remake our social character at least as dramatically as the Third Wave did 350 years ago. A new social character is cropping up in our very midst. In fact, even if every one of these insights were to prove mistaken, if everyone of the shifts we are beginning to see were to reverse itself, there is still one final, giant reason to expect an eruption in the psycho-sphere. That reason is summed up in the two words “communications revolution.” Human conflict has reached its most violent expression in the war [WWII staggering planetary dimensions and unheard-of scientific destructiveness. However, it helped to quicken the dawn of a say when the soldier’s sword and the airman’s bomb will be found only in such places as the “Chamber of Horrors” at Madam Tussaud’s Museum in London. Such extreme violence was an evolutionary necessity to convince one that one must cease to tolerate war, that one must find a more refined—that is, more mental—method of carrying on one’s struggles, that one must come into the consciousness of the World citizenship, and that one must create international institutions commensurate with such a border consciousness. Such thoughts have begin to circulate within one’s consciousness, but they will circulate forcibly only whilst the horrors of the last was are still easily remembered. It would be wiser and prudent to realize that a long night must precede this full dawn. A fresh generation or two will not feel the force of this remembrance, and then passions which breed war may overcome it and prove stronger than whatever mechanical organization to preserve itself society may have brought into being for itself-protection. This is so because sustained thought is creative and returns to us, in part, in the events which meet us as we travel through life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Nevertheless, we have indeed started to move onward and upward to that degree of ethical maturity which shall surely come when we shall have controlled these passions sufficiently to fight our quarrels around a conference table and not on a battlefield and which shall transform history from a record of national warfare into a record of international welfare. Morality constrains individuals to serve the interests of power for the collective, in the way cells serve the interests of power for the individual. The man may be dangerous, but he expects the parts of his body to be law-abiding If one of his cells decides to follow its own lights, the man will correctly see this s a danger to the whole, will call it a “wild” cell, a cancer and if he can, he will destroy it. It has always been in the interest of power to conceal that morality as its handmaiden; we are trained by power to be blind to this subservice. The official version is as follows: Morality is independent of power. It may be overcome by power but never invalidated by power. The paradigm of morality is a human with a principle saying no to a human with a gun. It is always possible to say not to evil. That refusal is authorized by conscience, the voice of God within us. We know that some things must not be done. Every human is responsible, is accountable to one’s fellow humans and to God. We are justified, by these lights, in ignoring people who say no. It is a lie: To be moral is to be subject to restraint; to be sovereign is to do as one sees fit. The United States of America does not want its ministers and generals to say no; once the course of action has been set, it expects them to follow through. We expect our lieutenants to do what their captains tell them to do. And we have any number of trained and loyal officers ready to perform as ordered when ordered to launch the missiles, which can harm millions. Is it really a paradox that the first practical step in forging an armour for such self-protection against war must necessarily be a moral and not a physical one? #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
There must be deep unflinching sincerity behind the will for peace. We yearn for a war-proof World; but when we come to consider the practical means of protecting human kind from further wars, we shall discover that insofar as they are not counterweighted with ethical principles and psychological understanding also, they may become as dangerous to us through creating a false sense of safety as the Old League of Nations become for a similar reason. One of the half-conscious tasks which destine in the war’s hands was to show the World’s face to itself. In the result it unmarked a gargoyle before an affrighted audience. For instance, when the League of Nations was denounced as a humbug, we tuned our ears away. Yet, this individual was not wrong as he was not quite right. For those who know what really went on behind its public conferences and pleasant speeches, know also that too much unscrupulous intrigue, political greed, and ethical insincerity were covered by its fine verbal façade of idealism and morality. Not that the basic conception of a League of Nations was a bad one; one the contrary, it was magnificent! However, it was one thing to invent machinery to check the outbreak of war and quite another to find the mental outlook large enough to work such machinery. For the new institution itself did not change their old outlook. Geneva witnessed both the birth of a great idea and death of a grand hope. The League perished because it put heads together but not hearts. It was to be expected that a machine of the character of the League of Nations would work badly at first, but it was not expected that it would ignominiously fail to work at all. Only a few anticipated this failure. They were the few who comprehended that the mental reality behind a thing is more formidable and important than its material appearances, that the inevitable karma of so much past aggression, exploitation, cruelty, and selfishness could not be easily circumvented without a real change of heart. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Th League of Nations was only an idea. It never came to life because it was never given the chance to do so. And it was never given the change because each of its members thought of its own country first and the League second, because each brought its nationalistic interest right into the League chambers and kept them there as the foremost purpose of its presence, because none had the consciousness of really being what all pretended to be—a untied commonwealth. We, however, have the splendid chance to make it some kind of arrangement which will honestly carry out its takes of preventing aggressive war and not merely talk about doing so, which will comprehend that the duty of stronger nations is to protect the weaker ones and not to exploit them, must paradoxically be one of the products of this terrible times. A supermajority is Germany contributed to this stabilization by promoting their country and their products, which allows their economy to overcome a depression and become one of the greatest nations in the World. Undoubtedly, the question of the ethical content—the question of what one must do—has already and persistently arisen in the minds of many readers. This question was lot left totally unanswered; but the answer—that we must become what we essentially are, persons—is so formal that it does not offer any concrete advice. Yet such advice is necessary for the life of humans. So also are principles, which at the same time abstract and concrete, so that support for moral decisions can be derived from them. Are there such principles of moral action? If so, how can they be related to the ever changing conditions of existence? Is not ethical relativism the only possible answer, even in view of the unconditional character of the moral imperative? The first problem is to consider the beneficial aspects and the limitations of ethical relativism. For relativism is the predominant ethical theory and, in many respects, also a widespread moral practice. The facts that support this theory are obvious. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The pronounced difference between primitive and modern ethics and between Western and Eastern, feudal and bourgeois, liberal-humanist and neo-collectivist morality, and the difference in ethical attitudes to the same event in the same locality by diverse social strata, diverse religious groups, and diverse generations strongly support ethical relativism. For certain time anthologist dealing with primitive cultures were the champions of ethical relativism. Ever since the eighteenth century, anthropological research has shown a particular interest in the ethics of primitive humans. Their morality was supposed to demonstrate the conditioning of our own ethical ideas, whether feudal or bourgeois, Christian or humanist. Particular laws pertaining, for example, to killing, stealing, and lying, and so forth, in one culture were compared with corresponding but different (and sometimes contradicting) laws in another culture, and the conclusion was drawn that there is no common ground in ethical thought among separated cultures. Ethics, according to this view, is culturally conditioned, and therefore ethics of different cultures are as different as the cultures themselves. In both cultural anthropology and popular understanding, such concepts are still widespread despite the fact that a sharp reaction has arisen against the primitive character of this method. We have learned (partly thought the insight that a living reality is a structural unity, a Gestalt, and not a mechanical composite) that cultures are wholes, and that we cannot compare parts of them with parts of others, but must understand the significance of the particulars in the light of the whole. Then we may discover that the contrast of ethical demands in separated cultures is not a contradiction, but a different expression of a common fundamental principle. Ignorance of this insight has produced much naïve relativism in popular thought and unfortunately also among scholars when they unintentionally become philosophers. The method of structural analysis is a warning against a primitive use of the “primitives” in the argument for ethical relativism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
A beneficial and constructive criticism of the relativistic theories is embodied in the doctrine of the natural moral law. It is a very old, famous, and still rather vital theory that humans by nature (in Christianity by creation) have an awareness of the universally valid moral norms. To every human this awareness is potentially given, even though actually distorted by culture, education, and one’s existential estrangement from one’s true being. This classical theory of natural law has only laws of nature in the ordinary sense of the word. Natural law in our context is the law of moral reason or, as Kant calls it, “practical reason.” For Sotic thought it has a common source with the physical laws in the divine logos, who is creatively present both in the laws of nature and in the natural moral laws of the human mind. Christianity accepted the Sotic doctrine, and most systems of religious thought have developed similar concepts. It is a general and unavoidable human problem, present in the quest for truth as well as in the demand for justice. You are singing, little dove, on the branches of the silk-cotton tree. And there also is the cuckoo, and many other little birds. All rejoicing, the songbirds of our God, our Lord. And our goodness has her little birds, the turtledove the redbird, the black and yellow songbirds, and the hummingbird. These are the birds of the beautiful goddess, our Lady. If there is such happiness among the creatures, why do our hearts not also rejoice? At daybreak all is jubilant. Let only joy, only songs enter our thoughts. Depression can make some people stronger individual somehow. They learn how to handle that kind of thing. People have to develop skills and abilities that they otherwise would not. And sensitivities too. It will make some people more compassion. Because it is like of it, they know what is it like to go through something that that and are more curious about other people and what they are going through. They are also more intent in trying to make some meaning out of the whole thing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Many people in the World today are frequently harassed by others simply because they look different, and it makes some who all look alike want to target this people and make life hard on them. Also, when people’s way of life is stifled, and they see themselves as being depressed, to down play it, they are socially engineered to say that they are just sad. And several people do not want to go on medication and try to wait for the situation to end, but many times it does not. Look, you cannot change the people around you and maybe you do not want weekly or daily appointments to talk about your problems. Keeping a journal in a locked box might be helpful so others cannot read your intimate thoughts. A lot of doctors think that a low dose of Prozac is sufficient to cure a small dose of sadness and anxiety. It may work for a while, but if the situation is ongoing, and you are having trouble sleeping, it may be a good idea to talk to your primary care physician. I have found that Desyrel (generic form is Trazodone) is very helpful. However, you may need to take a few weeks off from school or work to let your body adapt to the medication. And do not operate any heavy machinery, nor cook, or do anything that requires you attention, including going on dates or watching child. It is best taken at bed time, and allow yourself to rest. Even when you feel you are alert, have someone accompany you to make sure you are safe to drive. When you sleep, it allows your brain to recharge, rest and heal. You also get to forget about what is going on around you. (However, talk to your doctor first and never take anyone else’s medication!) Overall, sometimes it is best to get out of toxic situations by moving or transferring schools. It is often said, “You cannot runaway from your problems,” but you certain may need to get out of a toxic environment that is abusive and detrimental to your health. If you are having problems with your neighbours, friends, or at school, it is a good idea to talk to your parents or spouse to see how they can accommodate you, of if you can move in with a relative. Things change when you re around people who love and care about you. The probability of suicide is determined by how attached a person is to such social groups as the family, religious institutions, and community. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The more thoroughly a person belongs, the lower the risk of suicide. Conversely people who have poor relationship with their society are at greater risk of killing themselves. Remember, even the government is warning people, it may not be you with the problem, you could be fine, it may be the group you need to get away from and there are resources to help you. O House of America, come and let us walk in the light of the Lord. And the stability of thy times shall be abundance of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge, and reverence for the Lord which is His treasure. And David had prospered in all his ways, and the Lord was with Him. He hath delivered my life in peace so that none came nigh me, for there were many that strove with me. And the people said unto Saul: Shall Jonathan die, who hath wrought this great deliverance in America? Far from it, as the Lord liveth, there shall not one hair of his head fall to ground, for with God’s help hath he wrought this day. So the people rescued Jonathan that he died not. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto America, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall vanish. Thou didst turn for me my mourning into dancing; Thou didst loose my sackcloth, griding me with gladness. The Lord thy God would not hearken unto Balaam; but the Lord thy God turned the curse into a blessing unto thee, because the Lord thy God loved thee. Then shall the maiden rejoice in the dance, young men (and women) and their elders shall together make merry; for I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them and make them rejoice after their sorrow. “And [God Who provides seed for the sower and bread for eating will also provide and multiply your [resources for] sowing and increase the fruits of your righteousness [which manifests itself in active goodness, kindness, and charity]. Thus you will be enriched in all things and in every way, so that you can be generous, and [your generosity as it is] administered by us will bring forth thanksgiving to God. For the service that the ministering of this fund renders does not only fully supply what is lacking to the saints (God’s people), but it also overflows in many [cries of] thanksgiving of God.” reports 11 Corinthians 9. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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Why Do You Close Your Eyes to Pray?
Demonic activity is not uniform in the World over nor in historical experience. It appears that there was a great increase in demonic activity preceding and during the life of the Lord Jesus Christ here on Earth. There does appear to be a present increase of an awareness of the part of the powers of darkness that their time is short and that the second coming of Christ is at hand. It is therefore particularly imperative for Christians to be informed in spiritual warfare. There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. My file of occult cases has already grown to other 20,000 in number in regards to the Winchester Mansion. A woman, one of Mrs. Winchester’s servants, appeared at the police station and stated that she had just shot and killed her son. A demon had told her that her son would never regain his full mental health. Wanting to save the boy from his terrible future, she shot and killed him. The woman was arrested and finally sentenced after a long trial. This day-to-day experience show the suggestive powers and effects that demons and spirits have. This is an age of phenomenal progress in human’s conquest of the Universe. Awestruck observers are flocking to the altars erected by science to revere human achievements in the realm of the natural laws. Meanwhile, the alters of God are forsaken as naturalism in theology threatens to eliminate the supernatural from every day life. The situation is particularly ironical to the Christian who sees God permitting man to achieve feats bordering on the miraculous. Why should humans become skeptical and apathetic toward religious supernaturalism at a time when science is demonstrating how “close” the natural and supernatural can be? The fact that supernaturalism embraces not only the morally good—God and his elect angels—but the morally evil—Satan and the fallen angels or demons—aggravates modern human’s unbelief. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
For while some people have always denied the existence of God and the holy angels, skepticism has especially attended the sphere of evil supernaturalism. Many who profess faith in God question the existence of personal devil and casually relegate evil spirits or demons to the realm of folklore and superstition. If Satan and demons are merely the creation of superstition and imagination, the whole filed of demonism belongs to the World of fairytale and folklore, and not to the sphere of Christian theology. If there are n demons, evil cannot be traced to their activity and depraved aspects of human behaviour must be attributed to other cases. The Word of God attests the reality of evil supernaturalism through the career of both Satan and his myriads of helpers called demons or evil spirits (Luke 10.17, 20). Satan is presented as Lucifer, the first and most glorious creature of God, who subsequently sinned (Isaiah 14.12, 13; Ezekiel 28.11-19; Revelation 12.7-10). In his rebellion, Lucifer drew a multitude of angels with him and became “Satan,” a Hebrew word meaning “opposer” or “adversary.” Satan reigns over a kingdom of darkness organized in opposition to God (Matthew 12.26). This opposition crystallized in connection with humans and God’s purpose for him upon the Earth (Genesis 3.1-15). The angels who followed Satan became the demons or evil spirits, Satan’s minion. Apparently Lucifer, the first of the angels, was created to have dominion over the Earth (Job 38.1-7; Ezekiel 28.11-19). Satan was exalted and sinless before he rebelled and brough judgment and chaos upon the Earth. The Creator was now faced with the problem of evil and sin in a hitherto sinless Universe. God chose the Earth as the theater in which to present the great drama of human redemption. This great redemptive demonstration not only shows how God, in his infinite love and holiness, deals with evil, it will culminate in the conquest of sin, its banishment from a sin-scarred Universe, and its rigid isolation for all eternity, together with its perpetrations, in a place of confinement called “the lake of fire,” Gehenna or eternal hell (Revelation 20.11-15). #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
The Old Testament is replete with demonological phenomena because since the Fall of man in the Garden of Eden, God’s saints have been the object of satanic attack (Genesis 4.1-6; 6.1-10). Israel was surrounded by pagan nations which manifested the whole gamut of demonological practices and beliefs and clashed with Israel’s monotheistic faith. The New Testament presents overwhelming evidence for the existence of demons. Jesus’ powerful spiritual ministry precipitated a violent outburst of evil supernaturalism. Satan and demons opposed his mighty mission among humans, know well it could lead to their own undoing (Matthew 4.1-10; Mark 5.1-10). Our Lord gave his disciples authority to expel demons (Matthew 10.1) and expelled them himself (Matthew 15.22, 28), viewing his conquest over the demons as over Satan (Luke 10,17, 18). The New Testament speaks of demons (James 2.19; Revelation 9.20), described their nature (Luke 4.33; 6.18), their activity (1 Timothy 4.1; Revelation 16.14), their opposition to the believer (Ephesians 6.10-20), their abode (Luke 8.31; Revelation 9.11) and their eternal doom (Matthew 25.41). The tormentors and troublemakers of nature offer an interesting analogy to the evil agencies of the spiritual realm. In the planet kingdom, pest, insects, and blight continually harass the famer. In the animal kingdom, all creatures have their deadly enemy. And the human body is relentlessly attacked by a multitude of bacteria which cause disease and death. Those who hesitate to accept the testimony of Scripture about the reality of demons may thus find both scientific and philosophical corroboration in the nature which has been called God’s “oldest testament.” The natural World vividly illustrates the activity of demonic beings in the spiritual World. Of all the current methods of foretelling the future, the most popular is astrology. Astrologers claim that by observing the position of the sun, moon, fixed stars, and planets they can predict significant events that will take place on Earth. Palm reading is another method of fortunetelling, but it is close related to astrology that it does not require special consideration. The person who engages in this practice divides the hand into seven mounds which are named after Heavenly bodies—Venus, Mercury, Apollo (the Sun), Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and the Moon. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
In addition, the palm has four lines, which are “read” by the palmist. He calls them the heart, head, life, and fate lines and sees each of them as having special significance. Everything we will say about the evils, dangers, and deceitfulness of astrology applies to palmistry as well. One must, however, recognize that astrology is classified as a pseudoscience, and it should not be confused with astronomy, a legitimate field of study Astrology originated about 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and flourished in Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Persia, and Greece. It began with people who worshipped the sun, moon, and the five known planets of that time as gods They thought each of these seven deities owned a certain section of the Heavens as his “house.” They there established the zodiac the wild belt of fixed starts that appear in the course of a year, and divided it into twelve “houses.” As a result, there were twelve dwelling places for seven deities. The early astrologers decided that the sun and moon needed only one “house” each, and therefore assigned two dwelling places to Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mars, and Mercury. These planets had one “house” for the day and another for the night. This heathen concept of the planets as gods with dwelling places in the Heavens gradually developed into a detailed system of religion. Men carefully studied the Heavenly bodies, and noted how they positions of the planets changed. They theorized that whenever two or more of these planets (which they considered gods) were positioned in a direct radial line or within a ten-degree angle, some extremely significant events World occurs upon the Earth. They called this a “conjunction” of the planets. Since the movements of the Heavenly bodies is perfectly predictable, they had given to each of the “houses” through which the planet moved. For many years educated people mingled their astrological superstitions with their studies of nature, mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Some have assumed that the Magi, who came to Jerusalem looking for the King of the Jews when Jesus was born, came because of an astrological sign. This is a mistaken assumption, and the idea should never be used as evidence that the New Testament condones the practice of astrology. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Although the wise men as learned sages of the East undoubtedly shared in some superstitions of their day, the light that led them to make their journey to Jerusalem was a miraculously placed sign of God, not a mere configuration of the stars. It has been theorized that the conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn, which took place in 747 A.U.C (7 B.C.), or with Mars added in 748 A.U.C. (6 B.C.), led the to look for Jesus Christ. This supposition is without validity, however. In the first place, the Christian Bible nowhere declares that Heavenly bodies in their normal movements furnish this kind of information. Second, a similar conjunction of planes had taken place about fifty-nine years earlier, but this had not led an investigating body to Jerusalem. Third, when the planets move near to one another to form a conjunction, they are never so close tht they appear as one star. Fourth, the light miraculously appeared over the house where Jesus was living when the Magi arrived. These factors prove conclusively that the light in the Heavens was a miracle. We repeat, the wise men who presented their gifts to Jesus Christ did not receive information of His birth through astrology. However, I am not really convinced that astrology, all demons, and all spirits lie. I think perhaps messages are distorted or maybe they are seeing the future and warning people about what their actions will cause. Maybe some things are destined to happen and messages are incomplete. To further illustrate this example, Mrs. Winchester servant, who shot and killed her own son, after the message from a demon, perhaps what was to happen was fate and the demon was seeing the future and warning her not to shot her son. Of course, no one who is dead can regain their mental health because they cease to exist. I think that is why it is dangerous to peer into the future and listen to spirits sometimes. Maybe one may distort the message and actually cause the situation to happen. So it is not necessarily that demons and spirits are lying, but most people do not have the psychic ability to see what they see and cannot understand the context of the message. The story is told of how an astrologer Stoeffler made a complete fool of himself. He predicted a diluvian flood for February 1524. The population was terrified. Nobody wanted to work. The fields were not tilled. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The rich either had ships built for themselves or they retreated for safety into the mountains. Even the Elector of Brandenburg made preparations to escae the flood. The great astronomer Kepler was also not free from the contamination of astrology. A well-know example of this is his prediction tht Wallenstein would die a peaceful death in his prediction that Wallenstein would die a peaceful death in his 70th year. However, he was killed in his 50th year. Yet Kepler only engaged in astrology out of economic necessity. He wrote, “Astrology is to me an unbearable but necessary slavery. To keep my yearly income, my title, and my living quarters, I have to comply with ignorant curiosity. Astronomy is the wise mother, and astrology the foolish daughter who gives herself to anyone who pays her, so that she can support her wise mother.” Maybe consulting demons reduced the life of Wallenstein by 20 years. Perhaps he unknowingly made a deal and soul his soul to a crossroads demon, and would have lived to 70 had it not made a deal with the devil. Perhaps that is why people say make the best out of your life and enjoy what is here and now, and try not to look into the future. When consulting spirits and demons, you may be unknowingly entering into a contract. And it is possible that by listening to the supernatural will sometimes avert tragedy. The demons and Satan do have dominion of this Earth, and they could be testing your faith. So when Stoeffler consulted as Astrologer, and took action, perhaps this leap of faith diverted the flood, and if they had set idol, it would have happened. It is truly hard to understand how the supernatural works, which is why so many place their faith in God and choose not to work with demons and the devil. An important witch-case occurred in Scotland in 1678, the account of which is the interest to u as it incidentally makes mentions of the fact that one of the guilty persons had been previously tried and condemned in Ireland for the crime of witchcraft. Four women and one man were strangled and burnt at Paisley for having attempted to kill by magic Sir George Maxwell of Pollock. They had formed a wax image of him, into which the Devil himself had struck the necessary pins; it was then turned on a spit before the fire, the entire band repeating in unison the name of one whose death they desired to compass. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Amongst the women was “one Bessie Weir, who was hanged up the last of the four (one that had been taken fore in Ireland and was condemned to the fyre for malefice before; and when the hangman there was about to cast her over the gallows, the devil takes her away from them out of their sight; her dittay [indictment] was sent over here to Scotland), who at this tyme, when she was cast off the gallows, there appears a raven, and approaches the hangman within an ell of him, and flyes away again. All the people observed it, and cried out at the sight of it.” A clergyman, the Rev. Daniel Williams (evidently the man who was pastor of Wood Street, Dublin, and subsequently founded Dr. William’s Library in London), relates the manner in which he freed a girl from strange and unpleasant noises which disturbed her; the incident might have developed into something analogous to the Drummer of Tedworth in England, but on the whole works out rather tamely. He tells us that about the year 1678 the niece of Alderman Arundel of Dublin was troubled by noises in her uncle’s house, “as by violent Sthroaks on the Wainsocts and Chests, in what Chambers she frequented.” In the hope that they would cease she removed to a house near Smithfield, but the disturbances pursued her thither, and were no longer heard in her former dwelling. She thereupon betook herself to a little house in Patrick Street, near the gate, but to no purpose. The noises lasted in all for about three months, and were generally at their worst about two o’clock in the morning. Certain ministers spent several nights in prayer with her, heard the strange sounds, but did not succeed in causing their cessation. Finally the natator, Williams, was called in, and came upon a night agreed to the house, where several persons had assembled. He says: “I preached from Hebrews ii. 18, and contrived to be at Prayer at that Time when the Noise used to be greatest. When I was at Prayer the Woman, kneeling by me, catched violently at my Arm, and afterwards told us that she saw a terrible Sight—but it pleased God there was no noise at all. And from that Time God graciously freed her from all that Disturbance.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Many strange stories of apparitions seen in the air come from all parts of the World, and are recorded by writers both ancient and modern, but there are certainly few of them that can equal the account of that weird series of incidents that was seen in the sky by a goodly crowd of ladies and gentlemen in Co. Tipperary on 2nd March 1678. “At Pointstown in the country of Tepperary were seen drivers strange and prodigious apparitions. On Sunday in the evening several gentlemen and others, after named, walked forth in the fields, and the Sun going down, and appearing somewhat bigger than usual, they discoursed about it, directing their eyes toward the place where the Sun set; when one of the company observed in the air, near the place where the Sun went down, an Arm of a blackish blue colour, with a ruddy complection’d Hand at one end, and at the other end a cross piece with a ring fasten’d to the middle of it, like one end of an anchor, which stood still for a while, and then made northwards, and so disappeared. Next, there appeared at a great distance in the air, from the same part of the sky, something like a Ship coming towards them; and it came so near that they could distinctly perceived the masts, sails, tacklings, and men; she then seem’d to tack about, and sail’d with the stern foremost, northwards, upon a dark smooth sea, which stretched itself from south-west to north-west. Having seem’s thus to sail some few minutes she sunk they perceived her men plainly running up tacklings in the forepart of the Ship, as it were to save themselves from drowning. Then appeared a Fort, with somewhat like a Castle on the top of it; out of the sides of which, by reason of some clouds of smoak and a flash of fire suddenly issuing out, they concluded some shot to be made. The Fort then was immediately divided in two parts, which were in an instant transformed into two exact Ships, like the other they had seen, with their head towards each other. That towards the south seem’d to chase the other with its stem [stern?] foremost, northwards, till it sunk with its stem first, as the first Ship had done; the other Ship sail’s some time after, and then sunk with its head first. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
It was observ’d that men were running upon the decks of these two Ships, but they did not see them climb up, as in the last Ship, excepting one man, whom they saw distinctly to get up with much haste upon the very top of the Bowsprit of the second Ship as they were sinking. They supposed the two last Ships were engaged, and fighting, for they saw the likeness of bullets rouling upon the sea, while they were both visible. Then there appear’d a Chariot, dawn with two horses, which turn’d as the Ships had done, northward, and immediately after it came a strange frightful creature, which they concluded to be come kind of serpent, having a head like a snake, and a knotted bunch or bulk at the other end, something resembling a snail’s house. This monster came swiftly behind the chariot and gave it a sudden violent blow, then out of the chariot leaped a Bull and a Dog, which follow’d him [the bull], and seem’d to bait him. These also went northwards, ad the former had done, the Bull first, holding his head downwards, then the Dog, and then the Chariot, till all sunk down one after another about the same place, and just in the same manner as the former. These meteors being vanished, there were several appearances like ships and other things. The whole time of the vision lasted near an hour, and it was a very clear and calm evening, no cloud seen, no mist, nor any wind stirring. All the phenomena came out of the West or Southwest, and all moved Northwards; they all sunk out of sight much about the same place. Of the whole company there was not any one but saw all these things, as above-written, whose names follow: “Mr. Allye, a minister, living near the place. Lieutenant Dunsterville, and his son. Mr. Grace, his son-in-law. Lieutenant Dwine. Mr. Dwine, his bother Mr. Christopher Hewelson. Mr. Richard Foster. Mr. Adam Hewelson. Mr. Bates, a schoolmaster. Mr. Larkin. Mrs. Dunsterville. Her daughter-in-law. Her maiden daughter. Mr. Dwine’s daughter. Mrs. Grace, and her daughter.” The first of the sixteen persons who subscribed to the truth of above was the Rev. Peter Alley, who had been appointed curate Killenaule Union (Dio. Cashel) in 1672, but was promoted to livings in the same diocese in the autumn of the year the apparitions appeared. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
There is a townland named Poyntstown in the parish of Buolick and barony of Sliveardagh, and another of the same name in the adjoining parish of Fennor. It must have been at one or other of these places that the sights were witnessed, as both parishes are only a few miles distant from Killenaule. Another supernatural event was Mrs. Winchester’s arrival to the Santa Clara Valley in the late 1800’s was a sensation event. Our valley was thrilled by this dramatic entrance of a millionairess; by those freight cars sidetracked in Sant Clara, unloading rich imported furnishings; by building a two-story farm house into a 26-room mansion, in the first six months, and she did not stop going, she kept building for 38-years. Mrs. Winchester had nine cooks, and supervised 113 employees. She also devoted much energy to managing her estate, trading in gold and diamonds, renting out fields, orchards, houses, employees and horses. Here was fair gamed for all! The town talked about Mrs. Winchester! Gossiped would be a more fitting word, gossip no one claimed to like—but everyone enjoyed Talk begat rumors and as the years passed and new towers gables rose behind the six-foot hedge of Llanda Villa, the rumors grew to established legend. We shall recall a few, some containing a faith faint hint of truth, others, the inevitable product of unbridled conjecture. I want to share some of the astounding things that took place in the famous Blue Séance Room of Mrs. Winchesters mansion. Her family gathered there frequently before going to bed to find out what the spirit World might reveal to them. Here they experienced the thirteen séances of spiritualism: passivity, vocal reality, golden key revelation, lights, transfiguration, and levitation. Séances are noted for quietness. As the participants enter and meditate, they block out their tensions, worries, anxieties, and problems. Through mental discipline they try to be as passive as possible, with eagerness and expectation for what the spirit has for them. Lights are turned down at every séance. Shades are drawn in the daytime and at night. At some places rheostats dramatically control the lighting. Once when Mrs. Winchester asked a spirit why the lights were turned down, the reply was, “My daughter, why do you close your eyes to pray?” “For better concentration,” she said. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
“Just so it is,” said the spirit, “that you turn down the lights. It is for better concentration.” Séances always start on time. The exact hour is eagerly anticipated. To arrive late would grieve the spirits. Séances have top priority in the plans of those who attend regularly. Young people give the séance priority in their schedules over athletic events and other school activities. Sometimes the spirit messages came to them in other languages. Mrs. Winchester heard Spanish, German, French, and the language of the Chippewa Indians being spoken. When they did not recognize a language the control spirit would tell then what is was and would interpret the central message. It often went something like this: “Jesus Christ is coming soon. He is even now at the threshold of the parapet of the Heaveniles awaiting the word of the great spirits of lights. Wherefore, comfort ye one another with these words, and be ye ready; for ye know not what hour he will come.” When Mrs. Winchester asked the spirit how they could be ready, the answer was always,” “Live a good life, my child. Follow in the steps of the master the greatest medium of all.” This was a vague reference to Jesus Christ, without instructing them in what those steps were. When a medium went into a trance for any length of time, his or her body became very tired, causing the medium to spend a day or two in bed after the séance. Because of this, they could not have a séance as often as they wanted in Mrs. Winchester’s Castle and they went to séances in the homes of other mediums. However, the most striking phenomenon was a séance of vocal reality some witnessed in Mrs. Winchester’s estate in connected with her deceased cousin, Richard Pardee, who had been in the Spanish American War; he was a drummer. During the séance they wars feet marching in perfect cadence, the music of a fife, and the beat of drums. Each time, the music was a popular tune of the times, “The Jingo’s Soliloquy.” No one knew how all these sound vibrations could be distinctly produced through the vocal apparatus of the medium. The spirit constantly reminded them that public manifestations were for a later time, and so they must keep those revelations to themselves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The séances of lights were always preceded by a half hour or so of passive meditation during which each person prepared oneself by discipline of mind and emotions for the coming of the spirit. In this séance, the darkened room was filled with drifting lights until it became a mass of colours, each light indicating the spirit of someone who had passed on Each colour had significance. Little blue lights meant that the spirit of a departed baby was present. There were large orange lights and many yellow and green lights. Green represented spirits that were growing or progressing to a higher plane of spiritual development. A white light indicated a spirit that had progressed to the level of the master oneself. Spiritual advancement at this level was signified by the size of the white light. A read light was considered an “evil” spirit. It was greeted in the circle with a gasp of disappointment and sometimes fear. If a read light appeared, all the other lights would disappear, usually ending the séance. In the séance of transfiguration, the transfigured form of a loved one who has died appears. Mrs. Winchester was really plagued by a lot of deaths in a short time. It started with a new born daughter, her parents, mother and father-in-law, then her husband. You can be she was grieving to have almost her entire family wiped out like, many all within the same year. During a séance her deceased mother seemed to appear, cloth with light. Sarah W. Burns Pardee drifted across the room to her daughter, Sarah Winchester, stopped and gave her a gentle smile. Them medium said she was trying to tell Mrs. Winchester she was proud she was building a house for earth bound spirits. Mrs. Winchester shouted “Mother!” she leaped up to embrace her, only to have her disappear. Little is known about the séance of levitation. Levitation is sometimes called “soul travel,” the phenomenon of spirit development whereby a medium or advances convert to spiritualism can leave one’s body by complete yieldedness to control spirit. One is not completely disunited from one’s body, but is able to take conscious flight from it to distant places. Mrs. Winchester said she experienced this: she was taken into the spirit dimension and witnessed indescribable beauties. It was something she did not want to talk about, but tried to reproduce in her mansion and the Victorian gardens. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Two people in Mrs. Winchester’s spiritualist group enter the stated of levitation from time to time. During these periods they could read the headlines of the Oakland Tribune as it came off the press before it hit the city streets. Because Mrs. Winchester took architectural precautions to enlist the assistance of her friendly spirits, they were able to protect her from the Great San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake of 1906. The quake registered 8.3 on the Richter scale and stretched all the way from Oregon to Los Angeles It severely damaged Mrs. Winchester’s home, toppling the nine-story Observation Tower and some cupolas. She herself was badly shaken in her favorite Daisy Bedroom near the front of the mansion. It took several servants hours to locate her and then pry open the bedroom door and recue her, but Mrs. Winchester and everyone in the estate survived. Mrs. Winchester, however, felt the Earthquake was a warning from the spirits that they did not want her estate visible from the freeway that would be built in the future and also that such a large estate of 500 rooms, a nine-story tower, and 65,000 square feet would be too expensive to maintain after her passing, so she removed the tower, and much of the fourth floor. However, scientists, to this day, have said the mansion is one of the saftest places in the state to be during an Earthquake. Later, after having the structural damage repaired, the spirits ordered Mrs. Winchester to immediately bored up the front thirty rooms—including the Daisy Bedroom, Grand Ballroom, and the beautiful front doors—sealed up. The heavy, ornate front doors, which had just been installed just prior to the Earthquake had only been used by three people—Mrs. Winchester and the two carpenters who installed them. Apparently, the spirits used the reflections of spiritual light in the Daisy-stained glass windows to power beams of light energy to protect her and not allowed the nine-story tower to crash on the house and rip the mansion in pieces. Matter is composed of energy and energy is never destroyed. When the voltage of an electric current to atom-smashing velocity, certain elements, when they are bombarded with this electrical force, can be transformed into other elements. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Perhaps, similarly, the energy in humans can be attuned to a vital spiritual force to make matter visible. The number 13 occurs often on the grounds as well as in the house; for example, there are 13 cupolas in the greenhouse, and 13 fan palms lining the front gate. A craftsman in Italy, called Pietro Bossi, was told by a spirit to create an ornate sink made of Italian porcelain with 13 drain holes. There is a striking account that in which the a medium’s control spirit much wanted this sink and it appeared in the table in the Blue Séance Room from 6,212 miles away and there was a receipt explaining it had been paid for in gold and was addressed to Mrs. Winchester. There was a convincing story of the events. Mr. Bossi was renowned for his Neoclassical fire surround with exquisitely detailed inlaid marble work and specialist craftsmanship. Very little is known about Pietro Bossi. He was a man of mystery, and it is not known when or where he died. His legacy, however, has had long lasting implications for this history of art and design. Spiriting writing is accomplished by a medium who possessed the gift of writing while under the power of a spirit. The medium takes pen or pencil in hand and relaxes one’s arm on a table. One goes into a trance, yielding completely to the spirit force. The following is an actual sample of spirit writing. While Mrs. Winchester was alive, a tree in front of the Winchester mansion turned blood-red and it was blood. (The tree actually did exist and was cut down approximately in the first decade of the 2000s.) Huge slate-coloured clouds gathered around the tree. They whirled as they feel, and became darker It was symbolic of the waste of blood. The deadly clouds portend the battle of the near future when they very tree of life, every branch leaf, shall suffer unto death, for as this tree is, so is the World scene and its many branches, its may countries, for every branch shall be affected. Prepare the way for the Lord and He shall do battle He shall make war with the elements, and you shall stand. Yes, in the midst of chaos, ye shall stand and messengers of peace, love and unity. The battle will rage and rage, but by the law of polarity it will be met by its own destruction. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The light of the higher forces, God-sent, shall redeem the World. Yes, even as the twinkling of an eye can this be made to pass. Again, the servant of the Light are countless—their name is Legion. Have no fear, ye of Christ, for ye shall see what ye shall see—miracles. Yet shall ye know them as the working of the Word of Light, for surely one in the power of Light may rule this World unto its God-purpose. So from the realms of light I come—I am that I am. Amen. Mrs. Winchester said Emoah and Amoah were two of the control spirits she had when she was in spiritualism. In the séance wither one could be a control spirit, or they might speak occasionally when another control spirit was presiding. Hundreds of spirit messages came through the seances. They referred to God as Light and always contain a smattering of Scripture. Because these messages used scared terminology and came from a spirit, many people accepted them as God’s messages. When the construction workers were working on the Winchester Mansion, an occasional black spot, dotted against the grey distance, marked a hay-rick or labourer’s cottage on the estate. Mrs. Winchester provided a tenth of her income to provide for the poor farmers in California. One night on the Winchester estate, it was beginning to rain steadily. A worker, Jesse Evans, could see that he was in for dirty weather, and became a little anxious about how he was to get back to his cottage, especially as it was now rapidly growing dark. So thick was it that one could not see the low land anywhere, and could only judge of its position by remembering where the mansion was. He had not seen sign of a human being the whole day. It was not likely anymore would be about at night. However, he shouted as loud as he could, and then waited to hear if there were any response. There was not a sound, only the wind moaned slightly through the trees, and something creaked loudly. The prospect was not inviting. The light was dim; Jesse could scarcely make out objects near him, all else was obscurity. What little light there was came through the mansion’s windows. A small round speck of light looked at him out of the darkness ahead. Jesse took this as a sight to take shelter in the mansion. Groping his way with increasing caution, he stepped across the field and made his way to an opened window. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
In the window was blackness itself. He felt it would be useless to attempt to go further. As Jesse stood looking into the darkness, a cold chilly shudder passed over him, and with a shiver he turned round to look. Deeper patches of darkness on his right suggested it was best seek refuge inside the mansion. Here at least he could find rest, if he found it impossible to get to his cottage on the estate. Having some wax vestas in his pocket, he struck a light and examined the room. It was better than he had expected, It was quite clear that Jesse must pass the night here. Before going to look around, he shouted at the top of his voice, more to keep up his own spirits than with any hope of being heard and then paused to listen. Not a sound of any sort replied. Jesse now prepared to make himself as comfortable as he could. However, the silence only seemed the more oppressive, and the blackness all the darker. “It is no good; I will turn in,” Jesse though dejectedly. By contriving a succession of matches, Jesse was enabled to have enough light to see to eat his frugal supper; for he had kept a little sherry and a few sandwiches to meet emergencies, and it was a fortunate thing he had. The light and the food made him feel more cheery, and by the time the last match had gone out, he felt worse might have happened to him by a long way. As Jesse lay still, waiting for sleep to come, the absurdity of the situation forced itself upon him. As if he were cast away upon a desert island, here was Jesse, to all intents and purposes as much cut off from all communication with the rest of the World. The silence of the place was perfect; and if silence can woo sleep, sleep ought very soon to have come However, when one is hungry and we, and in a beautiful and uncanny place, besides being in one’s clothes, it is a very difficult thing to go to sleep. After sighing and groaning for sometime, Jesse sat up for change of position, and nearly fractured his skull in so doing. There was nothing for it but to it still, or lie down and wait for daylight. He had no means of telling time. Fixed upon the arduous business of counting an imaginary and interminable flock of sheep pass one by one through an ideal gate, he went to sleep. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
He was awakened by the sound of the two most horrible yells ringing through the darkness. Jesse sat bolting upright; and as a proof that he senses were “all there,” he did not bring his head up this time. There was another sound. The silence was as absolute as the darkness. He though his must have been dreaming, but the sounds ringing in his ears, and his heart was beating with excitement. It would have been madness to attempt to move in that blackness. And so he lay still and tried to sleep. However, now there was a sound, indistinct, but no mere fancy; a muffled sound, as of some movement in the forepart of the mansion. What was the sound? It did not seem like Mrs. Winchester’s dog Zip. It was a full, shuffling kind of noise, very indistinct, and conveying no clue whatever as to its cause. It lasted for only a short time. However, now the cold dam air seemed to have become more piercingly chilly. The raw iciness seemed to strike into the very marrow of his bones, and his teeth chattered. Rising to put this resolve in execution, he was arrested by the noise beginning again. Jesse listened. This time he distinctly distinguished two separate sounds: one, like a heavy soft weight being dragged along with difficulty; the other like the hard sound of boots on boards. Could there be others in the mansion after all? If son, why had they made no sound when he made his present noticed by shouting and firing his gun? Clearly, if there were people, they wished to remain concealed, and his presence was inconvenient to them. However, how absolutely still and quiet they had kept! It appeared incredible that there should be anyone. Jesse listened intently. The sound had ceased again, and once more the most absolute stillness reigned around. A gentle swishing, wobbling, lapping noise seemed to form itself in the darkness. It increased until Jesse recognized the chattering and bubbling of water. And he could not get rid of the chilly horrified feeling those two screams had produced. He derided the fear of the supernatural when comfortably seated in a drawing-room well lighted, and with company. Jesse felt her could face any number of spiritual manifestation. But the icy coldness of the air was eating into his bones, and he shivered until his teeth chattered. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Suddenly he became all attention again. An entirely different sound now arrested him. It was distinctly a low groan, and followed almost immediately by heavy blows—blows which fell on a soft substance, and then more groans, and again those sickening blows. He was frightened. He heard shrieks, the blows, the groans, the dull thumping sounds, and it compelled him to suspect the worse—to feel convinced that he was actually within some few feet of a horrible murders then being committed. Jesse could form no idea of who the victim was, or who was the assassin. He actually heard the sounds and they were growing louder and more distinct. He was painfully aware The horror of the situation was intense. Bump, thump, the thing was dragged up the steps with many pauses, and at last it seemed to have reached the landing. A long pause now followed. The silence grew dense around. Jesse dreaded the stillness—the silence that made itself be heard almost more than the sounds. What now horror would that awful quiet bring forth? He felt something drop on to his head and slowly trickly over his forehead. It was blood. The bewildering realization that he was not in bed, that he did not know where he was, which way to go, or what to do to get back again; everything he touched seem strange, and one piece of furniture much the same as any other. The reality of his struggles had almost made him forget the mysterious phenomena he had been listening to. No one knows what became of Jesse. The fact is, we cannot, in this prosaic age, cannot dismiss the supernatural. Mental illness, drugs, money, and the supernatural can be a dangerous combination. People let their id (the id operates based on the pleasure principle, which demands immediate gratification of needs. Many people confuse the id with ego. However, the ego eventually emerges to moderate between the urges of the id and demands of reality. The id tends to be infantile, instinctive and primal; it is not in touch with reality, or logic, or social norms.) If the ego cannot balance the id, people began to think they are a god, always right, better than others because of their economic standing, and they turn into everything the Bible calls a demon. God tells people to be humble, love thy neighbour, share, and forgive. I would say, be careful when consulting the supernatural and with judgment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Winchester Mystery House
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Leadership is a people process. The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. It calls for the application of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that allow each of us to successfully influence thins. We know what a person thinks not when one tells us what one thinks, but by one’s actions. In the twenty-first century it is not easy to comprehend the views that prevailed a few hundred years ago as to the nature of life and living creatures. Then as now every person, every day of one’s life, was bombarded by evidence for the orderly operation of cause and effect in biological phenomena. If the body was cut with a knife, blood would flow; if food was long withheld, weight would decrease; if the nostrils and mouth were tightly closed, death would result. Nevertheless, in the nonscientific intellectual climate that prevailed during the Middle Ages, such clear-cut evidence that living creatures, like inanimate objects, are controlled in at least some aspects of the behaviour by regular natural laws had little effect on popular ideas about biology. Vitalism in its most extreme form governed whatever thought there was on the subject. Living creatures, and especially humans, were thought to lie outside the realm of subject matter suitable for investigation and understanding; life and the living body were believed to be replete with mysteries that must forever lie beyond the comprehension of mortal humans. Not only was it therefore hopeless to try to make careful observations and deductions on life process, it was also, in some dark and frightening way, wrong to do so. Magic potions and incantations were employed to combat disease and injury, not just because nothing better was available but also because such techniques were clearly best suited to deal with the nonphysical mysteries believed to underlie the afflictions under treatment. It is likely that the gradual emergence of biology as a field of study and activity appropriate to its name—the science of life—would have commenced many years earlier than it did had it not been for the delaying effect of mystical belief in an unbridgeable chasm separating animate and inanimate processes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Nevertheless, a start was finally made. It came in the early 1600s, when William Harvey made his observations and put forth his deductions upon the movements of the heart and blood. While every schoolboy learns William Harvey to be called “the father of modern biology.” Harvey’s great fame rests on two bases, one of one’s own making and the other a philosophic consequence of his discovery. Harvey’s first claim to fame was based on the thoroughly scientific method he employed in arriving at his conclusions. Not only had preceded him (unsound though many of them were), but her performed a long series of experiments of his own. He dissected and minutely described what he saw in dogs, pigs, serpents, frogs, fishes, slugs, oysters, lobsters, and insects. He watched fluid circulating in the transparent shrimp and the unhatched chick. He traced the arteries and veins of valves in both heart and blood vessels. He actually calculated the capacity of each ventricle and estimated the resulting rate of flow of the blood. He observed the results of obstructing the flow of blood in selected arteries and veins and performed other experiment to test his theories. In short, Harvey employed the same sequence of careful observation, hypothesis formation, testing of hypothesis by new observation, and modification of hypothesis to fit the new data that describes all modern scientific research. In the early seventeenth century this was unique in biological investigation. It was a tremendous departure from the mixture of unsupported speculation and religious mysticism that had permeated the work of most of Harvey’s predecessors. Although the introduction into biology of the scientific method was accomplishment enough to justify Harvey’s fame, the philosophic implications of his discovery were probably even more important to future of biology. For Harvey had shown that ordinary physical laws—in particular, those governing the pumping and flow of liquids—were capable of accounting for the functions performed by the heart, an organ that had previously clearly belonged in the realm of the unknowable. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Harvey’s explanation of the properties of the circulatory system constituted the first important evidence that the principles of physical science were relevant to at least some of the process underlying the phenomena of life. It would carry us too far afield to trace in detail the historical development of understanding the functions of the various organs of the body tht has followed the pioneering work of William Harvey. Suffice it to say that faith in the hypothesis that such functions can be understood through the applications of the principles of physics has not led to disappointment. In addition to knowledge that the heart is a pump, we now know that the lungs comprise a mechanism for the introduction of oxygen into the body’s chemical plant and for the extraction of gaseous waste products; we understand a great deal about the digestive process in the stomach and intestines; we can follow the transport of oxygen, food, waste products by the blood; the chemical purification activities of the kidneys and the liver are pretty well detailed; the glandular secretion of hormones and the resulting stimulation of specific chemical reactions in remote organs of the body are no longer the mystery they once were. The validity of our understanding of the functioning of the organs of the body is evidenced by spectacular recent developments in surgery. The employment of heart/lung machines to substitute for the natural organs during lengthy operations on the respiratory or circulatory system is one modern example. The surgical implantation into the body of battery-powered electronic pulse generations that supplement the inadequate muscle-contracting capabilities of a defective heart is another. The artificial kidney machines, which prolong indefinitely the lives of patients with defective kidneys by periodic chemical removals of the accumulated impurities in the blood, are yet another example of success of the mechanistic approach to body function. Most spectacular of all are the transplantation of organs into human patients from other humans or animals. Despite the great difficulties occasioned by the body’s rejection mechanism, which causes a chemical reaction that frequently attacks and destroys organic transplants from others individuals, the medical literature now includes numerous reports of successful transplants of kidneys from one human to another. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
In 1953, the first successful first temporarily successful transplantation of a human kidney was performed by Dr. Jean Hamburger in Paris. A 16-ear-old boy received the kidney of his mother as living donor transplantation. In 1954, Dr. Joeseph E. Murray and his colleagues at Peter Bent Bingham Hospital in Boston performed that first truly successful kidney transplant from one twin to another. This was done without any immunosuppressive medication. Since then, kidney transplantation has become a rather standard procedure. In 1961, immunosuppression advancements allowed for the development of powerful immunosuppressives. They became widely available and, in combination, helped decreased the chance for kidney rejection. In the past patients had even lived for weeks after the implantation of kidneys from monkeys to substitute for their own nonfunctioning organs. There have been lung transplants in humans. In there 1950, there was also a report attesting to the current good state of good human health of a Brooklyn puppy more than six months after its heart had been replaced by a transplant from another, unrelated dog. Around this time, there was at least one cause on record of the transplantation of a heart in a human patient dying from failure of his own organ. Unfortunately, a human heart was not available for transplantation, and the heart of a monkey had to be used. It was inadequate and the patient died, but not for an hour or so. From the viewpoint of the patient the operations was clearly unsuccessful, but as an indication of the essential soundness of the modern understanding of the functions of the body and organs, even the temporarily successful operation of human’s circulatory system by the heart of a money must be considered to be an important accomplishment. We have dedicated this portion of the report as an inquiry into the adequacy of the purely physical laws of nature for explanation of the properties of living organisms, the successful interpretation of the functions of the body organs in terms of machinelike processes is of the greatest significance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Our twenty-first century familiarity with current medical events such as those just cited can easily blind us to their philosophic importance. We should not forget that, before the thread of development initiated by Harvey’s pioneering work on the circulatory system, there was general belief in the essential inapplicability of physical principles to body processes. Today the population point of view is entirely different. With the possible exception of “mental” activities, most of us now would subscribe to the thesis that the essential functions of the parts of the body are all ultimately understandable in terms of the same physical las that govern the operations of inanimate machines. If we are to attain the goal of a physical interpretation of all life processes, this removal from the essential functions of the body organs of any claim of dependence on nonphysical explanation, important though it is, is only the first of many steps. As our next step, let us consider the material out of which living organisms are constructed to inquire whether non-physical, vitalistic principles are needed to account for their existence and properties. We shall commence by going back in history and tracing the development of understanding of the similarities and difference between organic and inorganic matter. With all the changes and challenges society faces, there has never been a greater need to determine our priorities, and within renewed focus, align our daily actions with our purpose or goals. When Plato said that the telos of man is “to become as much as possible similar to the God,” such a telos gives unconditional character to the more imperative. If, however, the telos is, as in the hedonistic school, the greatest possible amount of pleasure to be derived from life, no unconditional imperative is at work, but merely the very much conditioned advice to calculate well what amount of pain must be suffered in order to attain to the greatest possible amount of pleasure. Between these two extremes of the definition of man’s inner telos are several definitions which set a finite aim according to the formulation, but in which something unconditional with respect to the moral imperative shines through. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This is true of utilitarianism, in which the moral imperative demands work for “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Here pleasure is replaced by “happiness,” and above all, it is not the individual happiness, but that of the many, which is the aim. And the happiness of the many is not possible without self-restraint in the individual’s search for happiness. Therefore, a demand appears that cannot be derived from the merely natural trends of the individual, a demand that implies the acceptance of the other person as a person, and an unconditional element besides, whether acknowledged or not. The Epicurean deal with the problems of the telos and the moral imperative from another angle. They also use the term “happiness,” but for them happiness consists in the life of the spirit in community with friends, and in the creative participation in the cognitive and aesthetic values of their culture. The relationship to friends as well as to cultural creativity demands unconditional subjection to the norms and structures of friendship, knowledge, and beauty. Nearest to Plato’s definition of the human telos is Aristotle’s though that man’s highest aim is participation in the eternal divine self-intuition. This state can be fully reached only be entering the eternity through the “theoretical” life, the life of intuition. Wherever this state of participation is reached, there is eudaimonia, fulfillment under the guidance of a “good daimon,” a half-divine power. To reach this goal is an unconditional imperative. And since the practical virtues are the precondition for fulfillment through participation in the divine, they also have unconditional validity. We have used the Greek word eudaimonia (badly translated as “happiness”) in order to point out the moral aim as described in several ethical schools. Eudaimonia belongs to those words that have suffered a marked deterioration in meaning. Most responsible for this process were the Stoic and Christian polemics against Epicureanism, which often unjustly confused Epicureanism with hedonism. The word in itself means fulfillment with divine help, and consequent happiness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
This happiness does not exclude pleasures, but the pleasure is not the aim, nor is happiness itself the aim. It is the companion of fulfillment with divine help, and consequent happiness. This happiness does not exclude pleasure, but the pleasure is not the aim, nor is happiness itself the aim. It is the companion of fulfillment, reached together with it. If we derogate this concept of eudaimonia, we must also derogate the Christian hope for eternal blessedness. For, even though the Calvinist names the glory of God as the aim of one’s life, one experiences blessedness in fulfilling this aim and serving the glory of God. The same, of course, is true of theosis (“becoming Godlike”), fruitio Dei (“enjoying the intuition of the divine life”), or working for and participating in the “Kingdom of God” described as the aim of the individual human, of humankind, and the Universe. Happiness or blessedness as the emotional awareness of fulfillment is not in conflict with the unconditional, and therefore religious, character of the moral imperative. A conflict exists only when the function of self-transcendence in one’s finitude. However, this diminution of human to finite process has rather rarely occurred in the history of thought. Even highly secularized philosophers were conscious of the function of self-transcendence in human’s spirit, and consequently of dimension of the unconditional or the religious dimension. There are two concepts in the preceding discussion that have been frequently used without having been thoroughly discussed. The one is “conscience,” the channel through which the unconditional character of the moral imperative is experienced, and the other is the term “religious.” Regarding the concept of religion, I cannot restrict myself to the following summary: the fundamental concept of religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, by an infinite interest, by something one takes unconditionally seriously. It is in view of this concept that we have formulated the main proposition, namely, that there is a religious dimension in the moral imperative itself. Derived from the fundamental concept of religion is the traditional concept that religion is a particular expression, in symbols of thought and action, of such ultimate concern within a social group as, for example, a church. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
If the moral imperative were derived from religion in the traditional sense of the word, secular ethics would have to sever any ties with religion, for it rejects direct dependence on any particular religion. If, however, the religious element is intrinsic to the moral imperative, no conflict is necessary. Babylonia had cloisters of wealth women—the naditus—dedicated to Sama, the Sun God. Though many cities had these convents, only the nadistus of Sippar were celibate. The naditu institution existed in the Old Babylonian era and peaked under Hammurapi and his son Samsuiluna (1792-1712 B.C.). In fact, Hammurapi had a personal stake in it, because his sister Iltani was a naditu. Naditus dedicated to Samas, as opposed to other gods, enjoyed the highest status of any nuns and, like the vestal virgins, had unusual economic clout for women Becoming a naditu was a family decision, never a question of religious vocation. First daughters were designated at birth as future naditus and were “raised to the god” until they entered the cloister. Naditus were initiated when they were about fifteen years old, always in the first three days of the Babylonian month of Tebet, our December-January. On the first and third days, offerings were made to Samas and his wife, Aja. Day two was a festival in memory of deceased naditus and ended with a banquet. On this day as well, a thread symbolic of her future union with the god Samas was placed on the naditu’s hand, and the cloister made her a bridal gift or food, drink, and silver. Additional ceremonies were performed for high-ranking naditus, such as the Princess Iltani, to obtain divine consent before the initiates could be consecrated. The initiation, like that of the vestal virgins, included important financial transaction between the naditu’s family and the cloister. The family provided an impressive dowry consisting of a portion of the father’s estate, jewelry, furniture, dishes, looms, cows, and sheep. One naditu also received nine slave girls, twenty-four gowns, forty-two headdresses, and even the shroud for her far-off funeral. Initiated naditus gained the legal authority to administer their own property or they could appoint their brothers to do so. A naditu whose dowry did not include property had the right to share her father’s estate equally with her brothers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Oddly, many of the initiates could not enter the cloister until years later, when space became available. It was, in fact, unlike any other cloister. Instead of communal buildings, such as the Atrium Vestae, the naditus lived in individual houses within a walled compound. The houses were expensive, and though some naditus bought more than one, others had to be content with renting rooms. The cloister housed one hundred to two hundred naditus, and though they were not forbidden to leave, this rarely happened. Several male administrators also lived there, and male relatives visited. Nonetheless, the naditus were expected to maintain lifelong celibacy, though the penalty for lapses was less severe than it was for unchaste high priestesses or wives, who were executed. In fact, during Hammurapi’s reign, two naditus gave birth and were neither disgraced nor expelled from the cloister. Naditus who lived outside its walls, however, or who entered a tavern, were sentenced to death by burning. The daily life of a naditu was a mixture of religious and secular activities. She made twice-daily offerings, and on the twentieth of each month, a say sacred to Samas, she had to provide a heartier oblation of met and beer. She also participated in some of the seven annual festivals and in various religious banquets. A typical naditu also devoted much energy to managing her estate, trading in silver and barely, and renting out fields, orchards, houses shops, slaves, and oxen. One naditu, for instance supervised 117 employees. Many naditus were involved in cooperative ventures, and they often acquired lands adjacent to each other’s own and co-owned fields. Though the naditus were an economic force, their power and privileged status embittered some male business associates. After business had been transacted, it was not uncommon for these men to turn on the naditus and pummel them. Because the celibate naditus remained childless, they were permitted to adopt younger naditus or slave girls to care for them in their old age. This was an important consideration, for naditus were typically long-lived. The Princess Iltani, for instance, served for over sixty years before her gods invited her to a feast, the happy euphemism for a naditu’s death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The cloistered naditus survived for over three centuries. Their dedication to Samas and Aja provided religious security for their families because of their intimate connection to these important deities. The secular benefits were equally significant. Their celibacy was a guarantee against the overpopulation that divided inherited Babylonian estates into puny strips. In return, the naditus were rewarded with status and privilege, and financial independence unique among Babylonian women. People have always believed—have seemed driven and determined, in the face of overwhelming countervailing evidence, to believe—that moral society as well as moral individua life is possible; that however rare or partial its actual achievement, it is in principle possible for individuals to live morally with the advantages of security, order, and opportunity provided by a powerful state, and for that state itself to behave morally with its constituent’s and with its neighbours. It was the accomplishment of Machiavelli, in a kind of Godel’s proof of political economy, to show that such is not the case, that the good and moral life within an orderly society is contingent on the amorality of the state that males in possible. When individuals come together to form a social entity, there must be a period during which the association is revocable; the individuals may find themselves subject to more constraint than they are willing to accept, and may opt out. This revocable period is the hinge of life or death for the social organism; for if the individuals disperse, the larger entity disappears. This larger entity, driven by its own will to power, will therefore do everything it can to end this period of revocability as quickly as possible; for so soon as the association achieves such specialization as to make it impossible for the parts to opt out and survive, at just that point the association becomes irrevocable, and the organism no longer in danger of perishing by virtue of the wiled dispersion of its components. Aggregates, therefore, always act to increase the dependence of member components. The aggregate wants to bring it about that when the aggregate itself is endangered, its components parts will have no choice but to remain loyal. My country is right or wrong. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
When the mountain men came down out of the Rockies in the nineteenth century and took up life in the village, there was a period in which, if community constraints proved too onerous, they could pack back into the mountains and resume their isolated and independent existences. The present-day citizen of Denver or Butte or Taos has lost this option, is no longer capable of wilderness survival, and is held, moreover, by ties to the union or the grange, to the American Legion or the Rotary Club, and by Social Security, whence will come one’s pension. The aggregate is not satisfied, however, to have its component parts stick together only because they could not survive on their own. Such allegiance is halfhearted. (“We have a terrible president, the country is on a disastrous course, but I guess we have to rally behind him. We have no choice.”) The aggregate wants to generate patriotic fervour, to being it about that individuals lose sight of their separate lives, lose awareness of their ubiquitous conflict with the state, that their identification with the state expunge the purview of individual life with its joys and sorrows, its hopes, its ideals, and particularly its ability to criticize the state in terms of reason, of common sense, and of the discrepancy between the announced aims of the state and the actions the state is undertaking. The unison of Sieg Heil by the packed and disciplined masses at Nuremburg, that is what the state wants; or the faith of Nikolai Rostov, who in holy warlike exaltation charges forward alone, an embodiment of the Russian spirit, against the massed French forces at Austerlitz. Think not of what your country can do for you, said President Kennedy, but of what you can do for your country. There is, therefore, a constant struggle between the individual and the state. For the state would like to eat up all individual power, all independence, discretion, freedom, autonomy. The individual opposes this demand, insists that the state not take any more. In times of danger to the state, however, individual can be persuaded to relinquish additional bits of freedom, since the security of the individual rests ultimately with the security of the state. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
In the state, knowing this, is always tempted to create crises that will justify arrogating to itself additional increments of the independence of its components. In this continuing struggle, the last century has witnesses a decisive shift in favor of the state. The Fascists and Communist movements since 1917 managed to appropriate vastly more power than citizens had ever in the past been willing to give up. The values of art, of individual conscience, of personal preference and belief, all presumably secure withing the private realm, have in our times been confiscated by the state. Nor is this a vicissitude; it is a tendency. A tendency made almost invincible by modern technology, which by virtue of its ever-increasing size, cost, complexity, and power, is, in this conflict, intrinsically on the side of the state. The nature of modern commerce and communication automatically empower the state at the expense of the individual. Television exerts a steady pressure on the private person to live in the public World, in the ambience of the aggregate, with the values and the assumptions of the aggregate, rather than in the private sphere. Whatever is being shown on the screen, whether debates or advertising or talk shows, the viewer is always being instructed on how to live in the public World, while the private World is being subtly and insidiously impugned, is being made to disappear. We in America like to think that our government is accountable. We are relieved when the president, though gaining power at an alarming rate, is reined by Congress or the courts. However, as we take comfort in the prudence of our constitutional checks and balances, we fail to note that nothing limits the action of the state as whole. If the president and Congress concur in an action then, thought it be a monstrous crime, we will do it. At no time has this nation been willing to subject itself to the authority of a World court. We are willing to given an accounting of our actions to the United Nations, but if that body brands our account as lies—as at times it is—we will ignore and go our own way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The deplorable state of the World today testifies silently to the widespread spiritual ignorance which is at the root of the trouble. Class hates class, group strives against group, selfishness is prevalent everywhere—this situation could only arise amongst creatures ignorant of the higher purpose on this Earth. Consequently, to help make available knowledge of the truth and to elevate moral character constitute the noble task to which nay human could devote oneself. The ways of arbitration—like the way of contractual treaties—for the purpose of avoiding war presupposes a loyal respect for promises and a level of simple honesty, an expression of obligations in deeds rather than oratory which, we know now from painful experience, does not exist in imperfect humanity. It is merely wishful dreaming to propose it as the practical alternative to war. The brutal realities of our situation have to be squarely seen without illusion. Nor is the bringing of the system of military naval and air defense to ever-increasing magnitude an effectual alternative. The same procedure is sure to be followed in the opposite camp. The result one day in some moment of emotional reaction to tragedy or of national cupidity will be an explosion of all these massed and concentrated engines of violence. Sloppy sentiments about human brotherhood are not t all needed to pad out the plain fact that all of us ought to work with goodwill for the general good. The dark possibility tht destroys our future can give place to a brighter one only when enough philosophically illumined people are to be found in each country. Nor need that be many—a few in each city would throw out enough influence to bring about this charge. It is the tragedy of our own age that philosophical thoughts should be classed with idle dreams when they are the most practical of all today. The present situation shows the utter failure of religion to control humans; it will never be more than a temporary palliative; TRUTH alone can solve all national and international problems as much as it solves the personal one. However, truth is based on intelligence and humankind’s intelligence still lags remarkably behind. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
So the adepts contribute their little will come through evolution, and then humans will learn one’s personal responsibility for all deeds under the laws of re-embodiment and compensation; later one will learn that one cannot separate oneself from the ALL, that the same Mind runs though us all, and that humanity is just a big family wherein the older members are responsible for the welfare of the younger ones, the rich for the poorer, and so on. Universal compassion will then be the only right outlook for a properly educated humans. Where would the crude racial separatism or the equally crude hatred of the bourgeoisie be then? This divine consciousness dissolves intenerate prejudice and removes embittered passion. However, no human will can manufacture it. The World must acknowledge a higher authority than fleshly desire and evolve by self-striving beyond its present materiality before the Overself’s grace will confer such an exalted state. Without trying to indulge in overoptimistic claptrap, it may nevertheless be predicted that, as the twenty-first century advances, human life will change both physically and culturally in an astounding way. It is true that no particular war can possibly end all war. It is the untamed animal in humans which causes all their personal fights, tribal aggressions, and national wars. It is the spiritual nature of humans which urges them to live peaceably and harmoniously with one’s fellows. That humans can rid themselves of external bloodshed without troubling to rid themselves of its internal causes within oneself, is one of their intellectual-born illusions. It may be kept at a distance for a longer time than before but it cannot be kept there permanently while the passions of hatred, anger, and greed thrive in one’s heart. However, it is also true that one’s instruments of collective violence have now become so destructive, so terrible, and so cruel that their very results are forcing one to contemplate abandoning such violence altogether, and to turn towards peaceful discussion for the settlement of one’s disputes. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
At the very simplest and most immediate level, why not create a cadre of professional and paraprofessional “life-organizers”? For example, we probably need fewer psychotherapist burrowing molelike into is and ego, and more people who can helps us, even in little ways, to pull our daily lives together. Among the most widely heard do-you-not-believe-it phrases in use today are: “Tomorrow I will get myself organized” or “I am getting my act together.” Yet structuring one’s life under today’s conditions of high social and technological turmoil is harder and harder to do. The breakup of normal Second Wave structures, the overchoice of lifestyles, schedules, and educational opportunities—all, as we have seen, increase the difficulty. For the less affluent, economic pressures impose high structure. For the middle class, and especially their children, the reverse is true. Why not recognize this fact? Some psychiatrists today perform a life-organizing function. Instead of years on the couch, they offer practical assistance in finding work, locating a girl or boyfriend, budgeting one’s money, following a diet, and so forth. We need many more such consultants, structure-providers, and we need feel no shame about seeking their services. In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba. However, how much effort goes into studying the structure of everyday life—the way time is allocated, the personal uses of money, the places to go for help in a society exploding with complexity? We take for granted that young people already know their way around our social structure. In fact, most have only the dimmest image of the way the World of work or business is organized. Most students have no conception of the architecture of their own city’s economy, or the way the local bureaucracy operates, or the place to go to lodge a complaint against a merchant. Most do not even understand how their own schools—even universities—are structured, let alone how such structures are changing under the impact of the Fourth Wave. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
We also need to take a fresh look at structure-providing institutions—including cults. A sensible society should provide a spectrum of institutions, ranging from those that are free-form to those that are tightly structured. We need open classrooms as well as traditional schools. We need easy-come-easy-go organization as well as rigid monastic orders (secular as well as religious). Today the gap between the total structure offered by the cult and the seemingly total structutrelessness of daily life may well be too wide. If we find the complete subjugation demanded by many cults to be repellent, we should perhaps encourage the formation of what might be called “semi-cults” that lie somewhere between structureless freedom and tightly structured regimentation. Religious organizations, vegetarians, and other sects of groupings might actually be encouraged to form communities in which moderate to high structure is imposed on those who wish to live that way. These semi-cults might be licensed or monitored to assure that they do not engage in physical or mental violence, embezzlement, extortion, or other such practices, and could be set up so that people in need of external structure can join them for a six-month or one-year hitch—and then leave without pressure or recriminations. Some people might find it helpful to live within a semi-cult for a time, then return to the outside World, then plug back into the organization for a time, and so forth, alternating between the demands of high, imposed structure and the freedom offered by the larger society. Should this not be possible for them? Such semi-cults also suggest the need for secular organizations that lie somewhere between the freedom of civilian life and the discipline of the army. Why not a variety of civilian life and the discipline of the army. Why not a variety of civilian service corps, perhaps organized by cities, school systems, or even private companies to perform useful community service on a contract basis employing young people who might live together under strict disciplinary rules and be paid army-scale wages. (To bring these paychecks up to the prevailing minimum wage, corps members might receive supplementary vouchers good for university tuition or training.) #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
A “pollution crops,” a “public sanitation corps,” a “paramedic corps,” or a corps designed to assist the elderly—such organizations could yield high dividends for both community and individual. In addition to providing useful services and a degree of life-structure, such organization could also help bring much-needed meaning into the lives of their members—not some spurious mystical or political theology but the simple ideal of service to community. Beyond such measures, however, we shall need to integrate personal meaning with larger, more encompassing World views. It is not enough for people to understand (or think they understand) their own small contributions to society. Even if inarticulate, they must also have some sense of how they fit into the larger scheme of things. As the Fourth Wave arrives we will need to formulate sweeping new integrative World view—coherent syntheses, not merely blips—that tie things together. No single World view can ever capture the whole truth. Only by applying multiple and temporary metaphours can we gain a rounded (if still incomplete) picture of the World. However, to acknowledge this axiom is not the same as saying life is meaningless. Indeed, even if life is meaningless in some cosmic sense, we can and often do construct meaning, drawing it from decent social relations and picturing ourselves as part of a larger drama—the coherent unfolding of history. In building Fourth Wave civilization, therefore, we must go beyond the attack on loneliness. We must also begin providing a framework of order and purpose in life. For meaning, structure, and community are interrelated preconditions for a livable future. In working toward these ends, it will help to understand that the present agony of social isolation, the impersonality, structurelessness, and sense of meaninglessness from which so many people suffer are symptoms of the breakdown of the past rather than intimations of the future. It will not be enough, however, for us to change society. For as we shape Forth Wave civilization will in turn shape us. A new psycho-sphere is emerging that will fundamentally alter our character. And it is to this—the personality of the future—that we next turn. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
However, let us return to our theme of vocation and develop it a step further. Perhaps the young fellows really want to do something, that is, something worthwhile, for only a worthwhile achievement finishes a doing. A person rests when one has finished a real job. (The striking illustration of this is that, statistically, the best mental health used to be found among locomotive engineers, and is now found among air-line pilots! The task is useful, exacting, it sets in motion a big machine, and when it is over, it is done with.) If the object is important, it gives structure to many a day’s action and dreaming—one might even continue in school. Unfortunately our society balks us, for it simple does not take seriously the fact, or the possibility, that people want this; nor the philosophic truth that excepts in worthwhile activity there is no way to be happy. For instance, in a standard questionnaire for delinquents, by Milton Barron, in a hundred headings there do not appear the questions, “What do you want to be? What do you want to work at? What do you want to achieve?” (But Donald Taft’s Criminology, which Barron is adapting, has the sentence: “Absence of vocational interest at the age when it is normal…is tell-tale of a starved life.”) In despair, the fifteen-year-olds hand around and do nothing at all, neither work nor play. Without a worthwhile prospect, without a sense of justification, the made-play of the Police Athletic League is not interesting, it is not their own. They do not do their school work, for they are waiting to quit; and it is hard, as well shall see, for them to get part-time jobs. Indeed, the young fellows (not only delinquents) spend a vast amount of time doing nothing. They hang around together, but do not talk about any thing, nor even—if you watch their faces—do they passively take in the scene. Conversely, at the movies, where the real scene is by-passed, they watch with absorbed fantasy, and afterward sometimes mimic what they saw. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
If there is nothing worthwhile, it is hard to do anything at all. When one does nothing, one is threatened by the question, is one nothing? To this insulting doubt, however, there is a lively response: a system of values centering around threatened grownupness and defensive conceit. This is the so-called “threatened masculinity,” not in the sense of being called a girl, but of being called, precisely, “boy,” the term of insult to some cultures. With this, there is an endless compulsion to prove potency and demand esteem. The boys do not talk about much of interest, but there is a vast amount of hot rhetoric to assert that oneself is “as good as anybody else,” no more useless, stupid, or cowardly. For instance, if they play a game, the interest in the game is weak: they are looking elsewhere when the ball is served, there are lapses in attention, they smoke cigarettes even while playing handball. The interest in victory is surprisingly weak: there is not much glow of self-esteem. However, the need for proof is overwhelming: “I won you, didn’ I? I won you last week too, didn’ I?” During childhood, they played games with fierce intensity, giving themselves as a sacrifice to the game, for play was the chief business of growth, finding and making themselves in the World. Now when they are too old merely to play, to what shall they give themselves with fierce intensity? They cannot play for recreation, since they have not been used up. The proving behaviour is endless. Since each activity is not interesting to begin with, its value does not deepen and it does not bear much repetition. Its value as proof quickly diminishes. In these circumstances, the inevitable tendency is to raise the ante of the compulsive useless activity that proves one is potent and not useless. (This analysis applies equally to these juveniles and to status-seeking junior executive in business firms and on Madison Avenue.) It is not surprising then, that, as Frederic Thrasher says in The Gang, “Other things being equal, the imaginative boy has an excellent chance to become the leaders of the gang. He has the power to make things interesting for them. He ‘thinks up things for us to do.’” At this point let us intervene and see what the Official Spokesmen say. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Come before the Father in prayer, wearing the breastplate of righteousness. Then you can stand in the throne room and say, “Father, I stand before You because of the righteousness of Your Son Jesus Christ. I come boldly before You without fear or condemnation or a sense of inferiority.” Someone may say, “You mean you think you are not inferior to God?” I did not say I was not. It is His righteousness that is not inferior. I am a partaker of that righteousness. (A Corinthians 5.21.) The Word says I am a joint-heir with Jesus. Do you think Jesus is inferior? We are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. God’s righteousness cannot be inferior or unworthy. When you put all this armour on, you will have on God’s clothes. When you stand before the devil to resist him, he thinks God is inside that armour and He really is. (John 14.23.) With God’s armour on, Satan does not see you; he sees God’s clothes. However, the minute you raise up your helmet and say, “I prayed, but it is not working out” or “I do not feel healed,” Satan knows that it is not God because He does not talk that way. Put on the prayer armour. Gird your loins with the Truth for this part holds all the armour in place. If you do not have the Truth, you are defeated going somewhere to happened! If you do not have the Truth, you do not know how to pray accurately. If you do not have the Truth, you will not know who you are in Christ Jesus. Prayer is your legal right to come to God’s throne, wearing the breastplate of righteousness and the helmet of salvation with your loins girt about with the Truth, your feet shod with the gospel of peace, holding up the shield of faith, and having the Sword of the Spirit in your mouth. “The heart of the wise teacheth one’s mouth,” reports Proverbs 16.23. Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their happiness, do not work against God’s intent. Humans, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the Earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traced of your foulness after you—alas, it is true of almost every one of us! #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
O God, I thank thee for all the creatures thou hast made, so perfect in their kind—great animals like the elephant and the rhinoceros, humorous animals like the camel and the monkey, friendly ones like the dog and the cat, working ones like the horse and the ox, timid ones like the squirrel and the rabbit, majestic ones like the lion and the tiger, for birds with their songs. O Lord give us such love for Thy creation, that love may cast out fear, and all Thy creatures see in man their priest and friend, through Jesus Christ our Lord. I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions, and as a mist thy sins; return unto Me, for I have redeemed thee. Sing, O ye Heavens, for the Lord hath done it; shouted aloud, O depths of the Earth; break forth into singing, ye mountains and forest, and every tree therein; for the Lord hath redeemed Jacob, and doth glorify Himself in America. Our redeemer, the Lord of Hosts is His name, the Holy One of America. O America, that art saved by the Lord with an everlasting salvation, ye shall not be ashamed nor confused, World without end. And ye shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and shall praise the name of the Lord your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you; and My people shall never be put to shame. And ye shall know that I am in the midst of America, and that I am the Lord your God, and there is none else; and My people shall never again be put to shame. For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Behold is my salvation; I trust Him and I will not be afraid, for the Lord God is my strength and song; and He is become my salvation. Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation. And in that day shall ye say: Give thanks unto the Lord, proclaim His name, declare His doings among the peoples, record that His name is exalted. Sing unto the Lord, for He hath done gloriously; let this be made known in all the Earth. Sing for joy, O inhabitants of America; for the great is the Holy One of America in your midst. And it shall be said on that say: Lo, this our God in whom we placed our hope that He might save us; this is the Lord for whom we have waited; we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Where there is Official Censorship, it is a Sign that Speech is Serious!
Time is not the enemy. It is not an obstacle or an unfair restraint. The main thing is to keep the main thing the most important goal. While the physical scientist has not been able to dispense completely with the concept of the unexplainable or supernatural, one has at least managed to consign it to a corner of one’s mind where it does not greatly interfere with one’s day-to-day activities. One accepts as “given” the laws and particles of nature and spends little time worrying about the metaphysical problems associated with their origin. However, one accepts absolutely nothing else as given. One conceives of the World of physical and chemical phenomena with which one deals as a completely orderly and lawful World, with every detailed event, whether it be the formation of a new galaxy or the fall of a raindrop, being the effect of causes, which are themselves the effects of other causes, and so on, going back ultimately to the fundamental particles and the basic laws of the Universe. Even the existence among one’s laws of a principle of indeterminacy limiting the precision with which the future can be predicted does not permit the entry of caprice into the World of the physical scientist. Within a calculable and frequently very narrow range of uncertainty, the future is completely determined by the past. Given the laws and the particles, all else follows inexorably. It is a measure of how far the modern World has come that few who read the preceding paragraphs will find either strange or objectionable the ideas expressed there—as long as they are clearly understood to relate only to the properties of inanimate matter. However, when it comes to biological science, a different situation exists. There is by no means universal agreement on the extent to which living organisms resemble nonliving matter in having structure and properties determined entirely by the operation of immutable and unchanging laws. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Many are convinced that there is a basic difference between biological and physical phenomena in the degree of their ultimate scientific explainability. And even those who believe generally in the validity of natural law in biology may still feel that the laws applicable to living matter differ in profound essentials from those which control nonliving matter. In former periods it was not difficult, even for practicing scientists to employ entirely different philosophies when interpreting biological and physical phenomena. There were obviously vast differences between living creatures and inanimate objects. The overall properties of reproduction, growth, purposive behavior, adaptability, and the like just did not exist in the World of the physical scientist. And even when the structural and functional details of living organisms were investigated, the conspicuous features were found to be complex organs, nervous system, tissues, and cells that seemed to have nonbiological counterparts. Since the biologist possessed the normal human genetic endowment, one could not help looking for cause/effect relationships, or “natural laws,” to help explain the complexities with which one had to deal in terms of a smaller number of simpler concepts. In this one was partially successful, but one’s laws, dealing with such things as the response of living organisms or parts of living organisms to environmental change, had little resemblance the physicist was steadily establishing among his particles and forces. Biology and physics appeared to be entirely separate fields. The biologist, with subject matter incomparably more complex than that of the physicist, had an even greater need for recourse to the supernatural to bolster the underpinnings of one’s science. For the purpose the particles and laws of the physical scientists did not seem relevant. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Instead, there appeared to exist underlying purposive and directive forces in living organisms of a quality lying completely beyond the reach or cause/effect considerations. The term “vital force” and “vitalism” were coined to represent the many aspects of the phenomena of life that, it was believed, would never be susceptible to scientific explanation. There was a certain tidiness about the clear cleavage between biology and physics, each possessing it own separate sphere of action and each governed by its own religious dogma. Such separation also has the great advantage of consistency with one of the most humanly compelling of all philosophic tenets—the anthropocentric notion placing humans above and beyond the workings of natural law designed for the regulation of an impersonal World. For the idea of the fundamental irreconcilability of life processes with the principles of physical science has always been a popular one almost automatically accepted as true, at least until proved false by overwhelming evidence. Nevertheless, with the growth of knowledge both in the physical and the life sciences, the neat separation between the fields became difficult to maintain. Despite the essential convictions of practicing scientists, biology and physics had a tendency to come together. In retrospect, it seems more than coincidental that the event generally considered to have launched biology as a true science—Harvey’s discovery in 1628 of the circulation of the blood—consisted of a demonstration that ordinary principles of hydraulic engineering could be successfully applied to explain a vital function of the human body. In the nearly 400 years since Harvey’s discovery one after another of the aspect of biology that were originally believed destined to be eternally dependent upon the mystery of vitalism for their explanation has been moved out of the realm of the supernatural by the application of the ordinary laws of physical science. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Not only the gross functions of the body organs but many of their details of structure and operation have been found amenable to explanation by the methods of the physicist and chemist. Even the substances that go into the composition of the tissues and cells of living organisms have been found to owe their architecture and properties to the operation of the same physical laws of atomic particles and forces that govern the chemistry of nonliving matter. In short, the coalescence of the physical and the life sciences has progressed so far that many scientists in both disciplines now suspect that there is no fundamental difference between them—that ultimately all aspects of the structure and behaviour of living matter will be explainable in terms of exactly the same fundamental particles and natural laws as those underlying the load carrying qualities of a bridge, the flight capabilities of a rocketship or the colour of the sun when it changes angles in the sky. According to this magnificently unifying concept, there is but one ultimate science, and that is the science of the physicist. However, if there is only one ultimate science, there must also be only one ultimate supernatural, and that mist consist in its totality of the postulate of the original existence of the fundamental particles and natural laws of physical science. All else in biology, as well as in physics and chemistry, must follow. Since living matter is only a different manifestation of the operation of the same particles and natural laws as those governing nonliving matter, there can be no “vital principle,” “vital force,” or “vitalism” that pertains to the one but not to the other. These thoughts, of course, are not new. The Greeks formulated many of them. However, there is something about the context in which they arise in the twenty-first century that is significantly different from that of previous eras. The thesis of the possible unity of all science emerges today, not just from the contemplative mind of the philosopher, but from the laboratory of the science. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
In the twenty-first century this is no longer merely one of many competing these, all similarly unverified and seemingly unverifiable. Instead, we are now confronted with an unbroken path of scientific discovery, extending back several hundred years, each successive step of which moves closer to what had for some time seemed to many to be an inevitable ultimate conclusion. What was once Greek philosophy has become a scientific hypothesis worthy of objective consideration and treatment by the techniques of the scientific method. When it comes to matters related to the probable unity of science, in terms of the loose categories that we popularly apply to the functions of higher animals, the subject matter there treated was “mental” rather than “physical.” In that area it seemed that the evidence was rather convincing that all aspects of complex behaviour and intellectual activity will ultimately find satisfactory explanations in terms of the purely physical laws of nature. Although it was harder to do, I though it was even possible to reconcile the subjective phenomena of personal awareness with the concept of the reign of the natural laws of physical science in the domain of human experience. Obviously, even if it has been entirely convincing, the earlier treatment could not have been considered complete demonstration of the ultimate identity of biology and physics. For it remained to be shown that the so-called physical properties of living organisms could also be expected to arise by the normal workings of the laws of physics. There is the accumulated evidence for the essential continuity between nonliving matter and living organisms. Insofar as the evidence is convincing, the age-old “mystery of life” is indeed exposed as a clever, but essentially nonmagical, trick of the ordinary laws of physics. The establishment of values and their relationships presupposes a valuating subject, and the question arises: how can values that are relative to a valuating individual or group (exempli gratia pleasure values) be separated from values that are valid by their very nature regardless of personal or social attitudes? #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
If there are such “absolute values” (absolute in the same sense of being independent of a valuating subject), what is the source of their absoluteness, how can they be discovered, how are they related to reality, and what is their ontological standing? These questions led unavoidably to a situation that the value theory by its very nature tries to avoid—namely, a doctrine of being, an ontology. For only if they are rooted in reality, then the values have reality. Their validity is an expression of their ontological foundation. Being precedes value, but value fulfills being. Therefor, the vale theory, in its search for absolute values, is thrown back upon the ontological question of the source of values in being. A third way in which the religious dimension of the moral imperative is questioned can be described as the attempt, with the help of psychological and sociological explanations, to deny the unconditional character of the moral altogether. The psychological impact of realities like the demanding and threatening parents, or doctrines like that of the commanding pushing God, evokes the feeling of something unconditionally serious from which there is no escape and with which there can be no compromise. The same argument can be strengthened by sociological considerations. For example, one can derive, like Nietzsche, the shaping of the conscience of the masses from centuries of pressure exercised by the ruling groups, who did not hesitate to employ all, even the most cruel, tools of suppression—military, legal, education, psychological. From generation to generation this pressure produced an increasing internalization of commands, namely, the sense of standing under an inner unconditional command, an absolute moral imperative. This type of argument seems convincing. However, it is circular because it presupposes what it tries to prove—the identity of two qualitatively different structures. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
In the one case, persons and groups are bound by traditions, conventions, and authorities, subjection to which is demanded by the conscience, which may be weak or strong, compromising or insistent, healthy or compulsory, reasonable of fanatic. Psychological or sociological explanations of such states of mind are fully justified. Nothing that happens in the mind should be exempt from psychological or sociological exploration and explanation. However, within this structure of causation, another is manifest—what we might call the “structure of meaning” or, to use a famous medieval terms revived by modern phenomenology, the structure of “intentionality” or the noetic structure (from nous, “mind”). This structure would be evident, for example, should a mathematician, psychologically and sociologically conditioned like everyone else, discover a new mathematical proposition. The validity of this proposition is independent of the series of conditions which made the discovery possible. In a similar way, the meaning of the unconditional in being and in what ought-to-be appears within the psychological and sociological processes which make its appearance possible. However, its validity is not dependent on the structure in which it appears. Psychological and sociological pressures may provide occasion for the appearance of such structures; but they cannot produce the meaning of the unconditional. However strong the pressures be, they are themselves conditioned, and it is possible to contradict them and to be liberated from them, as, for example, from the father-image or from the socially produced conscience. This is not possible with regard to the unconditional character of the moral imperative. One can, of course, discard every particular content for the sake of another, but one cannot discard every particular content for the sake of another, but one can discard the moral imperative itself without the self-destruction of one’s essential nature and one’s eternal relationship. For these reasons, the attempts to undercut the unconditional character of the moral imperative by psychological and sociological arguments must fail. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
There is, however, a more fundamental question, raised and thoroughly discussed by the ancient ethical philosophers, namely, the question of the moral aim. We have called it “becoming a person within a community of persons,” and we have indicated that the centered person is the bearer of the spirit, its creativity, and its self-transcendence. Insofar as it is the moral aim to constitute and preserve the person with these potentialities, we can say tht the moral imperative demands the actualization of human’s created potentiality. However, now the question arises: is this an unconditional demand? The answer depends on the idea of human’s intrinsic aim, of the telos for which one is created. If the aim implies something above finitude and transitoriness, the fulfillment of this aim is infinitely significant, or unconditional in its seriousness. The Jesuit fathers who had joined the Spanish military conquerors were shocked and distressed. Incan maidens, they complained, were quite unlike their counterparts in Europe. There, virginity was highly prized in brides, but in the far-flung Incan empire of the Andes, young women were as free to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh dalliances as young men. The priests, metaphorically wringing their hands, deplored this behaviour. “Women are considered of less value while they are virgins,” lamented Jesuit father Costa, “and thus, whenever possible, they give themselves to the first man they find.” Given the Incas’ pragmatic approach to sexuality, so different from the Europeans’, the divinely inspired institution of the acllas—chosen women—is all the more intriguing. At first, these cloistered virgins seem like the Incan version of the vestals. The reality was different. The acllas—chosen women—is all the more intriguing. At first, these cloistered virgins seem like the Incan version of the vestals. The reality was different. The acllas’ religious role did parallel that of the vestals, but unlike them, the acllas also had significant political impact. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
By 1532, when Pizarro and his conquistador arrived and crushed the Incas into defeat, the Incan empire extended from what is today Quito, Ecuador, down to central Chile. As imperialists ruling a patchwork territory of defeated enemies, the Incas faced constant opposition, ranging from sullen subterfuge to outright rebellion. Their genius was to devise a multifaceted administrative apparatus that melded the diverse conquered cultures into a cohesive political structure and made them governable. The Inca himself, absolutely ruler and descendant of the Sun God, was at the apex of the Incan pyramid. Underneath were his officials, privileged and educated nobles whose positions were hereditary and whose children were sent off to Cuzco, the administrative capital, for formal training. These curacas were highly paid and, unlike the millions of toiling peasants, did not pay taxes. The cleverness of this system was how it co-opted the intellectual elite and former rulers of the conquered peoples. Most curacas belonged to vanquished peoples, so Incas bestowed on them the enviable status of Inca-by-privilege, which was not noticeably different from Inca-by-birth. The more talented and loyal they were, the more gifts and promotions they could expect. Through this rigidly hierarchical structure, the Incan bureaucracy imposed its imperial standards and demands—heavy taxes, for example—on millions of Indian peasants. It certainly did not eliminate dissension, but it greatly facilitated the work—and the rewards—of empire. The parallels between the imperial function of the curacas and the acllas are striking, except the acllas derived their power from the very different sphere of religion. Religion suffused Incan life. Ritual was paramount, for ceremonies and sacrifices ensured the fecundity of crops and animals and the health of the humans who tended them. The Incan pantheon was crowded, but Inti the Sun God, founder of the Incan dynasty, was among the most important deities. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
As the Sun God’s Earthly descendant, the Inca had unique needs. Unlike other men, for example, he required virgin wives. With typical Incan brilliance, he sent his agent to locate the most beautiful virgins in every province of his dominion. Because Andean women had no predilection for chastity, the girls chosen far, far were too young. These acllas were selected strictly for beauty, rank, and of course virginity. Once chosen, neither they nor their parents could object. Henceforth the new aclla was alienated from her community and belonged only to the Sun or Inca. The acllas went into training, sequestered in convents called acllawasis, under the guidance of mamaconas, older acllas promoted to this rank. One crucial lesson was that for the rest of their lives, they must remain virginal. Four or five years later, the Inca intervened, reserving some novices for wives. The he married, though exempted from virginity, were honored and held in awe and respect, and Indian men and women greatly venerated them. Most acllas, however, were ritually wed to the Sun, and as his wives, shared his divinity and were referred to as “sainted people.” Like the Inca’s wives, the acllas were revered throughout the empire. A popular myth even held that they were so spiritual, they subsisted only on the odor of certain fruit. Daily life in the acllawasi was structured and busy, as befitted the industrious Incas. The acllas learned both religious duties and womanly chores, though the latter were always performed in a religious context. The acllas spun and wove fine, brightly coloured cloth to adorn the idols, to burn in sacrifice, and for they Inca’s garments. They brewed chicha liquor and cooked, and at sunrise they said, “Sun, eat this food that your wives have cooked for you.” After sacrifices, this food nourished the Sun’s priests, attendants, Acllawasi guards, and the acllas themselves. Like the vestal virgins, they also tended the temple fire, feeding it special carved and painted wood. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Older acllas—the mamaconas—had even greater responsibilities. During a month devoted to special ceremonies, for example, they distributed vast quantities of balls of bred baked with the blood of animals sacrificed in religious ceremonies. They gave tiny bits to all the foreigners in Cuzo and sent larger portions to all the foreign temples through the kingdom and to various curacas, as a token of political bonds and their loyalty to the Sun and to the Inca. By this simple ritual with its powerful symbolism, the venerated mamaconas demonstrated what a valuable role they played in the Incan political strategy of strengthening the bonds between Cuzo and the provinces. Their virginity underlay the allas’ existence. The acllawais were heavily guarded and the acllas could leave them only to preform liturgical duties such as procession. However, longings for pleasures of the flesh sometime overpowered them, and the male gatekeepers, the custodians of the acllas’ virtue were sometimes the thieves who stile it. Once, for acllas had pleasures of the flesh relations with certain men who were posted to guard the acllawsi gates. When it was discovered they had broken their scared vows, the offending acllas and their lovers were arrested and the high priests sentenced them all to death. The acllas had been warned. They were the brides of the Sun, and their divine husband demanded perpetual celibacy. Still, it is said that, more than once, an Inca crept into acllawasi and had his way with a virginal aclla. After one such tryst, one of the elderly guards respectfully clasped the Inca’s robe as he sat in the Square of the Sun. “Inca,” he murmured, “last night you went into the House of the Sun and you were with one of his women.” “I sinned,” replied the Inca in a muted voice. The guard went away, satisfied he would not be executed for negligence for not defending the virtue of the acllas. Most acllas, however, fell victim to neither the Inca nor their own passions. These women shared “the life of great queens and ladies, and a life of tremendous pleasure and amusements, and they were highly regarded, esteemed, and loved by the Inca and by the Great Lords.” And as unwitting agents of imperil reconciliation and consolidations, the acllas were so effective that twice, when Cuzco was sacked, the conquerors spared only two places: the Temple of the Sun and the acllawasi, the home of the revered Incan virgins. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
In legend at least, the acllas live on today. Peruvian descendants of the Incas tell this story. A young aclla and a peasant boy became lovers. The Inca learned the maiden had violated her vow of perpetual chastity. He condemned the young couple to a living burial, faceup in the ground. That night, the elements were so agitated that rivers dried up, stars shifted positions, and all the soil was contaminated, except the Earth where the lovers were interred. The priests were alarmed. They decided the bodies should be dug up and burned. However, instead of corpses, they found only two tubers lying side by side. These were the first potatoes. One of the World’s best-loved staple foods was the product of divine retribution against a sinning aclla and the lover with whom she had violated her sacred vow of perpetual virginity. Many psychodynamic theorists believe that suicide results from depression and from anger at others that is redirected toward oneself. This theory was first stated by Wilhem Stekel at a meeting in Vienna in 1910, when he proclaimed that “no one kills himself (or herself) who has not wanted to kill another or at least wished the death of another. Some years later Dr. Sigmund Freud (1920) wrote, “No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which one has not turned back upon himself (or herself) from murderous impulses against others.” Agreeing with this perspective, Karl Menninger called suicide “murder-in-the 180th degree.” Dr. Freud and Abraham proposed tht when people experience the real or symbolic loss of a loved one, they come to “introject” the lost person; that is, they unconsciously incorporate the person into their own identity and feel toward themselves as they had felt toward the other. For a short while, negative feelings toward the lost loved one are experienced as self-hatred. Anger toward the loved one may turn into intense anger against oneself and finally into depression. Suicide is thought to be an extreme expression of this self-hatred. The following description of a suicidal patient demonstrates how such forces may operate: A 27-year-old conscientious and responsible woman took a knife to her wrists to punish herself for being tyrannical, unreliable, self-centered, and abusive. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
She was perplexed and frightened by this uncharacteristic self-destructive episode and was enormously relieved when her therapist pointed out that her invective described her recently deceased father much better than it did herself. In support of Dr. Freud’s view, researchers have often found a relationship between childhood losses—real or symbolic—and later suicidal behaviours. One study of 200 family histories found that early parental loss was much more common among suicide attempters (48 percent) than among nonsuicidal controls subjects (24 percent). Common form of loss were death of the father and divorce of separation of the parents, especially during either the early years of life or late adolescence. Late in his career, Dr. Freud proposed that human beings have a basic “death instinct.” He called this instinct Thanatos, and said that it opposes the “life instinct.” According to Dr. Freud, while most people learn to redirect their death instinct, by aiming it towards others, suicidal people, caught in a web of self-anger, direct it squarely upon themselves. Sociological findings are consistent with this explanation of suicide. National suicides rates have been found to drop in times of war, when, one could argue, people are encouraged to direct their self-destructive energy against “the enemy.” In addition, societies with high rates of homicide tend to have low rates of suicide, and vice versa. However, research has failed to establish that suicidal people are in fact dominated by intense feelings of anger. Although hostility is an important element in some suicides, several studies find that other emotional states are even more prevalent. By the end of his career, Dr. Freud himself expressed dissatisfaction with his theory of suicide. Other psychodynamic theorists have also challenged his ideas over the year, yet themes of loss and self-direction aggression generally remain at the center of most psychodynamic explanations. In our times the usual principle of such speech is that the others, the delinquent boys, are not taken seriously as existing, as having, like oneself, real aims in a real World. They are not condemned; they are not accepted. Instead they are a “youth problem” and the emphasis is on their “background conditions,” which one can manipulate; they are said to be subject to “tensions” that one can alleviate. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
The aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant beliefs, and task to share in, but to re-establish “belonging,” although this kind of speech and thought precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belong impossible. When such efforts do not work, one finally takes some of the boy seriously as existing and uses force to make them not exist. Let me give a childish but important illustration of how this works out. A boy ten or eleven has a few great adventures involving pleasures of the flesh—he thinks they are great—but then he has the bad lucky to get caught and get in trouble. They try to persuade him by punishment and other explanations that some different behaviour is much better, but he knows by the evidence of his senses that nothing could be better. If he lives on in a profound disbelief, a disbelief in their candor and a disbelief even of one’s own body feelings. However, if he persists and proves incorrigible, then the evidence of his senses is attached to what is socially punished, explained away; he may even be put away. The basic trouble here is that they do not really believe he has had the pleasures of the flesh experience. That objective factor is inconvenient for them; therefore it cannot exist. Instead, this is merely a case of insecure affection at home, slum housing, comic books, and naughty companions: tensions and conditions. My hunch, is that this kind of early pleasures of the flesh adventure and misadventure is fairly common in delinquency. It is called precocious, abnormal, artificially stimulated, and so forth—an index of future delinquency. In my opinion that is rubbish, but be that as it may; what is important in a particular case is that there is a stubborn new fact. Attempting to nullify it makes further growth impossible (and creates the future delinquency). The sensible course would be to accept it as a valuable part of further growth. However, if this were done, they fear that the approved little hero would be a rotten apple to his peers, who now would suddenly all become precocious, abnormal, artificially stimulated, and prone to delinquency. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
The plight with pleasures of the flesh of these children is officially not mentioned. The revolutionary attack on hypocrisy by Ibsen, Freud, Ellis, Dresier, did not succeed this far. It is an eccentric opinion that an important part of the kids’ restiveness in school from the onset of puberty has to do with puberty? The teachers talk about it among themselves, all right. (In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had no pleasures of the flesh, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.) However, since this objective factor does not exist in our schools, the school itself begins to be irrelevant. The question here is not whether the pleasures of the flesh should be discouraged or encouraged. When existing facts are treated as though they do not exist, there is an important issue, far more important is that it is hard to grow up. For then there is no dialogue, it is impossible to be taken seriously, to be understood, to make a bridge between oneself and society. In American society we have perfected a remarkable form of censorship: to allow every one one’s political right to say what one believes, but to swamp his little boat with literally thousands of millions of newspaper, mass-circulation magazines, best-selling books, broadcasts, and public pronouncements that disregard what he says and give the official way of looking at things. Usually there is no conspiracy to do this; it is simply that what he says is not what people are talking about, it is not newsworthy. (There is no conspiracy, but it is not undeliberate. “If you mean to tell me,” said an editor to me, “that Esquire tries to have articles on important issues and treats them in such a way that nothing can come of it—who can deny it?” Try, also, if your view on the issues calls attention to an essential factor that is not being generally mentioned to get a letter printed in the New York Times.) Naturally, the more simply true a statement is in any issues about which everybody is quite confused, the less newsworthy it will be, the les it will be what everybody is talking about. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
When the child is the story said, But the Emperor has no clothes!” the newspaper and broadcasts surely devoted many columns to describing the beautiful new clothes and also mentioned the interesting psychological incident of the child. Instead of being proud of him, his parents were ashamed; but on the other hand they received $89,000 in sympathetic contributions towards his rehabilitation, for he was a newsworthy case. However, he had a block in reading. Where there is official censorship, it is a sign that speech is serious. That is why social media and congress teamed up to block President Trump out. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers. The proclaiming of morality by the state is so loud and so constant, becomes such a litany, that the leaders of a nation may hypnotize themselves, may come to believer their own public relations act. Concurrent with careful plotting for the annexation of the Philippine Islands, the American government advanced the fiction that the unpredictable fortunes of war were making America the unwilling and reluctant recipient and custodian of the islands. And when, later, the conquest achieved, a group of clergymen called upon President McKinley, he explained just how he had arrived at his decision: “I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you gentlemen that I went on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance more than one might. And one night it came to me this way—that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them. And by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellowmen for whom Christ also died. And then I went to sleep and slept soundly.” Morality is not a vision of ends, however desirable, but a system of restraints in the pursuit of any end. States speak the language of morality without the intention of being limited by it. They behave as they see fit, and the way they see fit is then declared to be moral. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
If they invade and take over a neighbouring state, it is at the “invitation” of that state to maintain order, liberty, justice, etcetera. Since there is no tribunal with the authority to disallow such claims, the state had the last word. And its last word is always a pious assertion of morality. When we condemn, as we often do, the action of a sovereign entity as wrong—the torture of political prisoners, for example—we do so on the basis of an individual morality that obtains within the collective. We extend those limits, rules, and restraints, and demand that the state itself observed them. And how does the challenged state respond? It says: “Like all civilized nations, we absolutely condemn the torture of political prisoners. Be assured it does not happen here.” When presented with names, dates, photographs: “There regrettable incidents were the unauthorized actions of certain guards, who will be apprehended and punished. “When it is demonstrated that the practice continues: “We do it only when absolutely necessary for national security.” When pressed further: “Other nations do it, too, including your own.” And finally: “Your visa is canceled. Go home.” So what then does it man when we condemn a state for evil acts? It means that we believe there should be limits, rules, to which the state is subject, however lofty the ends in view which might call for their suspensions, and that is it does not conform to thee limits, it should be forcibly restrained and punished. Which is to say, there should be a morality of sovereign states. And so perhaps there should. However, there is not. And should ever it come about, the states it restrained would no longer be sovereign. A double standard is unavoidably at work in the life of a strong and flourished state: Its citizens observe limits in their conduct with each other, whereas foe the state nothing is forbidden. If the individuals in the pursuit of their private aims were to consider themselves as free of limits as Machiavelli’s Prince in his conduct of the state, nothing being absolutely forbidden, then the actions of these individuals would immediately reduce society to chaos. The state would have been a mob; the Prince would have nothing to rule. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
The great Cuban crisis of 1962 resulted in a situation which brought about a postponement of the menace of World War III, but did not, fully and finally, avert it. All efforts to obtain peace may succeed or not succeed—the results are variable—but any effort to establish peace permanently cannot possibly do so fully and finally until the human race comes into a larger obedience to the higher spiritual laws. If philosophy can do nothing for the peace of the World, then it is worth nothing. However, it can do something. Indeed, if the politicians and militarists would recognize its inner worth, its private firsthand knowledge of the higher laws, it could redeem civilization from the evils and horrors of war. We may find any number of excellent arguments against war. We may demonstrate conclusively that was as a process for achieving national aggrandizement is now entirely unnecessary, because applied science has opened the way for every nation to increase its wealth many times. However, if arguments alone were sufficient to convince rulers, then war would have disappeared when the first flood of League propaganda was sluiced out on the World. The fact is that something more than appeal to reason is required, for humans contain passions, prejudices, greed, and fears also. One must batter down the barriers which wall in one’s view of life. One must stop thinking in terms of one’s own country alone. One must learn that the frontiers of England, of America, of India, lie far beyond England, beyond America, and beyond India. One must open out one’s philosophical horizon and bring one’s thinking up to date. Know that this century demands that the Indian peasant learn that one’s fate is inextricably bound up with the fate of the British factory worker, and both with that of the American trader. When chaos and disorder, violence and materialism become widespread, the spiritual forces reassert themselves, restate the truth, and inspire a renewal of faith, religion, and mysticism. A society which is based on a hierarchy of wealth, position, appearance, and Worldly skill is unbalanced and cannot function properly or healthily of fully. It must look deeper and add inner spiritual correspondences to these things. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The political conferences to prevent or end war appear ridiculous; they are foredoomed from the start: selfishness and insincerity render them futile. The hope for a lasting peace—so often unrealized—can become satisfied but only by looking for it in a new direction—within. The World situation is very unpromising. Humanity has not learned as much as it ought to have learned from its terrible sufferings of recent years. Or, as in certain countries, it has even learned the wrong lessons and become more selfish, more brutal and violent, and more unco-operative. There is no escape, no new shortcut through political or economical change out of the chaos in which the nations find themselves, other than the oldest one in history—which is to avoid evil, to do good, to believe in God and the moral laws. The helmet of salvation—“And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints,” reports Galatians 5.17-18. Praying always with all prayer. The Word of God praying. Paul is talking about prayer armour. Part of that armour is the helmet of salvation. The word salvation means “deliverance, preservation, healing, and soundness.” “All those ideas are present in the word salvation and they all belong to us. David said, “Let the redeemed of the Lord says so, whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy,” reports Psalms 107.2. Many people are not walking in the full provision of salvation because they are not saying it. They remain in the hand of the enemy,” reports 2 Timothy 2.24-26. Deliverance, healing, preservation, and soundness belong to us. Jesus Christ paid for it! (Isaiah 53: 4-5.) Why do so many thousands of apparently intelligent, seemingly successful people allow themselves to be sucked into the myriad cults sprouting today in the widening cracks of the Fourth Wave system? What accounts for the total control that a Jim Jones was able to exercise over the lives of one’s followers? #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
It is loosely estimated today that some 13,000,000 Americans belong to about 5,000 religious cults, the largest of which bear nations like the Unification Church, the Divine Light Mission, the Hare Krishna, and the Way, each of which has temples or branches in most major cities. One of them alone, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, claims 60,000 to 80,000 members, publishes a daily newspaper in New York, owns a fish-packing plant in Virginia, and has many other money-creating enterprises. Its mechanically cheerful fund raisers are a common sight. Nor are such groups confined to the United States of America. A recent sensational lawsuit in Switzerland called international attention to the Divine Light Center in Winterthur. “The cults and sects and communities…are most numerous in the United States of America because America is, in this matter, too 20 years ahead of the rest of the World,” says the London Economist. “However, they are to be found in Europe, west and east, and in many other places.” Just why it is that such groups can command almost total dedication and obedience from their members? Their secret is simple. They understand the need for community, structure, and meaning. For these are what all cults peddle. For lonely people, cults offer, in the beginning, indiscriminate friendship. Says an official of the Unification Church: “If someone’s lonely, we talk to them. There are a lot of lonely people walking around.” The newcomers is surrounded by people offering friendship and beaming approval. Many of the cults require communal living. So powerfully rewarding is this sudden warmth and attention that cult members are often willing to give up contact with their life’s earnings to the cult, to forego drugs and even pleasures of the flesh in return. However, the cult sells more than community. It also offers much needed structure. Cults impose tight constraints on behaviour. They demand and create enormous discipline, some apparently going so far as to impose that discipline through beatings, forced labour, and their own forms of ostracism or imprisonment. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Psychiatrist H. A. S. Sukhedo of the New Jersey School of Medicine, after interviewing survivours of the Jonestown mass suicide and reading the writings of members of the Peoples Temple, concludes: “Our society is so free and permissive, and people have so many options to choose from that they cannot make their own decisions effectively. They want others to make the decision and they will follow.” A man named Sherwin Harris, whose daughter and ex-wife were among the men and women who followed Jim Jones to death in Guyana, has summed it up in a sentence. “This is an example,” Mr. Harris said, “of what some Americas will subject themselves to in order to bring some structure into their lives. The last vital product marketed by the cults is “meaning.” Each has its own single-minded version of reality—religious, political, or cultural. The cult possesses the sole truth and those living in the outside World who fail to recognize the value of that truth are pictured as either misinformed or Satanic. The message of the cult is drummed into the new member at all-day, all-night sessions. It is preached incessantly, until he or she begins to use its terms of reference, its vocabulary, and—ultimately—its metaphour for existence. The “meaning” delivered by the cult may be absurd to the outsider. However, that does not matter. Indeed, the exact, pinned-down content of the cult message is almost incidental. Its power lies in providing synthesis, in offering an alternative to the fragmented blip culture around us. Once the framework is accepted by the cult recruit, it helps organize much of the chaotic information bombarding one from the outside. Whether or not that framework of ideas corresponds to outer reality, it provides a neat set of cubbyholes in which the member can store incoming data. It thereby relieves the stress of overload and confusion. It provides not truth, as such, but order, and thus meaning. By giving the cult member a sense that reality is meaningful—and that one must carry that meaning to outsiders—the cult offers purpose and coherence in a seemingly incoherent World. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
The cult, however, sells community, structure, and meaning at an extremely high price: the mindless surrender of self. For some, no doubt, this is the only alterative to personal disintegration. However, for most of us the cult’s way out is too costly. To make Fourth Wave civilization both sane and democratic, we need to do more than create new energy supplies or plug in new technology. We need to do more than create community. We need to provide structure and meaning as well. And once again there are simple things we can do to get started. Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their happiness, do not work against God’s intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the Earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you—alas, it is true of almost every one of us! Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field. Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out. Blessed shall be thy basket and thy kneading-trough. Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body and the fruit of thy land and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy cattle, and the young of thy flock. The Lord will command the blessing upon thee in thy storehouses, and in all that thou puttest Thy hand unto; and He will bless Thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. The Lord will open unto thee His good treasury, the Heaven to give the rain of thy land in its season, and to bless all the work of thy hand; and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow. Happy art thou, O America; who is like unto thee, a people saved by the Lord, the shield of thy help, and the sword of thy triumph! And thine enemies shall dwindle away before thee, and thou shalt tread upon their high places. “And they yearn for you while they pray for you, because of the surpassing measure of Go’s grace (His favour and mercy and spiritual blessing which is shown forth) in you. Now thanks be to God for His Gift, [precious] beyond telling [His indescribable, inexpressed, free Gift!]! reports II Corinthians 9.14-15. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Cresleigh Homes
Plants in the bathroom? That’s a YES from us! With bathrooms this size, they deserve as much décor attention as any of the bedrooms, wouldn’t you agree?!
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A dream is a wish your heart makes when you’re fast asleep. In dreams you will lose your heartaches. Whatever you wish for, you keep.
Have faith in your dreams and someday your Cresleigh Home will come smiling thru.
No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing the dream your Cresleigh Home will come true.
I Should Have the Right to this Possibility, and to Waste Myself!
The truth of the matter is tht you always know the right thing to do. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. The development of science can be descried as the process of transferring one after another aspect of human experience from the supernatural category into the realm of natural law. The rain and wind, lightning and earthquake, the rising and setting of the sun and stars have long since been accepted as the manifestations of the workings of the laws of gravity, mechanics, thermodynamics, and electricity. In more modern times the aurora borealis, the Van Allen belt, the propagation of radio waves, the properties of chemical dyes and plastics, and the principles of rocket propulsion are all “understood” in terms of generally accepted natural laws. And there are surprising few of these laws. With a couple of dozen subnuclear particles and a similar number of fundamental physical laws we are today able to derive explanations for a tremendous variety of physical and chemical phenomena, and most of those we cannot explain appear to be beyond our reach because of their complexity, rather than because of any inadequacy in the fundamental laws. To be sure, the last word has not yet been said relative to the basic particles from which matter and energy are derived and we have good reason to believe that we have not yet precisely formulated the natural laws, since new discoveries require us to refine and restate them from time to time. We cannot even be sure that there do not still exist undiscovered phenomena whose explanation will require major additions to our present statement of the body of natural law. However, all this is beside the point. The fact that our knowledge of the laws and particles that govern and inhabit the Universe is less than perfect must not obscure the tremendous body of evidence attesting to the orderliness of all natural phenomena that are generally classified as “physical” or “chemical.” In this very broad area, the crutch of a supernatural explanation now has to be used almost not at all. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Almost, but not quite. The explanations of physical phenomena must always start with the fundamental particles and the natural laws. Assuming the laws always existed and the particles were somehow provided in suitable number and distribution, plausible theories can be devised for the formation of the stars, the planet, the galaxies, and even for the subsequent course of billions of years of geological development that have made the Earth what it is today. However, since science is by its very nature based upon the process of reasoning from cause to effect, or of deducing probable causes from known effects, it is intrinsically incapable of carrying us back behind first causes. No scientist can “explain” the natural laws on which one’s science is ultimately based. One may invent a term such as “gravitational attraction” to enable one to discuss a phenomenon one wishes to deal with, and one may agree with other scientists on techniques for measuring the gravitational attraction between material object. One may then perform experiments that ultimately permit one to deduce relations, or “laws,” connecting gravitational attraction between material objects. One may then perform experiments that ultimately permit one to deduce relations, or “laws,” connecting gravitational forced and the masses and positions of the bodies involved. Thus one can learn how to predict the gravitational effects that will be produced by a specified configuration of objects or, conversely, to arrive at valid configurational deductions in terms of measured gravitational forces. However, what is gravity, really? What causes it? Where des it come from? How did it get started? The scientist has no answers. One’s delineation of the relations between gravitational forces and other properties of matter and space, and one’s discovery that the relationships so delineated are immutable and unchanging, may cause one to develop such a sense of familiarity with gravity that one is no longer curious about it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Nevertheless, in a fundamental sense, it is still as mysterious and inexplicable s it ever was, and it seems destined to remain so. Science can never tell us why the natural laws of physics exist or where the matter that started the Universe came from. It is good that our ancestors invented the concept of the supernatural, for if we are to answer such questions, we need it. We define ethic are the “science of the moral.” However, this is not a generally accepted definition, the chief reason being that the word “moral,” through historical accidents, has received several distorting connotations. Since the eighteenth century, at least in Europe, it has carried the implications of “moralism” in the sense of graceless legalistic ethics. And the United States of America, it has, under the influence of Puritanism, taken on a significance in pleasures of the flesh: to be “amoral” means to be lawless in the pleasures of the flesh, or at least to deny conventional pleasures of the flesh ethics. Because of these two connotations, one has tried to replace “moral,” and there would be no change. Therefore, I recommend that “ethical” be reserved for the theory of morals, and that the term “moral” and its derivatives be purged of those associations, and used to describe the moral act itself in its fundamental significance. We have discussed the nature of the moral act, its all-permeating character, and its immanence in the other two chief functions of man’s spirit—the cultural and the religious. We must now ask: what is the religious dimension of the moral imperative, and what is the relation of cultural creativity to morality? We can say: the religious dimension of the moral imperative is its unconditional character. This, of course, leads to a subsequent question: why is the moral imperative unconditional, and in which respects can one call it so, and in which not? In our daily life we used innumerable imperatives; but most of them are conditional: “if you want to catch your plane, you ought to leave now.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
However, perhaps you prefer to stay, even through you miss the plane. This is obviously a conditional imperative. However, if getting to the plane should be a matter of life and death, as, for example, in the case of a physician who must immediately operate upon a patient, the conditional imperative becomes unconditional. To miss the plane through negligence would than be an antimoral act, and would affect the person of the physician in a disintegrating manner. We might compare the disintegration effect that the failure to save a drowning woman has on the main character in Camus’ The Fall. There are many cases in which conditional imperatives have some bearing on an unconditional imperative. The missing plane might also arouse anxiety in those who expect the arrival of a friend. And there are cases in which several imperatives compete for supreme validity, and in which the decision is a moral risk. However, despite these “mixed” cases the moral imperative in itself is, as Immanuel Kant called it, “categorical” rather than “hypothetical,” or as I would say, unconditional as opposed to conditional. We may ask, however, if the decision is a moral risk—the “risk” implying that it might prove to be the wrong decision, whether a moral decision can stand under an unconditional imperative. The answer to this question is that the unconditional character does not refer to the content, but to the form of the moral decision. If it be a moral decision, it is dependent only on the pure “ought to be” of the moral imperative, whichever side of a moral alternative might be chosen, however great the risk in a bold decision may be. And should anyone be in doubt as to which of several possible acts conforms to the moral imperative, one should be reminded that each of them might be justified in a particular situation, but that whatever one chooses must be done with the consciousness of standing under an unconditional imperative. The doubt concerning the justice of a moral act does not contradict the certainty of its ultimate seriousness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The assertion of the intrinsically religions character of the moral imperative can be criticized from different points of view. Theology can strongly affirm that unconditioned character of the moral imperative, but deny that this character makes it religious. Moral commands, one argues then, are religious because they are divine commandments. They are ultimately serious because they express the “Will of God.” This alone makes them unconditional. God could have willed differently, and we must open our eyes to His revelation in order to know what His Will actually is. Such an argument, of course, would exclude any kind of secular ethics. Not only the content but also the unconditional character of the moral imperative would have to be sanctioned by a divine command, and conserved in holy traditions or scared books. I maintain, however, that the term “Will of God” can and must be understood differently. It is not an external will imposed upon us, and arbitrary law laid down by a Heavenly tyrant, who is strange to our essential nature and therefore whom we resist justifiably from the point of view of our nature. The “Will of God” for us is precisely our essential being with all its potentialities, our created nature declare as “very good” by God, as, in terms of the Creation myth, He “saw everything that He made.” For us the “Will of God” is manifest in our essential being; and only because of this can we accept the moral imperative as valid. It is not a strange law that demands our obedience, but the “silent voice” of our own nature as man, and as man with an individual character. However, we must go a step further. We can say: to fulfill one’s own nature is certainly a moral demand intrinsic in one’s being. However, why is it an unconditional imperative? Do I not have the right to leave my potentialities unfulfilled, to remain less than a person, to contradict my essential goodness, and thus to destroy myself? As a being that has the freedom of self-contradiction, I should have the right to this possibility, and to waste myself! If I choose to affirm my own essential nature, and this is a condition, the moral imperative is unconditional! The experience that has been expressed in the doctrine of the infinite value of every human soul in the view of the Eternal. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
It is not an external prohibition against self-destruction—bodily, psychologically, or morally—that we experience in states of despair, but the silent voice of our own being which denies us the right to self-destruction. It is the awareness of our belonging to a dimension that transcends our own finite freedom and our ability to affirm or to negate ourselves. So I maintain my basic assertion that the unconditional character of the moral imperative is its religious quality. If we maintain the immanence of religion in the moral command, no religious heteronomy, subjection to external commands is implied. The intrinsically religious character of the moral imperative is indirectly denied by the philosophy of values. Its representatives think in terms of a hierarchy of values, in which the value of the holy may or may not find a place; when it does, it is often on the top of this pyramid, above the moral, legal, social, political, and economic values. For our problem, this means first of all that values lie above and below each other and that there can be no immanence of one within another. The value of the holy, for example, cannot be immanent in the value of the good, and conversely. The relationship is external and may lead to the elimination of one or the other—most frequently, in this case, the value of the holy. In the World’s atavistic religions, where omnipresent gods reside in the trees, rocks, rivers, and Earth, and in animals, shamans or priests are charged with the delicate task of communicating across Earthly boundaries into the realm of the supernatural. Most come to the vocation at the invitation of divinities who appear to them in dreams. These men and women require a special sensitivity, and their training requires intense concentration, profound spirituality, and psychic and carnal purity achievable only through ritual purification. Usually this involves a retreat from daily life, dietary restrictions or fasting, and prayer and other devotions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Almost always, a period of enforced celibacy is essential. Removed from intimate human relations, the shaman or priest experiences heightened spirituality, and can focus fully on the spirits and the work at hand. In the stake, late-nineteenth-century northern World, Heave had no snow, ice, or storms, and hell was a sunless darkness with raging snowstorms and massive ice blocks that kept it cold. Every object was governed by an invisible force, and spirits could be contacted by wise humans. Only when a hooded, well-mitted, surrendered to a trance religious human sat, and, being careful not to spit on the ground or to take off one’s mittens, surrendered to a trace, could this communication could take place. Often one would have visions or successfully summon one’s spirit helpers. Such an individual had undergone initiation rites so rigorous one risked dying at any moment from cold, hunger, drowning, or bullets. The two things most dangerous to humans are hunger and cold. One’s monthlong fast, doubly dangerous in the arctic chill, was broken only twice, by single mouthfuls of warm water. For the next year, this individual ate only certain foods. When one was exhibited to the spirits, one sat for a month, without daring to lie down, in an unprotected snow hunt on an exposed ledge, with no caribou cover and only a scrap of hide to sit on. As one’s novitiate took place in the dead of winter, this individual who never got anything to warm one, and must not move, was very cold, and it was so tiring having to sit without daring to lie down that sometimes it was as if the individual died a little. This torment continued for a month, after which this spiritual person no longer had the strength to stand. He was not very much alive anymore, and now so completely emaciated that the veins on his hands and body and feet had quite disappeared. For an entire year, this spiritual individual was forbidden to sleep with his wife. Even his food, which she cooked in a separate little pot, was segregated. No one else was permitted to share his meat. After he had recovered from his ordeal and maintained strict chastity, his reward was that his village approved him as the new religion leader of his community. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Such extended abstinence was exceedingly rare in his culture, though among ordinary folks it was fairly common in the short term—for example during mourning the whaling season, and the Bladder Festival, when the spirits were known to be deeply offended by any violation of the prohibition against pleasures of the flesh. The Bladder Festival lasted one month, during which the humans moved into the dance house and women visited them only to bring food. Even then, they had to bathe before their daily visit and swaddle themselves in waterproof raincoats. These precautions were crucial, for without the assistance of the spirit World, starvation was inevitable. When the spirits demanded that the mortals abstain from pleasures of the flesh, defiance would have been suicidal—there was simply too much at stake. Their rites of passage were, in their intensity, harshness, and celibate isolation, typical of truly religious beings everywhere. In many societies, actualized Christians are the only religious practitioners, and they hone their ability to communicate with the spirits through subjecting themselves, body and psyche, to grueling and terrifying experiences. The other denominator that cuts across cultures north to sound, east to west, is abstinence, which is always required at least for short periods and often extensively, even for years. Far away from the frozen north, actualized Christians exact similarly distinctive requirements, with strict observance of abstinence always a crucial factor in strengthening candidates for their roles as mediums between mortals and spirits. Their World was a treacherous quagmire of mystic forces, spirit helpers, cunning enemies, and vengeful clients. They believed that witchcraft caused most sickness and nonviolent deaths and that daily, waking life is mere illusion, “a lie.” Reality is supernatural, and they key to perceiving it was through prayer and fasting. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Only the most powerful in the church, however, can traverse the barriers between the human and the supernatural Worlds and interfere with the spirits sent to work there by rival church leaders. This form of Christianity has two dimensions: bewitching or cursing, and curing, the opposite sides of the same machine. Both kinds of Christians rely on blind faith, for the power to penetrate and interpret the supernatural World. In intercessional prayer, the trances that become bridges between the spirit and the real World and are so widely available that anyone can experience their wonders. As a result, about one in four actualized Christian’s humans are leaders in the church. These leaders work through spirit helpers. The learn and teach by apprenticeship. They accept novices, who pay them to reveal their skills and transmit their knowledge. To initiate a novice, the actualized Christian will spend ten days praying. To fortify oneself for upcoming battles with the otherworld, the novice must rest for three months and abstain from pleasures of the flesh. If one is too weak to observe this rule, one will be a feeble, unsuccessful actualized Christian. After one month, one will release one’s spirit helper. Now one faces a curious decision. One will long to send this spirit to someone else, or if one decides to hold on to it, it is believed that individual has healing powers. Celibacy and abstinence play a crucial role in the actualized Christian’s future. This prolong chastity is allows one to gain truly great power. However, celibacy is considered an ordeal that deters many men from pursuing a career as an actualized Christian. The period of abstinence is not wasted. The novice makes use of the energy he is conserving by learn how to heal others and speak the Lord’s Word. When this period of abstinence is over and one has amassed all the flora and fauna one intends to use, the new actualized Christian sets about invading one’s neighbor’s body, or alternately, setting spirit helpers to suck out evil another human has lodged inside the ailing person. About five years after one’s novitiate, when he swallowed the evil out of one individual, the actualized Christian subjects oneself to a sort of performance review. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
More rest is expected to help the cycle of accumulating enough energizing celibacy. Finally, one is again ready to male a foray into the World of Heavenly spirits. People also turn to priests to guide them through their complicated and confusing World. However, as children, they do not choose their vocation, which is revealed at birth by divination. Infants born to hold these positions in the church, their callings are revealed at birth by divination. Infants born to be actualized Christians are removed from their parents and takes them high into the mountains for years of preparation. The priest and his wife raise the child in darkness, forbidden to look upon the sun or even the moon when it is full. The child sleeps by day and rises at night to eat and learn all the actualized Christian’s songs, dances, legends, divine secrets, the language known only to priests. This lasts nine years and is followed by deeper education in the mysteries of the Earth and the sky. During this time, the novice actualized Christian eats only simple, traditional food and must never taste salt. At puberty, one is first given men. After eighteen years of instruction, the young man is taken outside at dawn and for the first time permitted to see the World illuminated. One is ready to receive its knowledge, the next stage in his priesthood. Until then, the young man who has never seen sunlight had also been prevented from seeing a woman of reproductive age. During adolescence, when one is absorbing the accumulated wisdom of one’s priestly mentor, the experienced actualized Christian ensures one is never exposed to temptation. If one is to concentrate all one’s energy and force on assimilating the vast amount of material the experienced actualized Christian has spent so many years imparting, the strictest celibacy is necessary. One angel enlightens another. We must observe intellectual light is nothing else than a manifestation of truth, according to Ephesians 5.13: “All that is made manifest is light.” Hence to enlighten means nothing else but to communicate to others the manifestation of the known truth; according to the Apostle (Ephesians 3.8): “To me the least of all the saints is given this grace to enlighten all humans in God.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Therefore one angels is said to enlighten another by manifesting the truth which one knows one self. Theologians plainly show that the orders of the Heavenly beings are taught Divine science by their minds. One angel can notify 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 neighborhood of a more perfect body—for instance, the less hot is made hotter by the presence of what is hotter; so the intellectual power; for just as the power of an imperfect body is strengthened by the neighborhood of a more perfect body—for instance, the less hot is made hotter by the presence of what is hotter; so the intellectual power of an inferior angel is strengthened by the superior angel turning to one: since in spiritual things, for one thing to turn to another, corresponds to neighborhood in corporeal things. Secondly, one angel manifests the truth to another as regard the likeness of the thing understand. 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 grasped by the inferior angel; and this one proposes it to one’s knowledge. Thus it is with us that the teacher, in order to adapt oneself to others, divines into many points the knowledge which one possesses in the universal. This is the expressed by Dionysius (Coel. Hier. Vx): “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 the angels, both inferior and superior, see the Essence of God immediately, and in this respect one does not teach another. It is of this truth that the prophet speaks; wherefore he adds: “They shall teach no more every human one’s brothers, saying ‘Know the Lord’: for all shall know Me, from the least of them even to the greatest.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
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; that the angels are enlightened by 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 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 unformed, except it adhere to the first truth; while the other kinds of enlightenment that proceed from human or angel, are, as it were, dispositions to this ultimate form. The word-of-mouth publicity that attends suicides in a school, workplace, or small community may trigger suicide attempts. The suicide of a recruit at a U.S. Navy training school, for example, was followed within two weeks by another and also by an attempted suicide at the school. To head off what threatened to become a suicide epidemic, the school began a program of staff education on suicide and group therapy sessions for recruits who had been close to the suicide victims. Most people faced with difficult situations never try to kill themselves. In an effort to understand why some people are more prone to suicide than others, theorists have proposed more fundamental explanations for the self-destructive action than the immediate triggers considered in the past. The leading theories come from the psychodynamic, sociocultural, and biological perspectives. As a group, however, these hypotheses have received limited research support and fail to address the full range of suicidal acts. Thus the clinical field currently lacks a satisfactory understanding of suicide. 3.5 percent of suicides in which someone else—a spouse, intimate friend, relative—is murdered at the same time 5 percent of individual who make a suicide attempt soon after committing a homicide. 20 percent of persons who a suicide attempt soon after killing a child. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The simple job plight of these adolescents could not be remedied without a social revolution. Therefore, if the most well-intentioned public spokesmen do not mention it at all, it is not astonishing. However, it is hard to grow up in a society in which one’s important problems are treated as nonexistence. It is impossible to belong to it, it is hard to fight to change it. If one is smothered by well-meaning social workers and PaL’s who do not seem to understand the real irk, the effect must be rather to feel disaffected, and all the more restive. The boys cannot articulate the real irks themselves. For instance, what public spokesman could discuss the jobs? The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public ninety years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness. Or alternately, to want a job that exercises a man’s capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is utopia anarcho-syndicalism; it is labour invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a though in our generation. Management has the “sole prerogative” to determine the products and the machines. Again, to speak of the likelihood or the desirability of unemployment, like Norbert Wiener of J.K. Galbraith, is to b politically nonprofessional. Yet every kid somehow knows that if he quits school he will not get ahead—and the majority quit. During, let us say, 1890-1936, on Marxist grounds, the fight for working conditions, for security, wages, hours, the union, the dignity of labour, was mentioned, and it gave the worker or the youth something worthwhile. However, because of their historical theory of the “alienation of labour” (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself. If workmen accept their alienation, and are indifferent also to Marxist politics, it is not surprising now. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
When humans live each other on one’s own, should ever this have been the case, morality does not exist. Such humans have freedom without limit, but the enjoyment of that freedom is slight; for each must be on guard against all others, and each must scrounge alone for food and shelter. If each surrenders a bit of freedom in exchange for group solidarity, it appears advantageous of all. So each gives up one’s right to murder, to steal, to deceive. Now all are less free but more safe. Without fear they live together, secure against predators, hunt more successfully in a group, build better shelters. The group comes into being by collecting the surrendered rights of its constituent individuals. The group itself surrenders nothing, is subject to no rules, is free to use its aggregate force for such acts of murder, of stealing, of deceiving, as it may see fit. And it does often so see fit. The members of the group is now the predator. The individual freedoms constitute the stuff of morality. The aggregate power of the surrendered rights is exercise not by all acting in concert but by rulers. We hope that the freedoms we have surrendered will be exercised by our rulers for the benefit of all. Such is rarely the case. The relationship of the individual to the state is not that of cell to multicellular organism. For the cell surrenders all autonomy to the organism, whereas the individual person withholds some initiative from the state. The state, in its will to power, would have it that individual become like cells; and occasionally, when the state is exceedingly powerful, it may bring this about. The autonomy we retain as individuals constitutes a limit to the degree to which the state may command our compliance. The extent to which the individual is committed to the shared beliefs of one’s community measures the extent to which one has been willing to give up individual power in the interest of community. When shared beliefs are firm, the collective wields great power, its constituents correspondingly less. When shared beliefs are destroyed, the collective loses power. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
At the top of the hierarchy of social organization is the realm of sovereignty, where there is no effective constraint. Here the hypocrisy is extreme; for the security of the collective is dependent upon the confidence of its constituents that the government is itself bound by those principles which protect its constituents, as well as its neighbours, from the abuse of its power. So the spokesmen for the sovereign amoral nation are constantly proclaiming the nation’s morality, its commitment to justice, freedom, and peace, whereas in fact they are leading the nation in the pursuit of more power by whatever means promise success. Insofar as this pursuit is cured at all, it is curbed by fear of retaliation by other sovereign states and fear of insurrection at home. When seeking the ultimate sources of human error and human wrong-doing, the philosopher must look very far into human history and very deep into human nature. One must look farther than their social, economic, and political courses. This done, one will trace them to the animalistic instincts inherited from pre-human and primitive human incarnations. As long as these instincts remain undisciplined, and as long as the higher nature is not more eagerly cultivated, so long must we expect to witness the strife which produces war—whether between nations of inside them. It is quite proper to make the necessary remedial efforts through social, political, educational, organizational, and other means, but their benefits will disappear in the end if they are not made side by side with the effort to teach the necessity of liberation from these instincts by the appropriate mental and spiritual techniques. The more numerous the individuals who can find peace and joy inside their own hearts, the more will the dangers and horrors which threaten humankind be curbed. There is no perpetual peace anywhere on this planet, only perpetual strife. However, it is open to humans to take the violence, the murder, and the war out of this strife. One may purge it of its savage beast qualities. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The greatest spiritual needs of the modern World are more depth and more width. It needs to deepen its field of consciousness so as to include the true spiritual self and the divine laws governing life. It needs to widen out into loving thoughts and compassionate deeds. With right ethical ideals and sound nonmaterialistic ideas the external activities which will fill the postwar stage would then bring true progress to humankind. However, with unworthy ideals and false ideas humanity would only fall into greater disaster and eventual destruction. Without knowing the real and hidden causes of the malady of war, we cannot find the real and lasting cure of war. The reconstruction of community, however, must be seen as only a small part of a larger process. For the collapse of Third Wave institutions also break down structure and meaning in our lives. Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown. Structure provides the relatively fixed points of reference we need. That is why, for many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of the lives can be organized. The absolute demands imposed on a parent by an infant, the responsibility to care for an invalid, the tight discipline demanded by membership in a church or, in some countries, a political party—all these may also impose a simple structure on life. Faced with an absence of visible structure, some young people use drugs to create it. “Heroin addiction,” writes psychologist Rollo May, “gives a way of life to the young person. Having suffered under perpetual purposelessness, one’s structure now consists of how to escape law enforcement, how to get the money one needs, where to get one’s next fix—all these give one a new web of energy in place of one’s previous structure World.” The nuclear family, socially imposed schedules, well-defined roles, visible status distinctions, and comprehensible lines of authority—all these factors created adequate life structure for the majority of people during the Third Wave era. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Today the breakup of the Third Wave is dissolving the structure in many individual lives before the new structure-providing institutions of the Fourth Wave future are laid into place. This, not merely some personal failing, explains why for millions today daily life is experienced as lacking any semblance of recognizable order. To this loss of order, we must also add the loss of meaning. The feeling that our lives “count” comes from healthy relationships with the surrounding society—from family, corporation, church, or political movement. It also depends on being able to see ourselves as part of a larger, even cosmic, scheme of things. The sudden shirt of social ground rules today, the smudging of roles, status distinctions, and lines of authority, the immersion in blip culture and, above all, the breakup of the great thought-system, indust-reality, have shattered the World-image most of us carry around in our skulls. In consequence, most people surveying the World around them today only see chaos. They suffer a sense of personal powerlessness and pointlessness. It is only when we put all this together—the loneliness, the loss of structure, and the collapse of meaning attendant on the decline of industrial civilization—that we can begin to make sense of some of the most puzzling social phenomena of our time, not the least of which is the astonishing rise of the cult. Hear our humble prayer, O God, for our friends the animals, especially for animals who are suffering; for any that are hunted or lost, or deserted of frightened or hungry; for all that must be put to death. We entreat for them all thy mercy and pity and for those who deal with them we ask a heart of compassion and gentle hands and kindly words. Please make us, ourselves to be true friend to animals and so to share the blessings of the merciful. And God will love thee and bless thee and multiply thee; He will also bless the fruit of thy body and the fruit of thy land, thy corn and thy wine and thine oil, the increase of thy cattle and the young of thy flock, in the land which He promised unto thy fathers to give thee. Thou shalt be blessed above all peoples; there shall be n more barren or sterile ones among you or among your cattle. And the Lord will take away from thee all sickness; and He will put none of the evil diseases of sin, which thou knowest, upon thee; but will inflict them upon all them that hate thee. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
When one prays the Word of God, you are praying the perfect will of God. It will tear down Satan’s strong hold. “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart,” reports Hebrews 4.12. The Word of God is alive and powerful, more powerful than any tongue that could speak against you. That is the towedged sword He is talking about. One translation says, “The Word of God is a living thing.” Revelation 1.16 says, “And out of His (Jesus’) mouth went a sharp twoedged sword. The tongue will cut or heal. “There is that speaketh like the piercings of a sword: but the tongue of the wise is health,” reports Proverbs 4.22. Therefore we should proclaim it. You might pray this way: “I am redeemed from the curse of the Law; and in the name of Jesus Christ, I refuse to bow to sickness or disease. Every disease germ and every virus that touches this body dies instantly, in the name of Jesus. Then make that your confession everyday, not just when you feel like it. Your body is like a child, it will do anything you let it do, and sometimes it would rather be sick than have to go to work. “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would,” reports Galatians 5.17. If you give in to the flesh continually, your body will be sick. Galatians 5.19-21 lists the works of the flesh. Each one, or any combination of these, is very capable of producing sickness and disease in the body. Paul said, “If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live,” reports Romans 8.13. No, this is not the power of optimistic thinking. It is the power of God’s Word. It is creative power—the ability of God released when you pray the Word of God. Take the things God has said about your situation and put them in prayer from. Here is a simple way to pray the World of God: “Father, in the name of Jesus, I am the body of Christ. I overcome evil with good. Satan has no power over me for the Greater One dwells in me. Greater is He that is in me than he that is in the World. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
“No evil will befall me; neither shall any plague come nigh my dwelling, for He has given His angels charge over me. They keep me in all my ways and in my pathway is life. I thank You, Father, that no weapon formed against me will prosper, but whatever I do will prosper. I am like a tree planted by the rivers of water. My God supplies all my need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus. I have all sufficiency in all things. I do abound to all good works for my God has made all grace around toward me. Every word is based on the Word of God. You are proclaiming the answer, not the problem. Someone says, “You do not understand. I do not have abundance.” No, if you continue to disagree with God, you never will. Learn to call those things that be not as though they were. It is when you continually agree with and proclaim boldly the things God has said about you that He will perform His Word. Most Christians have tried it for a day or two, then given up. For nearly two years I prayed the World of God before some things became a revelation in my spirit. Just because we have said it two or three times does not mean we believe it. Sometimes it is necessary to say it over and over to bring faith. The Bible says, “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. If we hear ourselves speaking what God said, it will get in our spirits more quickly than if we hear someone else say it. If we confess God’s Word audibly, faith will come more quickly. The angel who hath redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads; and let my name be named in them, and the name of my fathers, Abraham and Isaac; and let them grown into a multitude in the midst of the Earth. The Lord your God hath multiplied you, and behold ye are this says as the stars of Heaven for the multitude. May the Lord, the God of your fathers, multiply you a thousand-fold, and bless you, as He hath promised you. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Fear, as Well as Morality, Opposes the Individual Will to Power!
Most people ask for happiness on condition. Only if you do not set conditions, happiness can be felt. The purpose of life, after all, is to live it. One of our innate characteristics, as terrestrial beings, appears to be a need to “understand” what goes on around us. Because of the way our minds are constructed, we cannot avoid seeking “causes” for the “effects” that we observe through our sensory mechanism. Since physiological limitations prevent our holding in mind and dealing simultaneously with more than a few related concepts, we continually strive to reduce to a minimum the number of fundamental causes or principles that we employ to explain what we observe. There is more than a little of the scientist built into the genetic specifications of each human individual. The fact that the universe in which we live is largely susceptible to understanding in terms of the kind of cause/effect principles that humans naturally search for no longer seems to be the mysterious coincidence that it once appeared. We not appreciate how the operation of evolution and natural selection must automatically, in time, bring to dominance animal species with behaviour and thought patters that adapt them to their environment. If the universe operates largely on the basis of cause/effect relationships, we would expect that the dominant species would owe its dominance largely to its evolutionarily developed ability to deal competently with cause/effect situations. A paradoxical consequence of man’s natural predilection for logical thought was his invention of the important concept of the supernatural. Humans had a compulsion to explain what they observed, but their ability to trace cause/effect relationships was limited to the simpler, more immediate phenomena of their environment. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
To provide an “explanation” for matters they despaired of understanding, humans invented the concept that these matters lay outside the domain of the natural cause/effect principles—that, in short, they were “supernatural.” This was appealing to the orderly human mind: it provided a neat means of differentiating between the aspects of life that ought to be dealt with rationally and those which should be just accepted but not analyzed. Humans have a World, namely, a structured whole of innumerable parts, a cosmos, as the Greeks called it, because of its structed character which makes it accessible to humans through acts of creative receiving and transforming. Having a World is more than having environment. Of course, humans like any other being, has environment; but in contrast to the higher terrestrial beings, for example, they are not bound to it. Humans beings can transcend it in any direction, in imagination, thought and action (exempli gratia, social utopias or ontological concepts or space exploration). Humans have “World” through every part of their environment. Their ways encounter with any of the objects surrounding them are always an encounter with the universe manifest in a particular object. Humans never encounter this tree, but also as a tree, one of many trees, as an example of the species tree (in itself a special manifestation of the universal power of being). Such an encounter presupposes freedom from the particular, and the ability to see the universal within the particular. The manifestation of this freedom is language. Language lives in universals. It is one and the same thing to have World, to transcend environment, and to speak in concepts and meaningful proposition. All this constitutes human’s essential freedom and is the presupposition of human’s experience of the moral imperative. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
The moral imperative is the demand to become actually what one is essentially and therefore potentially. It is the power of human’s being, given to them by nature, which they shall actualize in time and space. Their true being shall become their actual being—this is the moral imperative. And since one’s true being is the being of a person in a community of persons, the moral imperative have this content: to become a person. Every moral act is an act in which an individual self establishes itself as a person. Therefore, a more act is not an act in obedience to an external law, human or divine. It is the inner law of our true being, of our essential or created nature, which demands that we actualize what follows from it. And an antimoral act is not the transgression of one or several precisely circumscribed commands, but an act that contradicts the self-realization of the person as a person and dries toward disintegration. It disrupts the centeredness of the person by giving predominance to partial trends, passions, desires, fears, and anxieties. The central control is weakened, often almost removed. And when this happens, another partial trends also aspire to predominance, the self is split, and the conflicting trends also aspire to predominance, the self is split, and the conflicting trends make it their battlefield. The “will,” in the sense of a self that acts from the centered totality of its being, is enslaved. Freedom is replaced by compulsion. Deliberation and decision, the hallmarks of freedom, become mere facades for overwhelming drives that predetermine the decision. The voice of human’s essential being is silenced, step by step; and their disintegrating self, their depersonalization, shows the nature of the antimoral act and, by contrast, the nature of the moral act. The moral acct as the self-actualization of the centered self or the constitution of the person as a person, has analogies in the realm of all living beings, including humans from the biological point of view. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The analogy to the diminution or loss of centeredness in human beings is the psychosomatic phenomenon of disease. In some diseases, some processes that are necessary elements in the whole of a life process take an independent course and endanger the functioning of the whole. The cancerous growth of parts of the body is the most illuminating analogy to what happens in the centered self when particular trends conquer the center and destroy the unity of balanced trends. The analogy between the antimoral act and bodily disease is in many (somehow in all) cases more than an analogy. Both are expressions of the universal ambiguity of life, according to the processes of self-integration are continuously combated by movements toward disintegration. For the ethical problem this means that the moral act is always a victory over disintegrating forces and that its aim is the actualization of humans as the centered and therefore free person. While celibacy was one tool for greater thing for the actualized Christian, in a society that demanded premarital virginity of its daughters, religion defined celibacy as a precondition for salvation, and many were famous for defending their chastity against a vicious and lascivious public. When people speak of the Law of Chastity, they often define it as remaining celibate until marriage. In actuality, it would be more properly defined as remaining abstinent until marriage. Today, the words abstinent and celibate are frequently used interchangeably, but in practice they are quite different. Abstinence, as practiced in the Church, is the abstaining from all pleasures of the flesh activity until marriage. Celibacy, however, is the lifetime sacrifice to voluntarily forgo all pleasures of the flesh activity and remain unmarried for the entirety of your life. Most people never make any particular distinction between abstinence and celibacy because there is no longer an expectation for them to commit to celibacy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Elder Holland taught, “You serve yourself poorly when you identify yourself primarily by your sexual feelings. That isn’t your only characteristic, so don’t give it disproportionate attention. You are the first and foremost son (or daughter) of God, and He loves you.” With the stakes so infinitely high (entera marriage on one hand and suicide and depression on the other), let of not minimize the significant theological and emotional war in the heart of people who choose to define themselves by their sexuality. However, our beliefs regarding eternal marriage and families being sealed together throughout eternity is an integral, beautiful part of being saved. All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of Heavenly Parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose. We have a divine nature and destiny, and gender is part of our spiritual identity. God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye may be able to bear it. For those who do choose celibacy, that is a very respectful way of life. You are living a law not asked of anyone else in the Church. You are living a commitment that is only paralleled by the Law of Consecration. It is beyond the laws of sacrifice, the gospel and marriage, you have laid your hops, dreams, and future and family on the alter and given it all to the Lord. Eroticism seems to be a far greater challenge than hunger, illness, social alienation, and loneliness. Surprisingly, sometimes older people fall victim to their erotic feelings even more than the young men they counseled. Since the sixteenth century, the metaphysical importance of celibacy has lost none of its force, however. The extent to eradicate lust actually underscores the centrality of celibacy. Some preserve in their ongoing struggle to stifle their sensuality, helped by watchful experienced colleagues. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Celibacy is emphasized as an instrument to achieve relinquishing Worldly pleasures and desires, including the desire for possessions and, through lust, for other people. Celibacy is central to nonviolence. Some religious people taught human organs are aswim with dangerous microbes, and so pleasures of the flesh becomes a murderous activity. I wonder if the reason boys and girls consider the other gender to have germs and be icky is because they are closer to the premortal life and were indoctrinated more recently. However, as they grow up and become more indoctrinated in human culture, and become adults, pleasures of the flesh, to them, seems safer than drinking tap water. Celibacy is linked to the vow to extinguish all sensual desire. For that reason, intercourse has to be avoided as a great evil. The object of religious life is the Kingdom of Heaven, which can only be achieved in slow stages. The precepts of nonviolence, nonpossiveness, and celibacy are so intertwined that each partially defines and explains the other. When celibates are tempted by unbidden lust, they remember that the organs of pleasures are hotbeds of microbic life that, in copulation, one would be responsible for pulverizing. In any case, from their perspective, celibates believe that the unchaste cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Celibacy is a form of mental discipline and an instrument of nonviolence, and an absolute prerequisite for achieving the Kingdom of Heaven by spiritual liberation. Given the paramountcy of celibacy in some religions, people in the New World might wonder how they expect to shore up their numbers, already relatively small. The internal logic of the religion answers this nicely. Their scriptures teach that membership will shrink until nearing the end of times. An apocalyptic inferno will consume the debased remnants of humanity, and the World as we know it will cease to exist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
We must now look at another scripture, “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil,” reports Ephesians 6.10-11. Notice did not say, “Be strong in your own might,” but “in the Lord.” It is His might. It is not something we have to work up to. We must simply be obedient and be clothed in His might. Put on the whole armor or, as the Greek says, the complete armor of God. If you saw it, would you know the armor of God? It is God’s clothes and He is clothed in righteousness. He gave you His clothes to wear. Our problem has been that when we get ready to pray, we take off our breastplate of righteousness and throw it in the corner, saying, “Lord, I am so unworthy. I am so no good.” I can just imagine how God feels about such statements. He probably says, “Can you believe what they are saying! I sent My Son. He suffered and died to make them righteous. I gave them My clothes to wear.” That must grieve the heart of God after all He has done to clothe us with righteousness. Be obedient and put on His armor. You need it. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this World, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace: Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked,” reports Ephesians 6-12-16. Did you ever notice it says, “All the fiery darts of the wicked”? Someone may say, “Yes, but I just cannot do it.” I beg your pardon! The Word says you can. “Yes, but you see, I am so unworthy.” Now you have told off on yourself. You do not have on the whole armor of God. You left off the breastplate of righteousness. “Yes, but I do not feel righteous, so I must not be.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
You may not feel like getting dressed in the morning before you go to work, but believe me, it is the thing to do! God has told us to put on all of His clothes. If you do not feel righteous, it is because you do not have on your breastplate. The Church has been too sin conscious. We need to become righteous conscious. There is not a Christian that does not know about sin, but how many know that they are the righteousness of God? Renew your mind to the fact that you are the righteousness of God in Christ. When it becomes a revelation in your spirit, sin will cease to be a problem for you. It will be as Paul said, “Sin shall not have dominion over you.” It is not unusual for people, particularly teenagers, to try to commit suicide after observing or reading about someone else who has done so. Perhaps these people have been struggling with major problems and the other person’s suicide seems to reveal a possible solution; or they have been thinking about suicide and the other person’s suicide seems to give them permission of finally persuades them to act. Either way, one suicidal act apparently serves as a model for another. Suicides by celebrities, other highly publicized suicides, and suicides by co-workers or colleagues are particularly common triggers. Suicides by entertainers and political figures are regularly followed by unusual increases in the number of suicides across the nation. During the week after the alleged suicide of Marilyn Monroe in 1963, for example the national suicide rate rose 12 percent. Suicides with bizarre or unusual aspects often receive intense coverage by the news media. Such highly publicized accounts may lead to similar suicides. During the year after a widely publicized, politically motivated suicide by self-burning in England, for example, 82 other people set themselves on fire, with equally fatal results. Inquest reports revealed that most of the people had histories of emotional problems and that none of the suicides had the political motivation of the publicized suicide. The imitators seemed to be responding to their own problems in a manner triggered by the suicide they had observed or read about. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Even a media program that is clearly intended to educate and help viewers may have the paradoxical effect of spurring imitators. One study found a dramatic increase in the rate of suicide among West German teenagers after the airing of a television documentary showing the suicide of a teenager who jumped under a train. The number of railways suicides by male teenagers increased by 175 percent after the program was aired. Some clinicians argue that more responsible reporting could reduce this undesirable aftereffect of highly publicized suicides. A careful approach to reporting was seen in the media’s coverage of the suicide of Kurt Cobain. MTV’s repeated theme on the evening of the suicide was “Don’t do it!” In fact, thousands of young people called MTV and other radio and television stations in the hours after Cobain’s death, distraught, frightened, and in some cases suicidal. Some of the stations responded by posting the phone numbers of suicide prevention centers, presenting interviews with suicide experts, and offering counseling services and advice directly to callers. Perhaps because of such effort, the usual rate of suicide both in Seattle, Mr. Cobain’s hometown, and elsewhere held steady during the weeks that followed. “Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the World of God,” reports Ephesians 6.16-17. The Sword of the spirit. The spoken Word of God is the Sword of the Spirit. We call the Christian Bible our sword, but it is not really the sword. It may be the substance the sword is made of, but it is not the sword until it proceeds out of your mouth. There is no life in the Bible until it comes out of you mouth. You can lay the Bible on someone that is sick and it will not heal them. There is no power in the book, as far as we know. When you believe it and speak it, the power is released. You breathe life into it and the Spirit of God rises up in you when you dare to say, “Father, Your Word says that my need would be supplied according to Your riches in glory. I have given, and now it is given to me good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over. In the name of Jesus Christ, I receive it.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Order derives from authority. When authority is lost, we are free, everything is permitted, nothing is worthwhile, and we live in chaos. When the police disappear, looting sweeps through the streets. We can stand evil and cruelty; what we cannot stand is a lack of order. If the reigning scheme of things is intact, that is, believed in, and thereby endowed with authority, then we can tolerate murder and mayhem to uphold it. However, if the scheme of things falls, leaving us in unlimited freedom, we churn about in chaos until rescued by some other creed that claims our allegiance, takes our freedom and restores order. Evil springs up here, there, everywhere, all the time, flows, equally, from the breaking of rules and from the too careful observance of old rules in a changed society. The evil wrought by those who intended evil is negligible. The greater evil is wrought by those who intend good, and are convinced they know how to bring it about; and the greater their power to bring it about, the greater the evil they achieve while trying to do it. Not content modestly to oppose evil, they in their arrogance undertake to eliminate it completely, there by creating greater evil. The war to end all wars prepares the way for bigger wars, for destructions more vast. AN animal lives its life according to its nature and its circumstances, and therefore is never in the position of having to conclude that it has wasted its life. However, a human being, out of fear of breaking the rules, may waste one’s life, may observe oneself being afraid to live it. We live within limits. We know that life must be lived, and experience must be confined, within these limits. Fear God is the command sounding throughout the Old Testament. Fear God and respect God and bow down before God—these injunctions mean: Keep away from those boundaries. Murder is the privilege of God, not of humans. The burning cities, the turning of a woman into a pillar of salt, the destruction of the World by flood—all this is at the discretion, or the whim, of God, but not of humans. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We should note, however, that it is only human beings as individuals who are required to observe these limits. Human collectives have always ignored them. Heinous crimes and the burning of cities, proclaimed as activities reserved to God, are routinely undertaken by sovereign human collectives. Fear, as well as morality, opposes the individual will to power, and often it is unclear whether it is morality setting the limit, or fear masquerading as morality. Because we are afraid, we live in groups. Alone one is weak; in the crowd one will become strong. If the crowd grows rapidly and achieves great density, a moment of discharge will arrive, leveling hierarchies of power, making all equal; there will be no one above giving orders, making us feel weak and afraid, because everything above will be destroyed; we will surge through the streets, smashing windows and doors, overturning police cars, burning palaces. This was all predicted in 2006, and you see it had some to fruition by 2020. Let us sum up again. The majority of young people are faced with the following alternative: Either society is a benevolently frivolous racket in which they will manage to boondoggle, through the less profitably than the more privileged; or society is serious (and they hope still benevolent enough to support them), but they are useless and hopelessly out. Such thoughts do not encourage productive life. Naturally young people are more sanguine and look for man’s work, but few will find it. Some settle for a “good job” most settle for a lousy job; a few, but an increasing number, do not settle. I often ask, “If you have the chance, what do you want to work at? When you get out of school, college, the service, et cetera.” Some answer right off and tell their definite plans and projects, highly approved by Papa. I am pleased for them, but it is a bit boring, because they are such squares. Quite a few will, prompting, come out with astounding stereotyped, conceited fantasies, such as becoming a movie actors when they are “discovered”—“like Will Smith, but in my own way.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Very rarely somebody will, maybe defiantly and defensively, maybe diffidently but proudly, make you know that one knows very well what one is going t do; it is something great; and one is indeed already doing it, which is the real test. The unusual answer, perhaps the normal answer, is “I do not know,” meaning, “I am looking; I have not found the right thing; it is discouraging but not hopeless.” However, the terrible answers is, “Nothing.” The young man does not want to do anything. –I remember talking to half a dozen young fellows at Van Wagner’s Beach outside of Hamilton, Ontario; and all of them had this one thing to say: “Nothing.” They did not believe that what to work at was the kind of thing one wanted. They rather expected that two or three of them would work for the electric company in town, but they could not care less. I turned away from the conversation abruptly because of the uncontrollable burning tears in my eyes and constriction in my chest. Not feeling sorry for them, but tears of frank dismay for the waste of our humanity (they were nice kids). At the level of longer-term social policy, we should also move rapidly toward “telecommunity.” Those who wish community restored should concentrate attention on the socially fragmenting impact of commuting and high mobility. Building a sense of community in the Fourth Wave is the selective substitution of communication for transportation. Imagine how popular a train would be if in ran alongside the freeways in major cities. Not only would it significantly reduce traffic, but it would save lives, reduce pollution, decrease accidents, improve workers moods, and lessen the strain on the plant and animal life. The popular fear that computers and telecommunications will deprive us of face-to-face contact and make human relations more vicarious is naïve and simplistic. In fact, the revere might very well be the case. Most people complain about being upset at work by someone they do not like, wish they could decrease contact with people in their office and on the street. They do not want to be bothered by people they do not like or do not know. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
While some office or factory relationships might be attenuated, bonds in the home and the community could well be strengthened by these new technologies. Computers and communications can help us create community. If nothing else, they can free large numbers of us to give up comminuting—the centrifugal force that disperses us in the morning, throws us into superficial work relationships, while weakening our more important social ties in the home and community. By making it possible for large numbers of people to work at home (or in close-by neighborhood work centers), the new technologies could make for warmer, more bonded families and a closer, more finely grained community life. The electronic cottage may turn out to be the characteristic mom-and-pop business of the future. And it could lead, as we have seen, to a new work-together family unit involving children (and sometimes even expanded to take in outsiders as well). It is not unlikely that couples who spend a lot of time working together in the home during the day will want to go out in the evening. (Today the more typical pattern is for the commuter to collapse on retuning hoe and refuse to set foot outside.) As communications begin to replace commuting, we can expect to see a lively proliferation of the neighborhood restaurant, theaters, pubs, and clubs, a revitalization of church and voluntary group activity—all or mostly on a face-to-face basis. Nor, for that matter, are all vicarious relationship to be despised. The issue is not simply vicarious, but passivity and powerlessness. For a shy person or an invalid, unable to leave home, or fearful about meeting people face to face, the emerging info-sphere will make possible interactive electronic contact with others who share similar interest—chess players, stamp collectors, poetry lovers, or sports fans—dialed up instantly from anywhere in the country. Vicarious though they may be, such relationships can provide a far better antidote to loneliness than television as we know it today, in which the messages all flow one way and the passive receiver is powerless to interact with the flickering image on the screen. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Communications, selectively applied, can serve the goal of telecommunity. In short, as we build a Forth Wave civilization there are many things we can do to sustain and enrich, rather than destroy, community. If anything is to be done to save the World, it must be done through those in power—the masses of humans will be more likely to follow where they go–the few statesmen, rulers, or politicians by whose decisions history itself is now being made, who control tremendous power, are the ones who need guidance and wisdom, prophetic warning and personal awakening. If you say that the problem is too big for anyone to solve, you imply that nothing ought to be done to help these leaders find right direction. If you say, with Aldous Huxley’s Grey Eminence, that “mystics who interfere in politics only make matters worse,” I reply that unpractical visionaries, unbalanced fanatics, narrow sectarians, and inexperienced meddler certainly do so, but practical, balanced, and mature mystics do not. History proves this point. Philosophy rejects both objections. Even where there is only a small hope of avoiding the tragic outcome of present conditions, it must take the chance offered. When monsters devoid of human pity, inspired by terrifying hate, become leaders of a people, and are followed by them, the presence of the dark opposing principle in nature becomes very evident. The fact is that the situation has arisen for which the military leaders are totally unprepared, one which was never foreseen in all their courses in strategy and tactics, and before which the political leaders also are bewildered. In former times, compromise was a prudent and practical proposition. However, in our time it will not succeed. The leaders of humanity must either adjust themselves to truth or find themselves, and their nations, smitten with disaster or catastrophe. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
The makers of war cannot alter themselves suddenly into the makers of peace. It is useless to look to politics for the cessation of strife when it is itself based on strife. It is wiser and more logical to look to those who have found their own inner peace. The need of a twenty-first century leader to guide the people of the present and future is plain. For people are seeking truth and yearn for happiness where is have never been and never can be found—that is, in materialistic thinking and selfish living. The extent to which any single human is able to force World events today is small. Unseen forces of universal law are, on the contrary, using gifted individuals to control, influence, and fulfill the destiny of humankind. No leader will appear to set the whole World in order for no human has any other answer that will be more effective than the Golden Rule, which humankind has known since before Jesus’ days but failed to apply. If such a human is to be more successful one will have to demonstrate more spiritual Power. The people who compose a community and the leaders whom they follow make its character as good or as bad as they themselves are. Only wild fanatics can expect to build a perfect society out of imperfect materials. When the name of democracy is used as a shield to destroy democracy—while claiming its freedom—it is ridiculous to play the simpleton and ignore the reality of what is actually happening. By using the wrong methods, or even by using right methods at the improper time, the leaders of a nation attain the very opposite of what they strive for. It is for this reason that today the search after peace is bringing them farther from it. A very old Far Eastern text, the Book of Changes, declares, “If the military defense of a state is carried to such extreme that it provokes wars which annihilate the state, there is failure.” If the rulers do not respond to this last chance which has been offered them, they will not be given another. For there is a limit to the length of Universal Law which keeps the nations in an uneasy peace. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
However, if they do respond to the warning uttered and accepted the counsel offered, help will come—miraculous and abundant help. For if there is no tragedy graver than the tragedy of such rejected Grace, there is equally no blessing happier than the blessing of accepted Grace. Too many of history’s great leaders were at the same time humankind’s great misleaders. For they took too many people down the easy but evil path of violence, which revealed destruction and dealt out death at its end. Humanity does not want to live in darkness and madness; it cannot go on like that. The dictator, the politician, and the journalist must take part of the responsibility for leading the masses to this lugubrious situation. It would be a mistake to believe that salvation in any crisis depends on a quantitative element. Humanity could be helped by only a handful of humans who found and lived in the higher consciousness, provided it were willing to follow the guidance and respect the enlightenment of these humans. If it were not for the presence of a few human lights in our World, and for their mostly silent but sometimes open activity, that World would have deteriorated spiritually, morally, to an extent far below what it has done. Humankind has entered a new cycle, one wherein each human must learn something of the truth for oneself. In former cycles they did not need to bear this responsibility. In the present one, one must accept it. A time like the present should not be used as an excuse to escape into the past but as an inspiration to bring in the future. The economic and political reconstruction of the World is a vitally important task, but its ethical reconstruction is immeasurably more important. The former touches the surface of life only, the latter touches its very core. While our mental attitude remains what it is, no solution is possible. We meet hatred with hatred, suspicion with suspicion, fear with fear. Even nuclear disbarment would only ease the World’s crisis and not end it, would put off the urgency and acuteness and still leave the problem of enmity where it is. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Hatred ceases not by hatred but by love. And the New World has heard often enough (but does not practise) what Jesus taught on this matter. The word “nature” was first used to signify the generation of living things, which is called nativity. And because this kind of generation comes form an intrinsic principle, this term is extended to signify the intrinsic principle is either formal or material, both matter and form are commonly called nature. And as the essence of anything is completed by the form; so the essence of anything, signified by the definition, is commonly called nature. And here nature is taken in that sense. Nature is the specific difference giving its form to each thing, for the specific difference completes the definition, and is derived from the special for of a thing. So in the definition of “person,” which means the singular in a determined “genus,” it is more correct to use the term “nature” than “essence,” because the latter is taken from being, which is most common. The soul is a part of the human species; and so, although it may exist in a separate state, yet since it ever retains its nature of unibility, it cannot be called an individual substace, which is the hypostasis or first substance, as neither can the hand nor any other part of human; thus neither the definition nor the name of person belongs to it. Life in itself can make one strong because it is so noble, so full of pleasures and so powerful. Let those who bring about wonderful things in their big, dark books take an animal to help them. The life within the animal will give them strength in turn. For equality gives strength, in all things and at all times. Mayest thou be blessed by the God of thy father, who shall help thee, and by the Almighty, who shall bless thee with blessings of Heaven above, blessings of the deep that coucheth beneath and blessings of fecundity. The blessings of thy father are mighty beyond the blessings of my forefathers unto the utmost bound of the everlasting hills; such blessings shall be on the head of Joseph and on the crown of the head of the prince among his brethren. “Thus you will be enriched in all things and in every way, so that you can be generous, and [your generosity as it is] administered by us will bring forth thanksgiving to God,” II Corinthians 9.11. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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500 Fifth Avenue—We are Not Willing to Participate in the Bloody Business!
Attitude is the paint brush of the soul. If you trust, you will be hurt. However, if you do not trust, you will never learn to love. Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal. Some people choose to leave their way of life and its luxurious trappings for a very different existence as a wandering ascetic in search of spiritual enlightenment. The goal they are wishing for is that through their austere lifestyles, they will discover the truths they are seeking. Those truths, however, continue to elude some. As a result, some individuals will turn to intense meditation and prayer, and they are suddenly overwhelmed by the enlightenment they had been seeking. This allows one to understand then nature and causes of human suffering and what people have to do to eliminate it. After being enlightened, humans are able to determine their own destiny through the manner in which they live their lives. This precept has been particularly normalized in America, it is part of the American dream, and it allows people to overcome poverty and emerge for the low-class as long as they work hard and invest well. Many Americans and others who want to be Americans, heard that they, too, could aspire to become rich, own a big house, and drive a fancy car and escape the strictures and degradations of membership in poverty, converted to Christianity and were inspired to achieve the American Dream. The principles are typically pragmatic. Believers were taught to follow a life of moderation and balance, which meant they should hold correct opinions and aspirations, practice right speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and prayer. To accomplish all this, they had above all to be faithful to vows of Christianity, abstinence from the passion that consumes both body and soul; non-violence; and humbleness. The ultimate goal was the American Dream, freedom and community. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Right conduct, for instance, meant forswearing Earthly appetites. Celibacy, in other words, was mandatory for anyone who aspired to salvation. A Christian should avoid unchastity like “a pit of burning cinders,” but the nature of lust in general, and the glistening flesh in particular, made this immensely difficult. Some people are lustier and weaker-willed than others, endlessly conniving to seduce wavering individuals. Despite this, people should suppress their lust, some their wiles, and everyone should observe strict celibacy. However, in modern churches, the leaders acknowledge the likelihood that marital celibacy might prove unworkable. In the cast, in small number of churches, on may hear the church leaders preaching about chastity, and some even say that pleasures of the flesh are for enjoyment, not just procreation. They do not even frequently preach about being faithful in marriage. The reason is most people cannot maintain marital celibacy, and they even sometimes tolerate and are accepting of concubinage. However, at some point pleasures of the flesh must come to an end, for all Christians who hope to achieve enlightenment, they must adopt a life of renunciation, with celibacy at its core. Lust, Aversion, and Craving, sharpens the portrait of humanly evil, personifying the lustful human devoted to destroying spirituality through their uncontrollable seductiveness. The all-important Christian concept of celibacy, therefore, can be neither defined nor understood without special reference to human nature. Furthermore, by pledging themselves to celibacy as well as to nonviolence and humbleness, many people could become leaders in the church. While ensuring their spiritual salvation, they could evade the burdens and obligations of marriage and parenthood that would otherwise be their fate. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Some even dared dream of lives rich with learning and preaching. For them, Christianity was an albatross escaped, an opportunity for a life most other humans could scarcely even imagine. To understand the meaning of the phrase “Moral imperative,” we must distinguish the three basic functions of man’s “spirit,” we point to the dynamic unity of body and mind, of vitality and rationality, of the conscious and the unconscious, of the emotional and the intellectual. In every function of the human spirit the whole person is involved, and not merely one part or one element. We must revive the term “spirit” as designating a natural quality of humans. It cannot be replaced by “mind” because “mind” is overweighted by its intellectual aspect. None of these three functions of the spirit ever appears in isolation from the other two. They must be distinguished, nonetheless, because they are able to relate to each other in many different ways. Most concisely, we might say: morality is the constitution of the bearer of the spirit, the centered person; culture points to the creativity of the spirit and also to the totality of its creations; and religion is the self-transcendence of the spirit toward what is ultimate and unconditioned in being and meaning. The first of these functions is our direct and primary subject. However, in order to deal with it adequately we must continually refer to the other two. The moral act establishes human beings as persons, and as bearers of the spirit. It is the unconditional character of the moral imperative that gives ultimate seriousness both to culture and to religion into an emotional distortion of mysticism. It was the prophetic message, as recorded in the Old Testament, that contrasted the moral imperative, in terms of the demand for justice, with both the culture and the religion of its time. The message is one of ultimate seriousness and has no equivalent in any other religion. This seriousness of Christianity depends upon it, as does also any ultimate seriousness and has no equivalent in any other religions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The seriousness of Christianity depends upon it, as does also any ultimate seriousness in New World culture. If, in their creation science and the arts, politics, education all become empty and self-destructive, then the moral imperative is disregarded. The imperative exhibits itself in scientific and artistic honesty to the extent of self-sacrifice; in one’s commitment to humanity and justice social relations and political actions; and in the love of one towards the others, as a consequence of experiencing the divine love. These are examples which demonstrate that, without the immanence of the moral imperative, both culture and religion disintegrate because of lack of ultimate seriousness. The moral imperative is the command to become what one potentially is, a person within a community of persons. Only humans, in the limit of our experience, can become a person, because only humans are a completely centered self, having oneself as a self in the face of a World to which one belongs and from which one is, at the same time, separated. This dual relations to one’s World, belongingness and separation, makes it possible for one to ask questions and find answers, to receive and make demands. As centered self and individual, humans can respond in knowledge and action to the stimuli that reach one from the World to which one belongs; but because one also confronts one’s World, and in this sense is free from it, one can respond “responsibly,” namely, after deliberation and decisions rather than through a determined compulsion. This is one’s greatness, but also one’s danger: it enables one to act against the moral demand. One can surrender to the disintegrating forces which tend to control the personal center and to destroy its unity. However, before we pursue this line of thought, we must consider more thoroughly some of our concepts up to this point. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The merry-go-round spins, and around and around they go, the missileman, the submariner, the minister of propaganda, up and down, around and around, while the band plays on. Those persons who arrive at the intermediate ranges of power have clean hands, white lace cuffs. They are doctors, jurists, writers, scientist, artists, editors, professors, poets. They delegate to others the bloodier, the more immediately cruel and exploitative aspects of power. Thereby they create a space around themselves in which can flourish the gentler sentiments: love, empathy, pity, even self-sacrifice. These gentler sentiments then gradually generate a morality which condemns the unfettered will to power. People of this sequestered moral group increasingly criticize those more distant agencies which execute the will of the state, thereby becoming estranged from the source of their own security and their affluence. Power becomes alien to them. They see it as brutal, abhorrent. They say that state is immoral—which it is. Increasingly they use their influence to restrict the state in its exercise of power over its constituents and over other states. Thus an enclave of the privileged, who have distanced themselves from the bloody hands to which they owe their privileged state, articulates a morality that would manacle those hands. A powerful society can afford, may even support and defend, such an enclave of the morally fastidious. However, if the message of this marginalized group should persuade the whole, the whole would find itself in peril. For force provides the ultimate constraint whereby all settled societies protect themselves against the enemies of order within and without. Those persons with the knowledge and will to use force and stand close to the center of any society’s power structure; power holders who lack such will or knowledge will find themselves drive from that center. Mercenaries will fight alongside citizens maintain clean hands and all dirty work is delegated to mercenaries, then not for long will mercenaries be content to fight for wages. Wielding the force, they will proceed to take the power. Force, like a heat-seeking missile, finds out those who lack the will to use it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Although people who attempt death by suicide may be troubled or anxious, they do not necessarily have a psychological disorder. Nevertheless, the majority of all death by suicide attempters do display such a disorder. In fact, research suggests that as many as half of all suicide victims had been experiencing severe depression, 20 percent chronic alcoholism, and 10 percent schizophrenia. Correspondingly, as many as 15 percent of the people with each of these disorders try to kill themselves. People who are both depressed and dependent on alcohol seem particularly prone to suicidal impulses. Panic and other anxiety disorders have also been linked to suicide, but in most cases these disorders occur in conjunction with depression, a substance-related disorder, or schizophrenia. People with major depressive disorder often experience suicidal thoughts. Those whose depression includes a very strong sense of hopelessness seem particularly likely to attempt death by suicide. One program in Sweden was able to reduce the community suicide rate by teaching physicians how to recognize and treat depression at an early state. Even when depressed people are showing improvements in mood, however, they may remain high suicide risks. In fact, among those who are severely depressed, the risk of suicide may actually increase as their mood improves and they have more energy to act on their suicidal wishes. Severe depression also may play a key role in suicide attempts by persons with serious physical illnesses. A study of 44 patients with terminal illnesses revealed that fewer than one quarter of them had thoughts of suicide or wished for an early death and that those who did well all suffering from major depressive disorder. A number of people who drink alcohol or use drugs just before a suicide attempt actually have a long history for abusing substances. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Anti-anxiety drugs increased by 34 percent, anti-insomnia medication increased by 14.8 percent, and anti-depressants being prescribed increased by 18.6 percent. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The basis for the link between substance-related disorders and suicide is not clear. Perhaps the tragic lifestyle of many persons with these disorders or their sense of being hopelessly trapped by a substance leads to suicidal thinking. Alternatively, a third factory—psychological pain, for instance, or depression—may cause both substance abuse and suicidal thinking. Such people may be caught in a downward spiral: they are driven toward substance use by psychological pain or loss, only to find themselves caught in a pattern of substance abuse that aggravates rather than solves their problems. Nor should the medical complications of chronic substance abuse be overlooked. Certain suicides by people with alcoholism, for example, occur in the late stages of the disorder, when cirrhosis of the liver and other medical complications arise. At least some of these people may be acting as “death initiators” in the belief that a journey toward death has already begun. People with schizophrenia may hear voices that are not actually present (hallucinations) or hold beliefs that are clearly false and perhaps bizarre (delusions). There is a popular notion that when such persons kill themselves, they must be responding to an imagined voice commanding them to do so or to a delusion that suicide is grand and noble gesture. Research indicates, however, that suicides by people with schizophrenia more often reflect feelings of demoralization or the like. For example, many young and unemployed sufferer who have had relapses over several years come to believe that the disorder will forever disrupt their lives. Still others seem to be disheartened by their unfortunate, some times dreadful living conditions. Suicide is the leading cause of premature death in this population. These considerations apply to all ages and classes; but it is of course among poor youth (and the aged) that they show up first and worst. They are the most unemployable. For a long time our society has not been geared to the cultivation of the young. It seems people prey on and try to milk the young for all their money. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
In our country, 95 percent of the population age 25 and older have completed high school, and 37.5 percent of the United States of America’s population who are aged 25 and above have graduated from college. However, the high school trend for the future, due to the pandemic, is not looking well: there will be a high proportion of drop-out before the twelfth grade; an increase rate of college dropouts; and stratification will harden. Nationwide, college enrollment has already dropped by 560,000 students in the fall of 2020 compared to the fall of 2019. Colleges saw an unprecedented 13 percent decrease in first-year enrollment. High school students drop out rate because of fears of COVID-19 have increased by 13.8 percent in 2021. Generation Z workers have also been disproportionately affected: those aged from 18-24 years experienced a peak unemployment rate of 26.8 percent in April. In January 2021, they experienced an 11.8 percent unemployment rate. If we made a list we should find that a large proportion of the dwindling number of unquestionably or self-justifying jobs, in the humane and in the future, there is no doubt that the more educated will have jobs, in running an efficient, highly technical economy and an administrative society placing a premium on verbal skills. The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) reports that employment in computer and information technology jobs is expected to grow by 11 percent between 2019 and 2029. Total employment is projected to grow from 153.5 million to 165.4 million over the 2020-2030 decade, an increase of 11.9 million jobs. The labor force participation rate is projected to decline from 61.7 percent to 60.4 percent in 2030. Retail trade is expected to lose 586,800 jobs over the 2020-30 decade, the most of any sector. As e-commerce continues to grow in popularity, accelerated by spending patterns in the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for brick-and-mortar retail establishments is expected to decline. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
For the uneducated there will be no jobs at all. This is humanly most unfortunate, for presumably those who have learned something in schools, and have the knack of surviving the boredom of those schools, could also make something of idleness; whereas the uneducated are unless at leisure too. It takes application, a fine sense of value, and a powerful community-spirit for a people to have serious leisure, and this had not been the genius of the Americans. From this point of view, we can sympathetically understand the pathos of our American school policy, which otherwise seems so inexplicable; at great expense compelling lids to go to school who do not want to and who will not profit by it. There are of course pedagogic motives, like relieving the home, controlling delinquency, and keeping kids from competing for jobs. However, there is also this desperately earnest pedagogic motive, of preparing the kids to take some part in a democratic society that does not need them. Otherwise, if they do not know anything, what will become of them? Yet keep in mind many colleges treat students who received financial aid like they are of low caste and do not belong in college. Even at schools that are not highly rated, financial aid students are made to feel like they are rejects and abusing the system. However, financial aid is a good program before it increases the employment rate, educates people, and adds to the knowledge of Americans so they can make better decision and go one to be creative thinkers, who may possibly even invent things to better society. With a college degree, any college degree, a student is more likely to get a job, which will reduce strain on the public savings and also give the individual the pride of feeling like one is doing something good and honorable. Compulsory public education spread universally during the nineteenth century to provide the reading, writing, and arithmetic necessary to build a modern industrial economy. With the overmaturity of the economy, the teachers are struggling to preserve the elementary system when the economy no longer requires it and is stingy about paying for it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The demand is for scientists and technicians, the 15 percent of the “academically talented.” For a vast majority [in the high school], the vocational courses are the vital core of the program. They represent something related directly to the ambitions of the boys and girls. However, somehow, far more than half of these quit. How is that? To create a fulfilling emotional life and a sane psycho-sphere for the emerging civilization of tomorrow, we must recognize three basic requirements of any individual: the needs for community, structure, and meaning. Understanding how the collapse of Third Wave society undermines all three suggests how we might begin designing a healthier psychological environment for ourselves and our children in the future. To begin with, any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the techo-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness. At many people view online connections and dating sites and applications and a tragedy waiting to happen. From Los Angeles to Tokyo, teenagers, unhappily married couples, single parents, ordinary working people, and the elderly, all complain of social isolation. Parents confess that their children are too busy to see them or even to telephone, text message, email, let alone write a letter, send a fax or a telegram. Lonely strangers in bars or launderettes offer what one sociologist calls “those infinitely sad confidences.” Singles’ clubs, discos, and raves serve as flesh markets for desperate divorcees. Loneliness is even a neglected factor in the economy. How many upper-middle-class housewives or househusbands, driven to distraction by the clanging emptiness of their affluent suburban McMansions, have gone into the job market to preserve their sanity? How many pets (and carloads of pet food) are brought to break the silence of an empty home? #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Loneliness supports much of our travel and entertainment business. It contributes to drug use, depression, and declining productivity. And it creates a lucrative “lonely-hearts” industry that purports to help the lonely locate and lasso Mr. “Right,” or Miss “American Dream.” The hurt of being alone is, of course, hardly new. However, loneliness is now so widespread it has become, paradoxically, a shared experience. Community demands more than emotionally satisfying bonds between individuals, however. It also requires strong ties of loyalty between individuals and their organizations. Just as they miss the companionship of other individuals, millions today feel equally cut off from the institutions of which they are a part of. They hunger for institutions worthy of their respect, affection, and loyalty. The corporation offers a case in point. As companies have grown larger and more impersonal and have diversified into many disparate activities, employees have been left with little sense of shared mission. The feeling of community is absent. The very term “corporate loyalty” has an archaic ring to it. Indeed, loyalty to a company is considered by many a betrayal of self. In The Bottom Line, Fletcher Knebel’s popular novel about big business, the heroine snaps to her executive husband: “Company loyalty! It makes me want to vomit.” Except in Japan, where the lifetime employment system and corporate paternalism still exist (through for a shrinking percentage of the labor force), work relationships are increasingly transient and emotionally unsatisfying. Even when companies make an effort to provide a social dimension to employment—an annual picnic, a company-sponsored bowling team, an office Christmas party—most on-the-job relationships are no more than skin-deep. For such reasons, few today have any sense of belonging to something bigger and better than themselves. This warm participatory feeling emerges spontaneously from time to time during crisis, stress, disaster, or mass uprising. The great youth riots of 2020, produced a glow of community feeling for those who have been jilted by racism, discrimination, injustice, sexism. The antinuclear demonstrations today do the same. However, the movements and feelings they arouse are fleeting. Community is in short supply. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
One clue to the plague of loneliness lies in our rising level of social diversity. By de-massifying society, by accentuating differences rather than similarities, we help people individualize themselves. We make it possible for each of us more nearly to fulfill one’s potential. However, we also make human contact more difficult. For the more individualized we are, the more difficult it becomes to find a mate of a lover who has precisely matching interests, values, schedules, or tastes. Friend are also harder to come by. We become choosier in our social ties. However, so do others. The result is a great many ill-matched relationships. Or no relationships at all. The breakup of mass society, therefore, while holding out the promise of much greater individual self-fulfillment, is at least for the present spreading the pain of isolation. If the emergent Fourth Wave society is not to be icily metallic, with a vacuum for a heart, it must attack this problem frontally. It must restore community. How might we begin to do this? Once we recognize that loneliness is no longer an individual matter but a public problem created by the disintegration of Third Wave institutions, there are plenty of things we can do about it. We can begin where community usually begins—in the family, by expanding its shrunken functions. The family, since the industrial revolution, has been progressively relieved of the burden of its elderly. If we stripped this responsibility from the family, perhaps the time has come to restore it partially. Only a nostalgic fool would favor dismantling public and private pension systems, or making old people completely dependent on their families as they once were. However, why not offer tax and other incentives for families—including non-nuclear and unconventional families—who look after their own elderly instead of farming them out to impersonal old-age “homes.” Why not reward, rather than economically punish, those who maintain and solidify family bonds across generational lines? The same principle can be extended to other functions of the family as well. Families should be encouraged to take a larger—not smaller—role in the education of the young. Parents willing to teach their own children at home should be assisted by the schools, not regarded as freaks or lawbreakers. And parents should have more, not less, influence on the schools. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
At the same time much could be done by the schools themselves to create a sense belonging. Instead of grading students purely on individual performance, some part of each student’s grade could be made dependent on the performance of the class as a whole or some team with it. This would give early and overt support to the idea that each of us has responsibility for others. With a bit of encouragement, imaginative educators could come up with many other, better ways to promote a sense of community. Corporations, too could do much to begin building human ties afresh. Fourth Wave production makes possible decentralization and smaller, more personal work units. Innovative companies might build morale and a sense of belonging by asking groups of workers to organize themselves into mini-companies or cooperatives and contracting directly with these groups to get specific jobs done. This breakup of huge corporations into small, self-managed units could not merely unleash enormous new productive energies but build community at the same time. Semi-autonomous teams of perhaps six to 17 people, who choose to work together as friends, should be told by marketing forces what module of output will be paid for at what pay rates per unit of output, and then should increasingly be allowed to produce it in their own way. Indeed, those who devise successful group friendships cooperatives will do a lot of social good, and perhaps will deserve some subsidies or tax advantages. (What is particularly interesting about such arrangements is that one could create cooperatives within a profit-making corporation or, for that matter, profit-making companies within the framework of a socialist production enterprise.) Corporations could also look hard at their retirement practices. Ejecting an elderly worker all at once not only deprives the individual of a regular, full-sized paycheck, and takes away what society regards as a productive role, but also truncates many social ties. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Multiple risks—people who experience multiple suicide factors are at particular risk for self-destruction. To further illustration this point, the actor Herve Villechaize killed himself after losing his lucrative role in the television series Fantasy Island and also developing a chronic, painful medical condition. Why not more partial retirement plans, and programs that assign semi-retired people to work for understaffed community services on a volunteer part-pay basis? Another community-building device might draw retired people into fresh contact with the young, and vice versa. Older people in every community could be appointed “adjunct teachers” or “mentor,” invited to teach some of their skills in local schools on a parttime or volunteer basis or to have one student, let us say, regularly visit them for instruction. Under school supervision, retired photographers could teach photography, auto science engineering on how to repair a recalcitrant engine, bookkeeper how to keep boos, and so on. In many cases a healthy bond would grow up between mentor and “mentee” that would go beyond instruction. It is not a sin to be lonely and, in a society whose structures are fast disintegrating, it should be a disgrace. Thus, why does it seem “not quite nice” to go to groups where it is perfectly obvious that the reason that everyone is there to meet people of the opposite gender? The same question would apply to singles’ bars, discos, and holiday resorts. The letter points out that in the shtetls of Eastern Europe the institution of shadchan or matchmaker served a useful purpose in bringing marriageable people together, and that dating bureaus, marriage services, and similar agencies are just as necessary today. We should be able to admit openly that we need help, human contact and a social life. We need many new services—both traditional and innovative—to help bring lonely people together in a dignified way. Some people now rely on “lonely-hearts” ads in the magazines or social media to help them locate a companion or mate. Before long we can be sure local or neighborhood cable television services will be running video ads so prospective partners can actually see each other before dating. (Such programs, one suspects, will have enormously high ratings.) As you see The Bachelor and The Bachelorette are extremely popular TV Show. The Bachelorette season 18 finale averaged 3.5 million total viewers. The Bachelor season 25 had 5.30 million viewers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
However, should dating services be limited to providing romantic contacts? Why not services—or places—where people might come simply to meet and make a friend, as distinct from a lover or potential mate? Society needs such service and, so long as they are honest and decent, we should not be embarrassed to invent and use them. Politicians do not seek, and do not find, the real issues behind the apparent ones: this is one of the reasons why their very remedies merely cover up the causes, and repress only the symptoms. The time comes when what is evaded comes also to the surface and must be faced, when the illusions can no longer be hidden, when the chronic accumulated toxins break out all over the body politic, bring severe troubles, maladies, and sickness. So long as those who lead nations or rule peoples have wholly or partially inadequate understanding of the profounder significance of human existence, so long will those nations and peoples be led from one painful blunder to another. This postwar World is hard to live in. We are paying the price for the visionless selfishness, the voracious greeds, and the stupid materialism of the past decades. It was for us to become aware of the new undercurrents of thought and feeling and to become conscious of their import. If we failed to do so it was because our intuition needed improvement. The distressing record during the past two decades of a leadership which lacked both realism and idealism partly explains the inevitably of this war. The blind incompetent and materialistic humans who helped to write this record of hugged their errors and deluded themselves into looking for the foe everywhere but in their own minds. The World is in such grim chaos because it has had materialistic leaders and no spiritual leadership. Humankind cannot be fashioned in actuality into goodness or wisdom overnight—let alone the godlike exemplary image of which the scripture speaks. Not even the most powerful adept can do that. Much of the preaching, most of the idealistic teaching, is hardly relevant to the human situation as we find it in the World today. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Only clear thinking, and even clearer non-thinking intuition, can see the picture, not only as it is, but also in its wholeness. Without some knowledge of the World-Idea, those who hold public office, those who led their countries, merely grope their way under the delusion that they see. This does not mean tht knowledge of this truth provides all the needed and perfect solutions of the problems. The egoistic attitudes and blindness, the narrownesses, the greeds, hates, prejudices, animosities, passions, and violent emotions of the people would still continue to block the way and obstinately obstruct the wisest and best of leaders, sowing a seed that will have to operate, a destiny that brings back what is put forth. This is not to say that a fine leader’s presence and power are as nothing; they mitigate the bad effects of humankind’s own past making, and they initiate new constructive efforts which will penetrate the future. No, we are not as sheep led to the slaughter. That is talking is talking about Jesus Christ and His crucifixion. We are more than conquerors through Jesus Christ that loved us. We are conquerors through Jesus Christ. One who is more than a conqueror is one who enjoys the victory, but does not have to fight the battle. Jesus won it for us. Thank God, everything He did, He did for us! Sometimes when you talk like this, people will say, “Who does he think he is? I think I am who the Word says I am: the righteousness of God, a joint-heir with Jesus, a World overcomer, more than a conqueror! Someone else might say, “But the Word says, ‘There is none righteous, not one.’” That is true. There is no one righteous within oneself. However, thank God, I am not in myself. I am in Christ Man’s righteousness is as filthy rags in the sight of God. I am not declaring my own righteousness. I am declaring His righteousness. (Romans 3.25-26.) I do not see myself in this position of authority because of my own righteousness but because of His. Paul said, Awake to righteousness, and sin not (1 Corinthians 15.34). #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
One of the problems with many religious people is that they try to do good things to merit favor with God. We are living under grace, not the Law. If you try to do good works to build up credit with God, the Word say you put yourself under the curse of the Law. For as many as are the works of the law are under the curse Galatians 3.10. To be under the curse of the Law means to be subject to the curses which are poverty, sickness, and spiritual death. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ. (Galatians 3.13-15.) I am a child of God and an heir with Jesus. Abraham’s blessings are mine: The Word say he was blessed coming in and blessed going out, blessed in the city and blessed in the field. He was blessed all over more than anywhere else! We need to realize that when we were redeemed from the curse of the Law, we were NOT redeemed for the blessings. They belong to us. If you have been born again, Abraham’s blessings are yours. We are the redeemed—not going to be someday, we are now! Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, whom He hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy (Psalm 107.2). Some might ask, “If we are redeemed from the cure of the Law, then why do we still get sick?” Let me ask you another question: Jesus Christ redeemed the World from sin, did He not? Then why do folks still sin? They are redeemed from sin, yet they go on sinning. If you want to, you see, you can do it. Just because we are redeemed from the curse of the Law does not mean that no one will ever sin or be sick again. Redemption is yours, but you must walk in it. Paul said, “Sin shall not have dominion over you.” It should not have, but it is up to you. You must mortify the deeds of your flesh. Just as the children of America had to go in and possess the land that God had given to them, we must use our authority to command sickness and sin to stay out of our lives. We have been redeemed from the curse of the Law, but we must go in and possess that which is already ours. Redemption is our land. “If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land,” reports Isaiah 1.19. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature—even a caterpillar—I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature. I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another, not to one’s kind that lived thousands of years ago, not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole Earth. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. Exalted and honored be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. May the prayers and supplications of the whole house of America be acceptable unto their Father in Heaven; and say ye, Amen. May there be abundant peace from Heaven, and life for us and all America; and say ye, Amen. May He who establisheth peace in the Heavens, grant peace unto us and unto all America; and say ye, Amen. May God give thee the dew of Heaven, of the fatness of the Earth, and abundance of corn and wine. May peoples serve thee and nations bow down to thee. Cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be everyone that blesseth thee. And may Almighty God bless thee and make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, that thou mayest become a multitude of people. Ma He give thee the blessing of Abraham, to thee and thy seed with thee, that thou mayest inherit the land of thy solournings which God gave unto Abraham. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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It Was the Control Spirit–Shall I Never be Delivered from this Mystery?
The Christian Bible tells us plainly there will be a great increase in demon activity as we approach the end of human history. The Apostle makes specific reference to this in 1 Timothy 4.1. The Book of Revelation, chapters 16 and 18, predicts almost universal demonic domination in the final days of God’s judgments on the Earth. This surge of demonism will be amazingly deceptive, luring the masses and even converting nominal Christians. Veneration for the evil spirits will lead to depraved conduct, and the pinnacle of demonic achievement will be their control of World leaders. As incredible as it may seem, this revelation from the Word of God assures us that dependence on these unseen spiritual forces will increase even as scientific knowledge increasing. There is a lot of reality and power that evil spirits possess. Many people have become involved in communication with evil spirits, these spirits—both appealing and loathsome—enslave them, but Jesus Christ can set them free. There are people in this World that have firsthand experience dealing with spirits. Spiritualism is very attractive because it promises knowledge of the future and communication with dead loved ones. Many people will be influenced by demonic spirits in this way without realizing it. However, the only sure guide into the shadowy spirit World is the Christian Bible, and we neglect it at the peril of our souls. The person who denies the phenomena of spiritism today is not entitled to be called a skeptic, one is simply ignorant. A finial, clinching reason for our refusal to consider any of today’s seers as divinely inspired is our conviction that the gift of prophecy ceased when the Scriptures were completed. Prophets uttered truths they had received directly from God, and the Lord used this means of revelation during the years from the creation of man until the time of Malachi. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
From Malachi until John the Baptist can on the scene, Israel had not prophets. Then, in the brief period between Christ’s ascension and the completion of the gospels and epistles, the gift of prophecy was present in the Church. However, gradually the New Testament writings took the place of a prophetic ministry. The apostles were aware that God had given them special authority when they wrote, and that believers were to place greater value upon these gospels and epistles than so-called prophetic declarations. For example, although Paul was not speaking primarily of prophets, he definitely asserted the authoritative nature of his writings when he made the demand, “if any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man, and have no company with him,” reports 2 Thessalonians 3.14. Again, writing to the Christians in Corinth, he said that his words were they very commandment of God, and that they constituted the standard by which God’s people could evaluate the declarations of men considered to be prophets. “If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord,” reports 1 Corinthians 14.37.” The priority of these apostolic writing over the declarations of other humans who claimed to be prophets is further indicated by the apostle John as he brought the book of Revelation to a close. He know that he was writing the authoritative message of God, and therefore could issues this strong warning: “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book; and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book,” reports Revelations 22.18, 19. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
No one claiming a prophetic gift had any right to tamper with the written Word. It is obvious, therefore, that the inspired writing of the apostles gradually superseded prophetic utterances in the early church. Special gifts like prophecy, knowledge, wisdom, healings, and tongues were gradually withdrawn, and in 1 Corinthians 13 Paul declared that the quiet, unselfish pursuit of love is a far more excellent path than that of always desiring the more spectacular activities. He continued, “whether there be prophecies, they shall be done away; where there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophecy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, the that which is in part shall be done away,” reports 1 Corinthians 13.8-10. When Paul writes these words, the New Testament as a whole was not yet in existence, but he declared that special gifts of the Holy Spirit such as prophecy and tongues would become a thing of the past. They would merge into the complete revelation of the New Testament and no longer be needed. They belonged to the childhood state of the Church; therefore, we conclude that the gift of prophecy cannot be in existence today. God has spoken in the Scriptures, and it is to them that we must turn to find His message to us. No one today can rightly claim that he speaks a message by direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We do not believe that anyone today who claims to receive visions directly from the Lord should be acknowledged as a spiritual leader. None of these so-called prophets are correct in every single prediction they make, and therefore they do not meet the test the Lord prescribed in Deuteronomy 18. Most of them are also guilty of disobeying the Biblical warnings of Paul against occultism. In addition, they tend to speak ambiguously and manifest an ignorance of what the Bible really teaches. Finally, we believe that we have logical, historical, and Biblical grounds for affirming that the gift of prophecy was temporary, and that it gave way and disappeared from the Church when the New Testament was completed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
In the year, 1663, a quaintly humorous story of a most persistent and troublesome ghostly visitant comes from the Ireland, though in this particular instance its efforts to right the wrong did not produce a lawsuit: the narrator was Mr. Alcock, who appears in the preceding story. One David Hunter, who was neat-herd to the Bishop of Down (Jeremy Taylor) at his house near Portmore, saw one night, as he was carrying a log of wood into the dairy, an old woman who he did not recognize, but apparently some subtle intuition told him that she was not of mortal mould, for incontinent he flung away the log, and ran terrified into his house. She appeared again to him the next night, and from that on nearly every night for the next nine months. “Whenever she came he must go with her through the Woods at a good round rate; and the poor fellow look’d as if he was bewitch’d and travell’d off his legs.” Even if he were in bed he had to rise and follow her wherever she went, and because his wife could not restrain him she would rise and follow him till daybreak, although no apparition was visible to her. The only member of the family that took the matter philosophically was Hunter’s little dog, and he became so accustomed to the ghost that he would inevitably bring up the rear of the strange procession—if it be true that the lower classes dispensed with the use of night-garments when in bed, the sight must truly have been a most remarkable one. All this time the ghost afforded no indication as to the nature and object of her frequent appearances. “But one day the said David going over a Hedge into the Highway, she came just against him, and he cry’d out, ‘Lord bless me, I would I were dead; shall I never be delivered from this misery?’ At which, ‘And the Lord bless me too,’ says she. ‘It was very happy you spoke first, for till then I had no power to speak, though I have followed you so long. My name,’ says she, ‘is Margaret—-. I lived here before the Wat, and had one son by my Husband; when he died I married a soldier, by whom I had several children which the former Son maintained, else we must all have starved. He lives beyond the Ban-water; pray go to him and bid him dig under such a hearth, and there he shall find 28s. Let him pay what I owe in such place, and the rest to the charge unpay’d at my funeral, and go to my Son that lives here, which I had by my latter Husband, and tell him that he lives a very wicked and dissolute life, and is very unnatural ad ungrateful to his Brother that nurtured him, and if he does not mend his life God will destroy him.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
David Hunter told her he never knew her. “No,” says she, “I died seven years before you came into this Country”; but she promised that, if he would carry her message, she would never hurt him. However, he deferred doing what the apparition bade him, with the result that she appeared the night after, as he lay in bed, and struck him on the shoulder very hard; at which he cried out, and reminded her that she had promised to do him hurt. She replied that was if he did her message; if not, she would kill him. He told her he could not go now, because the waters were out. She said that she was content that he should wait until they were abated; but charged him afterwards not to fail her. Ultimately he did her errand, and afterwards she appeared and thanked him. “For now,” said he, “I shall be at rest, and therefore I pray you lift me up from the ground, and I will trouble you no more.” So Hunter lifted her up, and declared afterwards the she felt just like a bag of feathers in his arms; so she vanished, and he heard most delicate music as she went off over his head. In the late 19th century, Mrs. Winchester used to have séances in the Blue Séance Room in her mansion, which was constantly being expanded and remolded for 38 years. It once stood nine stories high, had 500 rooms, and was approximately 65,000 square feet. Here is the transcript from one of her sessions: “I could hardly wait for the next séance to take place so I could talk to my departed husband….six more days seemed like an eternity. I had not doubt that William would be present, though we had failed on the first attempt. I had talked with the spirit World many times in in my forty-four years, just as I talked with anyone else. I had listened to the spirits give lectures, sermons, exhortations, and counsel to the construction crew assembled at the seances in my mansion. However, I never tired to talk with a dead person. My family, especially my mother’s relatives, had been involved with spiritualism for several generations. They came to the United States of America on the Mayflower. My father was a very religious mand. He often remarked that if any of his children were to die, he would become a spiritualist. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
“On March 7th 1881, my brave forty-four-year-old husband died, and soon afterward a family from New Haven, Connecticut, told me they had contacted the spirit of my dead husband and the he was eager to talk to me. I was very excited, and I agree to let the spiritus to come to my home at the appointed time for a séance in the Bule Séance Room. There were perhaps thirteen people gathered in my home for the séance. We sat quietly, meditatively, and expectantly. The medium sat at one end of our circle of chairs and led us in singing hymns and prayer. It did not seem strange to us to open the séance by saying the Lord’s Prayer. We even ended: ‘…in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’ A prayer for a séance went like this: ‘Eternal God and Father of Lights, we gather as thy expectant children. We are eager to communicate with the spirit World and the spirits of our departed friends and loved ones. We pray that you would look favorably upon us. Bless us this night with communications from our friends in the spirit World. In the name of the great Father of Lights. Amen.’ Then we sang familiar church hymns such as: ‘Face to Face,’ ‘In the Garden,’ ‘Beautiful Isle of Somewhere,’ and ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ While we were singing, the medium slumped into unconsciousness, and before long a strange voice spoke through the medium’s lips; it was the control spirit. ‘Good evening, my children. There are many of the departed here, and all are eager to speak with you. The spirit World welcomes you to another opportunity to contact your departed loved one.’ We listened eagerly to the spirit as the medium sat limply, eyes closed, in her chair. The spirit said that a family was present whose departed loved one wanted very much to speak with them, but since he had been in the spirit World so short a time he was still adjusting to his new spiritual dimension and would have to communicate the following week. That was a terrible disappointment, and the whole family could hardly wait until the next séance when we could contact my beloved husband. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
“At the second meeting we encountered another phase of spiritualism, the gold key séance (sometimes called a séance of vocal revelation). A metal key, made of solid gold, stood upright in a damp saucer on a table in the middle of the room. When the medium entered her trance, the solid gold key rose slowly from the table and dipped into a horizontal position. Eerily, it began spinning with a soft whir and moved around the room, stopping at intervals in midair. I sat rigid in amazement. I saw the floating key, but I could not believe it. The others in the séance seemed to accept the experience as a very common thing. The key went first to my father and then to other members of our family. And we heard a voice, supposedly my departed husband’s, but at first we could not distinguish the words. Then the key came to me. My first reaction was to grab it, and I snatched at the key, but it darted away with amazing swiftness. I tried again, but it moved faster than I did. The key finally settled directly in front of me, just out of my reach. Then the control spirit launched into a lecture about my unbelief, speaking through the unconscious medium. She said if I were to get anything for this meeting, I must conduct be patient. As my emotions subsided, the golden key hovered closer and closer to me until it was near my ear, the key was stroking my hair in the way my husband used to comb it. A voice flowed from the key saying, ‘I love you; I love you.’ It was supposed to be my husband’s voice, but it did not sound like him to me. Everyone else accepted it as William’s voice, but I was disappointed; it was not William. That was the first of many occasions when he supposedly spoke to the family, but I was never convinced. At later séances my niece and I were told we could become gifted spirit mediums. By following the instructions of the spirit voice in the séance of passivity we would in time be able to contact the spirits in our own home. My niece and I began to practice the séance of passivity for thirteen minutes each evening. During these periods we tried to blot out every conscious thought from our minds. Eventually we could sit for an hour and thirteen minutes without being distracted by a single conscious thought. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
“In one of the longer periods, the phenomenon finally took place that we had been waiting for. I witnessed the spirit taking control of my niece as she lost consciousness and a voice completely foreign to her soft contralto boomed out: ‘My child, be not afraid. You have done well. If you only believe, greater things than these you will do. Continue in this way, and the marvels of the spirit World will be revealed to you.’ With that, the spirit departed and my niece regained consciousness. She asked what had happened, and I told her the words of the spirit. She was thrilled! She had arrived at a coveted place of spiritual development, and from that time on we held séances in my mansion in private, with my young niece as the gifted medium. Some people say this is all a hoax, that spirits do not talk with human beings and that floating objects are mere trickery. I would agree that a great many of the eerie demonstrations we hear about are clever illusions, but I believe on the basis of personal experience and the plain words of Scripture that spirits of the invisible World do communicate with humanity and do wield supernatural power in our visible World. And the ominous truth is that these spirits are not from God, but fallen angles controlled by Satan. Their unholy mission is to lead human beings—by refined or gross means—away from dependence on God, their Creator, and they are active in spiritualist churches, séances, psychic phenomena, witchcraft, and idol-worship. However, some of these spirits are good and convey helpful messages. Yet, individuals and nations who reject God, no matter how educated and prosperous they are, fall prey to the other god, Satan.” Believe it or not, the key to the massive front door was made of solid gold and the keys for the other 2,000 doors of this Eight Wonder of the World filled two water buckets. One day, Mrs. Winchester stood at the sitting-room window, after the butler left her, looking at the dull grey of the January sky and the yellowing pastures of the dairy county. There was no rain, but also no gleam of sunshine. I always wanted a private tour of her mansion. My father was on the construction crew and he promised one day when Mrs. Winchester was away, I would get my chance. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
One morning Mrs. Winchester went off in her carriage for a trip to San Francisco, California. My father let me in the mansion and told me I could look around, but warned me not to touch anything and not to get lost. I walked through the beautiful jewel crested front doors, and they closed behind me. I did not think anything of it. However, suddenly, I stumbled, tripped over the carpet, and fell on my hands and knees, managing—and only just managing—to save the lantern which I carried from being extinguished in the fall. The floor of the mansion was very uneven in that part, and I had inadvertently walked into a sort of loose floor board, more or less I was pulverized. I rose and looked about me. evidently, I had strayed from the direct track, thanks to my old habit of indulging in reverie, and had mechanically taken a wrong turning among some of the many passages. The place where I now found myself was by no means similar to the part of the mansion that was in full yield, and from which I had wandered. Instead of being dry, airy, and full of life and bustle, the passage where I stood was damp, and quite silent, not a sound being audible except the drip, drip of blood that oozed through the roof in fifty places, and fell splashing into the little pools of bright red blood that lay among the bricks. The floor was of brick, not wood. It was plain that I was in some neglected corner of the mansion; it was plain, to, that I had lost my way. Now the warning my father gave me came back to me with unwelcome emphasis, and as I breathed with difficulty the clammy and heavy air of the mansion, a shudder ran through my whole frame. In the next instant, I rallied my courage, laughed contemptuously at my own fears, and stepped out manfully along the passage. I knew I must have entered the mansion from the right. But alas! On emerging from the hallway into a sort of square chamber, in which some rude benches, carved out of mahogany, were cut in the gleaming walls, I found that no less than thirteen openings gave access to different parts of the mansion, and I was fairly at fault. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
How I had strayed so far without paying any attention to the bearings of my heedless course, is what, perhaps, none but an absent man can understand; and I, unluckily, was an absent man. It was strange to be lost, or to roam in circles among the great hallways of this estate, and to be lost in what seemed to be an underground tomb, which had dank air and darkness for miles to come. I remarked, too, that the candle in my lantern would not last very long—from one to two hours perhaps, but certainly not longer. It was annoying, very annoying, to be left thus alone. I did not like to own to myself that it was dangerous. How strange it was, I thought, that I did not hear the very faintest sound from the scene of all those busy construction workers working on the Winchester mansion. I listened—listened intently. Not a sound; not so much as the faint hammer; not the welcoming sound of a human voice; not the tramp of one of those shaggy ponies that drew the wood. I had never before realized what the weight of solitude—enforced solitude—could be. I listened; I waited. Not the faintest indication that any other mortal but myself was below ground, reached my ears. Angry with my own fears, vexed with my own carelessness, that had brought me to this pass, I selected at hazard one of the passages opening into the mansion, and entered it, walking fast, but holding the lantern well in front, to avoid any fresh trip falls which might lie in wait for the unwary foot. The hallway was but some thirteen yards long, and then into two narrower corridors, the widest of which led me to a narrow pathway of tiny stairs that seemed to zigzag up the mansion. I entered it stooping, but soon found it was so dizzying that I should be obliged to proceed on hands and knees, if at all, so I retraced my steps: and, tracing them to another stairwell, and found myself atop of the stairs, but unable to proceed any further for the top was cut off by the ceiling. I was wondering aimlessly, as in a labyrinth, unless my candle was spent, and then I should be indeed in sorry case. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Already my feet were cold and wet with the tenacious brine; the cold moist air had brought back my cough, and I shivered in the chill atmosphere of the vault where were I stood. Yet, perhaps there were people near me, within earshot all the time, for I could not believe that the mansion had been suddenly deserted. I shouted, and shouted again, the many hallways and rooms giving back the sound of my voice with strange and sullen dissonance. Presently, though no answering call was returned, I saw a light, far off and dim, but rapidly advancing towards me along the gallery that lay on my left, and which was one of the six I have mentioned. Nearer and nearer it came; no flare of torches, but the steady gleam of a small lamp; and then, to my surprise, I saw that the human figure that soon became visible was not that of a construction worker. The light of the lantern fell faintly on the pale face, colourless as marble, but delicate and pretty enough, of a young and slender girl—a lady, evidently, by her dress, and whom I instantly conjecture to have been one of the staff. However, how she came there, and alone? Was she lost, like me? or—“Did you not call a minute ago? I can show you the way, if you like.” Common-place words these; but they were spoken with a peculiar quiet intonation, that impressed me in spit of myself. The voice was sweet and low, but almost solemn in its calm. There was something strange, too, in the composure and the unsmiling gravity of one so young, while her very presence in the out-of-the-way part the mansion perplexed me. My first idea was, that the young lady, like myself, had lost her way in the intricacies of the mansion; but this supposition her confidence of bearing seemed to contradict. No doubt she knew the mansion well, or she would scarcely have offered to guide me to safety. This was an additional proof the she could not have been one of the merry, rosy-cheeked servants in the mansion. Most likely, some young lady had entered the mansion to see the mysteries inside, and she was some resident in the neighbourhood. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Nonetheless, the beauty in this place was in the infinite variety of fantastic columns, some of pure white marble, others of mahogany, and shimmering gold wallpaper, that composed the walls. As the feeble light of the lanterns flashed on the pellucid surfaces and frail, some more elaborate in the intricacies of their mouldings than the than the Corinthian or Byzantine, I could not restrain my exclamations of surprise and delight. For a moment I forgot the cold, the damp, the discomfort, and said, half to myself: “What a wonderful sight! If a human artist had carved those delicate capitals and rich decorations, what a rush would there be to see his handiwork! But I dare say even the county handbook does not condescend to describe this place, which is worthy to be the palace of the king of gnomes.” “Few know of this place,” said my conductress, in the same measured, passionless voice as before. She had stopped when I stopped, and she stood motionless as a statue, and as pale as if she had been a figure hewn out of alabaster, rather than a creature of flesh and blood. It was the first word of the nature of a remark which had fallen from her, and I tried to draw her into conversation by descanting on the beauty of the singular grotto, and the spaciousness of the mansion. She said very little, but her reticence sis not seem to be caused by any poverty of intellect. There was, however, a peculiar want of warmth or enthusiasm, whether the subject were are or nature, in what little my fair guide could be induced to say. Nor was she by any means communicative as to herself. My attempts to discover whether she really lived in the neighbourhood, were quietly baffled, and when I said that “doubtless her friends would begin to be alarmed at her long absence for which I feared that my own stupid blundering was to blame,” she was merely bowed, and led the way as before. On we went, through a network of hallways, that only seemed to grow more Daedalian every moment, but through which my companion glided along the as unswervingly as if she held in her hand an unfailing clue. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Many of these galleries were evidently the work of man. In all, however, the air was heavy, chill, and moist, and blood dripped from the walls, and fell gurgling down hidden fissures into some unseen depths below. I was confident that I had passed none of these places that day, and began to suspect that my guide was leading me a long round, so as to shew me all the lions of the mansion, instead of taking a short-cut to the workings. At another time, this desire to impress a stranger with a full notion of local marvels would have amused me; but my cough got worse; I shivered, and longed for the excursion to come to a close. Yet there was an awkwardness in suggesting this. I ventured on a safe remark. “It is bitterly cold,” said I, with a shudder, for the damp seemed to be piercing to the very marrow of my bones. “Do you not find it so?” “Very cold!” She said no more; but those two common-place words were spoken in a voice that awed me, somehow, in spite of myself, and seemed to freeze me into silence. On we went, and I trusted that we may be approaching the work-part of the mansion, for the candle in my lantern was reduced to a mere morsel, and must soon be burned out. However, ill as I felt, and hard as it was for my weak lungs to endure the unwholesome air, I almost forgot this in my perplexity as to my conductress. I could not make her out at all. I have met with romantic young ladies, silly young ladies, sensible young ladies, even haughty and vain young ladies, but never with anyone like my guide. Why was she leading me thus, what I felt must be a circuitous course through the mansion? Why—She came to a dead stop, slowly-turned, and confronted me. The hood of her grey cloak, an old-fashion article of attire, such as I had not seen for many years, was drawn over her head, and it threw her pretty face partly into shadow; but her eyes were bright and clear, though there was something in their cold steady look that made me shiver afresh, as if the air of the mansion had grown even more icy and oppressive than before. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
“Tell me about yourself. Tell me what you are going to do. What are your plans, I mean,” she said in the same manner as before, like a sleepwalker unconsciously uttering words that volition does not prompt. I laughed, and blurted out some could-be witty rejoinder on my own good-fortune in having inspired so charming a person with sufficient interest in my fate to suggest the question; but the flippant words died away on my lips half spoken, as she waved her hand, not impatiently, not coquettishly, but with a calm dignity of bearing that matched well her bloodless cheek and the carriage of her proud head. “You are to sail in the Chester—is it not so?” said this singular girl, without a smile or a falter in her low but very distinctive voice. I owned the fact, in so slight surprise. I had not mentioned to no one at the Winchester Mansion the name of the ship in which my passage was taken. The idea of a mystification, of a trick, dawned upon me, but I was at a loss to guess how my beautiful nightmare of a guide could have obtained the information she evidently possessed. Did she know more of men than this? My name, for instance, my profession, and my reason for quitting the Bank of Italy? If so, at any rate she made no parade of her knowledge. She merely raised her hand for a moment—it was ungloved, and there were rings of price sparkling on the thin white fingers—and her eyes seemed to gather a new expression of sadness and warning as she said: “Beware of the Chester! If you love your life—and on, it is bitter to die young—do not sail in that ship.” Slowly the hand she had lifted in warning fell to her side, and holding up the lamp as before, she turned away, and preceded me along the galleries. I followed her, perplexed, half angry, half alarmed. I began to fear that I was the sport of a mad woman. And then a new fancy sized me. Perhaps I myself might be delirious, and the mansion, the endless galleries, and my beautiful nightmare guide, were visions of a disordered brain, a sweet dream or a frightful nightmare, from which I vainly strove to awake. Presently, it occurred to me for the first time that my new-found friend’s feet made no sound as they trod the wooden floor, and twisted stairways. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Certain it was that she moved firmly and swiftly on, without any sign of difficulty or fatigue, while I stumbled and slipped, slipped and stumbled, and at times found it hard to keep up with her. However, as regarded the noiselessness of her tread, I could not solve the doubt. If I stopped, she stopped too, not after a pause, but instantly. And I heard nothing but my own labouring breath and hacking cough, and the sound of my own weary feet. A little while, and even this was forgotten in a new source of apprehension. I had for some time vaguely conceived the idea that, as in labyrinth, we were walking in a circle; and gradually I began to fancy that I had seen this or that sofa and parlour table or that mahogany arch before, and that I had passed through some of the corridors at least once before. However, suspicion was changed to certainty when I suddenly espied, lying on the ground in one of the galleries, one of my own gloves. I had dropped this glove some time before, for I had missed it soon after the arrival of the Unknown. As I picked it up, I glanced keenly around me, and thought I recognized the opening that led into the hall of fires. I was right; in another moment I had followed my mysterious guide into the hall of fires itself. More than an hour’s weary toil, for my candle was all but spent, had brought us back to the point from which we had started. I was angry at last; all my involuntary awe for my strange conductress was lost, and I stamped my foot hard upon the floor as I asked if she had been amusing herself at my expense, or whether she, too, were unaware of the topography of the mansion, and had misled me by accident. I spoke in wrath, and almost in menace; but there was no reply, save one long moan, as from a child in pain, that rang sadly through the mansion. I turned my head, but I could see nothing; and when I again confronted what I now deemed my treacherous guide, a sort of mist seemed to dim my eyes, and I saw, or thought I saw, her form grow faint and indistinct, fading and fading like breath upon a mirror, but with still the same calm face, the same grave look of sorrow and warning, until that too faded, and nothing was left opposite to me—nothing but a masonry wall. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
I sprang forward, incredulous, and touched the wall with my hand. As I did so, a repetition of the moaning cry made me start, and far down the passage where I had seen her first, I saw her again—the pure, pale outline of the young face, the tall slender form in the grey mantel, with the hood drawn over the head, the lamp shining in the outstretched hand. How came she there? “This is too much!” cried I passionately, and convinced that I was the victim of a trick, though how such a trick could have been effected, I did not care to consider. “I will not bear this juggling. I will not—” As I spoke, I darted forward to overtake the receding figure, and my foot tripping among the loose stones of the floor, as I ran, I fell heavily, crushing the lantern beneath me, and being instantly involved in the demonic darkness. Bruised and hurt, I have no heed to the pain of the fall from the door to nowhere, but sprang up, and strained my eyes in the direction where the lamp had been last seen. There was not a spark—not a sound. No light, no rustle of her dress, no faint sound of a distant footfall, nothing but darkness and silence. Eagerly I listened, eagerly I watched, but in vain. I tried to call aloud, but my tongues refused its office; and when I did raise a weak shout, I felt natural repugnance to the darkness deepen as no answer came. “She is doing this to frighten me,” I murmured; “she is hiding behind some bush. Whoever she is, she could be cruel enough to leave me here in the dark alone, to perish.” Silence, still silence. Any sound, even that moan, at which my very heartstrings had quivered, would have been better than that. Darkness, blank, blank darkness. I tried to shout, tried to group my way back in, but I was limp. I had not the strength to rise. Oh, it was very cold, cold and dark. This must be death. “A drop more brandy, Jim; the last did him good, I cannot feel any pulse yet, though. Do not crowd so about him, lads. Give him air! That is enough brandy, do not leave off the chafing the hands. He will come round!” #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
With my dulled ear, I heard these words, but scarcely understood them, and from between the half-closed lids my weak eyes could feebly distinguish a glare of torches, and several rough me in construction garb, and one in black with a kind, shrewd face—the doctor, no doubt. I saw all his, in a stupid sort of indifferent way, as if he had been a pageant, and then I seemed to sink down into a black sea of roaring water, and fainted for the second time. I was in bed at last. I had been in bed some days, very ill, and with a brain too deadened, and a frame too exhausted, to take note of time. When my senses returned, I asked what was the date, and hearing it, knew that the Chester had sailed without me, and that my passage-money was lost. It was not for weeks, and until my slow convalescence had ripened into recovery from the illness brought on by cold and the wetting I had experienced, that the doctor asked me how I came to separate myself from the construction crew, and to get lost in the Winchester Mansion. “It so happened,” he said, “that work was suspended unusually early on that day, as there was a wake at Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco, and the construction workers had a sort of half-holiday by annual custom. The mansion was therefore abandoned, and but for the lucky chance, that when you were missed at home, and inquiries were made, and intelligent boy, the son of another construction worker, declared that you have never left the estate at all, it is probable that no search would have taken place. As it was, long hours passed before a party started in quest for you; and it is fortunate they there were in time. The Winchester has witnessed more than one tragic incident, even in my day.” “To what do you allude, doctor?” asked I eagerly. “Three year ago, a young lady, a Miss Mary Seward, because separated from her friends, as you did, in that mansion,” answered the doctor. “I had not as yet settled in the district, and only know the details from report, and very imperfectly. I believe, however, that the poor girl, who had made one of a large family art, was bound on a visit to an aunt who lived in England; her own parents then residing at the Rengstoff House, near here. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
“The day was a stormy one; the carriages drove off in a heavy fall of rain; and I believe the missing one was understood by her mother to be staying at her aunt’s, and vice versa, for there was no alarm till help was impossible. The poor girl’s body was found—for she perished of cold and hunger in that maze of galleries. Bless me, how pale you look, my dear sir. Take some cordial, and lie down, and no more talking—not a word more, I insist.” I have no explanation of the above facts to offer. I have endeavoured, far from San Jose, to set down every detail of the occurrence as simply and succinctly as possible. If I could disabuse my mind of the ghastly doubt and horror that cling to it, and which haunt me when I recall the events of that day in the Winchester Mansion, I should be very thankful. The good doctor, when he heard my statement, did his best to convince me that what I saw was a mere hallucination, due to my disordered health and excited nerves. I wish I could think so; but further inquiries, made before I left San Jose, served to assure me that I was not the only person who was supposed to have seen the presence that I had beheld in the disused portion of the mansion. One word more. The warning was no idle one, though I doubt whether I should have been ashamed to have heeded it, had not illness chained me to my sick-bed. Before I was able to quit the Winchester Mansion, news came that a dense fog enveloped the iron and wood steamship City of Chester and its 106 passengers as they began the slow journey north from San Francisco Bay to Eureka. It was 1888, and family members bid their loved one’s safe passage from the Broadway dock as the vessel disappeared into the pea soup fog. Moments later, the Chester was split in two by a ship more than twice its size, killing 16 people—13 passengers, including two children and three crew members—and becoming the bay’s second-worst maritime disaster. Some people may believe all spirituals are evil and trying to harms us or that they are demonic, but it seems some are good and really trying to save our lives. Perhaps some of these spirits are our guardian angels. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Winchester Mystery House
What a lovely weekend for a bit of mystery👻 winchestermysteryhouse.com
I Felt, My God, I Could Not Face this thing!
There are risks and costs to a program of action. Make sure that what you aspire to accomplish is worth accomplishing, and then throw your whole vitality into it. Excellence in education is the key to our nation’s future. Celibacy, of course, is a fundamental dimension of moral purity, and it provides disciplines that enhance mental and spiritual qualities. This allows one to sublimate the creative force into a God-directed, selfless love, the chaste joy of longing for the untouched beloved, a pure passion much like the agape ideal of many early Christian nuns. The focus on celibacy and the conservation of the creative force, allows the source of one’s spiritual power and their mystical ability to partake in God’s transcendental nature by transforming one’s energy into spiritual energy. Celibacy, therefore, is a critical instrument for achieving spiritual goals. All people are souls coupled with physical bodies, and they exist withing the chronological context of historical cycles of moral and physical decline. At the beginning, the ages were perfect and pure. Men and women were equal, and neither adversity nor affliction existed. The principal cause of this flawlessness was the absence of pleasures of the flesh. However, pleasures of the flesh entered the scene. Gradually, these Godly folk deteriorated, morally and physically, until corruption and torment prevailed. Heaven became hell, and the fleshly desires of the body came to dominate the World. Hand in hand with the degeneration of human standards came the bondage of humans, enslaved by another’s lust. The goal of the celibates is to end this cycle and purify themselves on Earth so they may be reborn at or soon after the pristine beginning of each successive cycle. They wish to be liberated from sinful births rather than rebirth itself. The only was they can achieve this is by renouncing the evil that is pleasures of the flesh and adopting complete celibacy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Celibacy promises enormous reward. To begin with, it fulfills the theological condition for assuring perfect future births. It also relives people from the chains of marriage. Cleansed of pleasures of they flesh, some find their true spiritual identities and such off their ties with the ungodly, material World. It religious terms, it promised unheard-of opportunities that allowed individuals to move to positions of power. Inspired with these new ideas, people explained to their significant other that they should live together chastely, loving each other with a pure and spiritual devotion. Pleasures of the flesh, conversely, has overpopulated and made a slum of the planet. Some liken pleasures of the flesh as to foraging about in a sewer. Pleasures of the flesh love has no vindicative features, either. True love is loving someone’s essence—one’s soul. Pleasures of the flesh expends previous energy. Lust renders people powerless and demands for its fulfillment. Celibacy allows people to be pure and liberates individuals from bondage and frees them to achieve the enormous power of absolute chastity. Ethics is treated separately only as a matter of experience. Morality is grounded in our essential being. In this respect, these principals of ethics stand in continuity with traditional Roman Catholic natural law ethics and other forms of moral realism. What is morally right and good is the realization through action of human natural potentialities. These ethics are not judgmental, but verge on intuitionism because of its appeal to the “silent voice” of conscience about essential nature. Ethics on this point deals with how to specify the precise relation between casuistry, that is, reasoning about moral cases, and claims about human nature. If we are going to reason rightly about moral cases, must we assume something about the nature of human beings? #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
If we cannot reach agreement about the nature of human life or its good—a consensus difficult to reach in wildly pluralistic societies—does this invalidate casuistic thinking? Theologians and philosophers currently have attempted to server the connection between casuistry and claims about human nature. Ethics, while itself deficient on matters of casuistry, challenges this move by questioning the point of morality itself. If morality is about the realization of human potentialities, the come conception of human nature seems required in addressing practical moral questions. The demand on the casuist is either to show that this is not the point of morality so that no claim about human nature is needed in ethics or, conversely, to provide a different account of human nature, such as the found in traditional natural law ethics. Morality, then, is grounded in our essential being. What is means, is that morality finds its source in God as the ground and power of being. Ethics is in this respect necessarily theological in character. However, this raises two questions. First, how is the idea of God related to some conception of what is morally good? That is, even if one grants the claim about the religions character or morality, it is another question to ask about the content of claims about God and goodness. How does a conception of the good, whether grounded in claims about human nature or historically specific beliefs, relate to Christian ideas about God and agape? Some moral theorists argue that in ethics we need only a thing theory of the good, because the point of the moral life in a pluralistic society is just relations between persons rather than establishing the human good. At issues then are the substance of claims about the human good, the status of those claims, their place in ethics, and the relation between those claims and discourse about God. This leads to the second question: Given the fact of moral diversity on this planet, can one sustain the claim that morality is theistic? #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Indeed, is that claim actually needed in ethics? Is an appeal to agape morally adequate in our time? Put differently, the concern to combat moralism and relativism must be rethought in terms of the reality of moral pluralism and also of debates about how to understand moral goodness. The final challenge to this thought poses to theological ethics is at the level of basic moral problems. The moral problem is the fragmentation of life; the moral act is a victory of self-integration against forces that lead to human estrangement. This means that the power to act is essential to how one conceives of the human good because only through exercise of power in action is life realized. Now in our time, technology has radically increased human power to the point that we can alter the environment and even the human species. This makes the reality of power and human responsibility basic to contemporary ethical reflection. These concerns have been addressed in matters of terms of the dominance of technical rationality in the modern World and also theologically by understanding the term God as symbolizing the power of being itself. The question that remains open, however, is the extent to which claims about rationality and the symbol God can contribute to current ethical reflection on the reality of human power and the demands of responsibility. Thus one challenges theological ethics in terms of patterns of practical moral reasoning, the relation between claims about God and those of moral goodness, and also the contribution of theological discourse to reflection on human power and responsibility. Any assessment of these ethics in terms of the history of thought or contemporary ethical reflection must engage one’s work on each of these points. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
God as the Ground and Aim of our being has been transformed into a multiplicity of laws, partly doctrinal and partly ethical. The moral “yoke” that Jesus wished to make easy had only been made heavier, and the message of grace has largely been lost, despite the numerous liturgical prayers for the forgiveness of sins. They do not express the vision that appears in Paul’s Letters and John’s Gospel, or is expressed in the seventh petition of the Lord’s Prayer—“save us from the evil one”—namely, the image of a demonic power ruling the universe and driving humans into separation from God and into hostility against Him. The prayers for forgiveness have, for many people, only the function of relieving the uneasy conscience produced by trespasses against traditional and often absurd rules of behaviour, mostly a prohibitive character. However, they do not express the great paradox, that there is a reunion with the eternal “Ground of our being” without “right” action on our part, without being “good people,” or the “people of good will.” Therefore, despite liturgical formulae, hymns, and the reading o lessons from the Pauline Epistles, the message of grace has been lost. Grace as the power of accepting the person who is unacceptable, and of healing the person who is mortally sick, has disappeared behind the preaching of the religious and moral laws. It is understandable that people, in view of this graceless moralism turn to secular ethics. However, when they find nothing more than the logical analysis of ethical theory, they turn easily to a cynical relativism or to a totalitarian absolutism in ethics, each often a consequence of the other. The question that is implicit in this situation is: Can we point to something that transcends both graceless moralism and normless relativism in ethical theory and moral action? #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The response of Christianity is the message that a new reality has appeared with the coming of the Christ, a power of being in which we can participate, and out of which true thought and right action can follow, however fragmentarily. We find analogous affirmations in other religions and even in secular movements of an implicitly religious character, such as nationalism, socialism, and liberal humanism. Being precedes action in everything that is, including man, although in man as the bearer of freedom, previous action also determines present being. This answer stand in opposition to both moral legalism and amoral lawlessness. It affirms morality and points beyond it to its religious foundation. If morality is intrinsically religious, as religion is intrinsically ethical, neither is dependent on the other, and neither can be substituted for the other. Power is protean. When, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States of American and the Soviet Union squared off against each other, the power of each was a function of bombs, ships, missiles, planes, tanks, armored divisions. These were the factors that each had to reckon with as it braced itself for struggle. However, within each nation the enormous power, respectively, of Kennedy and of Khrushchev was charismatic, depending upon the ability of each to inspire belief that one dividually did possess those magical powers which the peoples of those countries had as children experienced in their fathers and now unconsciously imputed to their leaders. When a profound patriotic passion is aroused, it will make people weep, and evokes and shapes in them a mood of fervent devotion and self-sacrifice. As people listen, more and more will they want to go into the battle field. It is considered a great honor to die for such a powerful leader. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Most significant power is composite, being both instrumental and charismatic. Instrumental power is that which accrues in consequence of competence at the work of the World—the growing of wheat, the building of houses, the designing of an airplane, the composing of a sonnet. The smaller the extent of power, the more likely it is to be instrumental. The greater the power, the more likely it is to be charismatic. Many of the greatest World leaders have held power primarily by virtue of their ability to embody protection from our deepest fears and gratification of our primitive and grandiose fantasies, and perhaps not at all by virtue of competence at directing the affairs of a nation. Indeed, some such leaders, far from being competent to govern, lead the nations for which they are responsible straight to destruction. Once nature was the danger and the challenge. The cave drawings of Stone Age man bear witness to his preoccupying concerns with animals as a source of food and as a source of danger. The ability to elude these animals, to capture or to kill them, was the locus of power. Now anyone can shoot a rifle, no animal poses a threat, the ability to fell a charging elephant wins us no fame, perhaps even contempt, and we know that we may, if careless, destroy animals utterly. Most significant power now is power over people. The ability to win the respect, the belief, the support, the allegiance, the following, the obedience, of people—this is power. Morality, law, and custom comprise the rules by which the group expect us, as individuals, to live. These rules allow for a modest accumulation of power by way of instrumental competence. If we respect the rules, we cannot hope for more. We shall be conformists, the salt of the Earth but never its giants. A more venturesome order of normality calls for one to be as free in pursuit of power as a prudent, though often but nominal, regard for rules will permit. With less than that prudent regard, one is likely to land in disfavor or in jail—though sometimes, with a little luck, an adventurous thug may become a ruler. With more than a prudent regard one is disabled in the race. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Neurotics are those who are crippled in the pursuit of power by internal constraints, impediments built into character by childhood experience. All of us start out weak in the hands of the strong, and a parent inclined to exploit that discrepancy can teach a child that any transgression of rules will yield pain and humiliation. Such an early education can bring it about that in later life, long after the tyrant is dead, any tentative reaching for power will be aborted by anxiety. The awareness of vulnerability prompts one to look about carefully, to take the measure of things. It leads to knowledge, is essential to good judgement. Without it one’s vision of one’s self and the World is determined, not by the way things are but by one’s will, one’s desire. When power is absolute, distortion is extreme; the real World is replaced by fantasy. When one possesses greater power than any despot of the past, one will ask for ultimate power: Every individual will henceforth follow this person’s personal order of suffer death. The congressional deputies will enthusiastically and unanimously approve the measure. One will now, legally, be above any law. That is why it is important that we do not have one party with a supermajority. However, people are so unwillingly to talk about politics to the extent that they ignore what is going on, and this can eventually become the result. So empowered, and thereby more and more out of touch with the reality one is imperiously undertaking to shape and to control, and with no compunction to heed the advice of one’s general, who are in touch, one will proceed to make those disastrous mistakes which will led to the destruction of the army and the loss of the war. Nothing within the state impedes the pursuit of power by the state. Empires expand. Any of them, are it able, will encompass the World. They go as far as they can, stop only where the lines of communication and supply are stretched too thin, where the conduits of power can no longer deliver effective force. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
In the individual, however, morality is a brake and may at any point set a limit. A truly Christian position calls for the abnegation of power, requires one to give all one has to the poor, to be meek, to love one’s enemy, to turn the other cheek. A measure of the instinctual force of the drive for power is given by the rarity with which such an ethic has in fact been practiced. The other internal obstacle is fear. One can go quite far in the acquisition of instrumental power without struggling with another human being and hence without encounter fear, power growing as a function of one’s kill in becoming a good pianist, carpenter, bookkeeper, or surgeon. However, the point is reached eventually beyond which any further gain can be achieved only in struggle with another person, in defeating or besting or outmaneuvering someone. In such contest one is vulnerable, there is no sure win. One may show one’s self a fool, may be humiliated. Fear may become so intense that one’s life comes to be structed around it. Whoever arranges for oneself an isolated life (a write, an artist, a forest-fire watcher, a drawbridge keeper) or a vocation with built-in advantages over the people with whom one deal (a psychoanalyst, and anesthesiologist) is likely to be the who feels keenly the danger of pursuing power through interpersonal struggle. The hurdy-gurdy plays, and around and around they go, the charioteer, the legionnaire, the cuirassier, up and down, sailing around, the president, the foreign minister, the chiefs of staff, varnished faces frozen in arrogance and disdain, the bombardier, the cavalryman, the machine gunner, around and around, as the band plays on. When the oppressed take up arms and rebel, they do so in the name of principles that asset basic human rights and so constitute an insurgent morality which justified the overthrow of the existing order. The existing order has a morality of its own, an establishment morality, which holds that the security and welfare of each individual are contingent on the state, that the state therefore is owed allegiance, that its laws must be obeyed, its leaders respect it. It labels the leaders of the rebellion as traitors, criminal, fanatics, and will crush them if it can. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
As rebels confront government troops, so insurgent morality confronts established morality. If government troops prevail, the insurgent morality is discredited, disappears. If the rebels are victorious, the establishment morality is discredited, succeeded by the insurgent morality. In the latter event the insurgent morality comes to be allied with power, becomes the new establishment morality, ancillary to the safeguarding and expansion of power. In this new role it sanctifies power, reassures the now newly oppressed that their oppression is in the nature of things, perhaps ordained by divine will, that no protest is indicated but rather patience and cooperation, that all must make sacrifices, that the leaders act for the welfare of all, that laws must be obeyed. Thus a morality which began as protest against power becomes the servant of power. The insurgent morality in its insurgency declares that power is corrupt and tends to corrupt everyone and everything allied to it; and when the revolution succeeds, it proves the truth of its indictment by corrupting first those exalted principles under whose banners it rode to power, along with the warriors who bore them. The striking way in which the modern World is moving toward its doom is not accidental but predetermined. Yet this terrible inevitability is not imposed from without by arbitrary power. It arises from within, from the World’s own characteristics. During the First World War, a civilization ridden by pleasures of the flesh which had sought intense pleasures found intense pain. Did it learn the implicit lesson? No! It plunged more wildly than ever in the quest for joy involving pleasures of the flesh, only to find still worse agony in the Second World War. The more it has wasted the gift of life, the creative force, the more it has lost the essence of life, blood. The creative force of life is white blood. Nature has punished human’s careless dissipation of the one with a forced loss of the other. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
The time has come to teach the lesson of responsibility about pleasures of the flesh in clear words. If humanity refuses to learn and obey spiritual laws, the horror of a third World War, compared with which the second will be mere child’s play, cannot be escaped. It would be agreeable and pleasant to share such optimism about the non-inevitableness of war, but it would also be self-deceptive. When the terrors and horrors of one war fail to have the effect of arousing people to thinking for themselves instead of in a mass, that is to say, of seeking truth individually, then the war will repeat itself again and again. If the war comes, it will have been brought by the erring nations upon themselves. If the war is not to come, they must change their ideas and their actions now. Some believe that war might come in a few years’ time; it might also come in only one year’s time; but it would be folly to deny that it might not even come at all. If no efforts at all had ben made on both the physical and mystical planes to counteract the threatened conflict, it could have broken out in the Cuban crisis year. The situation is still an anxious one but it is not a hopeless one. Piety alone will not suffice to meet it, just as politics alone has already failed to do so. However, the mystical efforts are being kept up. War is not inevitable. No one knows the outcome of the tremendous struggle going on between the atheistic hate forces and the constructive love forces on the mental level. The intercessory and contributory meditations of a few knowledgeable sages afford whatever real hope exists today. If the peoples and leaders fail to respond to those contributions, they will then have to carry the responsibility for its destruction. It is folly not to see that war is inevitable, folly to blind oneself deliberately to what is coming merely because one dreads it. While our human interest and nature shudder at the though of such war, our human wisdom and insight have no doubt it will take place. The dander is not only that a Third World War will come, but that it will come during an inconvenient time. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
None of the wars which humankind have hitherto suffered was Armageddon, for the last war was fought out fully and extended its devastations only in three continents and partly on the fourth, but the fifth was not affected in the same way. When Armageddon comes, it will devastate five continents. The mass of people does not take to truly spiritual concepts. Extroversion, egoism, and preoccupation with personal or Worldly affairs keep out any interest or attention in such concepts. Only the crushing shock of atomic war will provide an impulsion toward them from without. Even the new polarization of attitudes which is emerging as a consequence of the war, is confused rather than clear-cut. The ghastly tragedy of this confusion would show itself at its very worst in Armageddon. In the Second World War the issues between good and evil were clear-cut and easily discernible. However, in the Third World War they would be confused, chaotic, and mixed. It does not require much perceptiveness to perceived the inevitability of Armageddon. This fear haunts millions today and is one of the impulsions to the search for spiritual comfort, in one group, and the search for forgetfulness in pleasures, with the larger group. We may face the tragic inevitability of a Third World War with fear and gloom or with calm and resignation. Many suicide attempts are preceded by a change in mood. The change may not be severe enough to warrant a diagnosis of mental disorder, but it does represent a significant shift from the person’s past mood. The most common change is an increase in sadness. Also common are increases in feelings of anxiety, tension, frustration, anger, or shame. In fact, the key to suicide may be “psychache,” a feeling of psychological pian that seems intolerable to the person. Suicide attempts may also be preceded by shifts in patterns of thinking. Individuals may become preoccupied with their problems, or mood will not change. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Some clinicians believe that a feeling of hopelessness is the single most likely indicator of suicidal intent, and they take special care to look for signs of hopelessness when they access the risk of suicide. Many people who attempt suicide fall victim to dichotomous thinking, viewing problems and solutions in rigid either/or terms. Indeed, the “four-letter word” in suicide is “only,” as in “suicide was the only thing I could do.” In the following statement a woman who survived her leap from a building describes her dichotomous thinking at the time. She saw death as the only alternative to her pain. “I was so desperate. I felt my God, I could not face this thing. Everything was like a terrible whirlpool of confusion. And I though to myself: There is only one thing to do. I just have to lose consciousness. That is the only way to get away from it. The only way to lose consciousness, I thought, was to jump off something good and high.” Studies indicate that as many as 60 percent of the people who attempt suicide drink alcohol just before the act. Autopsies reveal that about 25 percent of these people are legally intoxicated. In fact, considering that coroners are more likely to classify deaths as accidental when they detect high alcohol levels, the excessive use of alcohol just before death by suicide is probably much higher. Such statistics suggest to many clinical researchers that alcohol often helps trigger suicidal behaviour. A variety of factors may account for this relationship between alcohol use and suicide. Alcohol’s disinhibiting effects may allow people who are considering suicide to overcome the fears that would otherwise restrain them. Alternatively, alcohol may contribute to suicide by lowering an individual’s inhibitions against violence and helping to release underlying aggressive feelings. Yet another possibility is that alcohol further impairs a suicidal person’s judgment and problem-solving abilities. Research suggests that the use of other kinds of drugs may have a similar tie to death by suicide, particularly in teenagers and young adults. A high level of heroine, for example, was found in the blood of a popular musician at the time the individual died by death from suicide. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Holiday effect—studied in countries throughout Europe indicate the suicide rates tend to drop before Christmas and Easter but then increase after those holidays. Seasonal violence—although findings are sometimes mixed, many studies suggest that suicides committed by violent methods are highest during the spring and lowest in the late fall. Most common killings—more suicides (31,000) than homicides (23,000) are committed in the United State of America each year. Yet, economically and vocationally, a very large population of the young people are in a plight more drastic than anything so far mentioned. In our society as it is, there are not enough worthy jobs. However, if our society, being as it is, were run more efficiently and soberly, for a majority there would soon not be any jobs at all. There is at present nearly full employment and there may be for some years, yet a vast number of young people are rationally unemployable, useless. This paradox is essential to explain their present temper. Our society, which is not geared to the cultivation of its young, is geared to a profitable expanding production, a so-called high standard of living of mediocre value, a so-called high standard of living of mediocre value, and the maintenance of nearly full employment. Politically, the chief of these is full employment. In a crisis, when profitable production is temporarily curtailed, government spending increases and jobs are manufactured. In “normalcy”—a condition of slow boom—the easy credit, installment buying, and artificially induced demand for useless goods create jobs for all and good profits for some. Now, back when the pandemic started, when the stimulus attempted by hook or crook to put people back to work and give them money to revive a shattered economy, there was an outcry of moral indignation from the conservatives that many of the jobs were “boondoggling,” useless made-work. It was insisted, and rightly, that such work was demoralizing to the workers themselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
It was insisted, and rightly, that such work was demoralizing to the workers themselves. It is a question of a word, but a candid critic might certainly say that many of the jobs in our present “normal” production are useless made-work. The tail fins and built-in obsolescence might be called boondoggling. The $64,000 Question and the busy hum of Madison Avenue might certainly be called boondoggling. Certain tax-dodge Foundations are boondoggling. What of business lunches and expense accounts? fringe benefits? The comic categories of occupation in the building trades? the extra stage hands and musicians of the theater crafts? These jolly devices to put money back to work no doubt have a demoralizing effect on somebody or other (certainly on me, they make me green with envy), but where is the moral indignation from Top Management? Supposed we would cut out the boondoggling and gear our society to a more sensible abundance, with efficient production of quality goods, distribution in a natural market, counterinflation and sober credit. At once the work week would be cut to, stay, twenty hours instead of forty. (Important People have already mentioned the figure thirty.) Or alternately, half of the labor force would be unemployed. Suppose too—and how can we not suppose it?—that the automatic machines are used generally, rather than just to get rid of badly organized unskilled labor. The unemployment will be still more drastic. (To give the most striking example: in steel, the annual increase in productivity is 4 percent, the plants work at 50 percent of capacity, and the companies can break even stop producing at less than 30 percent of capacity. These are the conditions that forced the steel strike, as desperate self-protection.) Everybody knows this, nobody wants to talk about it much, for we do not know how to cope with it. The effect is that we are living a kind of lie. Long ago, labor leaders used to fight for the shorter work week, but not they do not, because they are pretty sure they do not want it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Indeed, when hours are reduced, the tendency is to get a second, part-time, job and raise the standard of living, because the job is meaningless and one must have something; but the standard of living is pretty meaningless, too. Nor is this strange atmosphere a new thing. For at least a generation the maximum sensible use of our productivity could have thrown a vast population out of work, or relieved everybody a lot of useless work, depending on how you take it. (Consider with how little cutback of useful civilian production the economy produced the war goods and maintained an Army, economically unemployed.) The plain truth is that at present very many of us are useless, not needed, rationally unemployable. It is this paradoxical atmosphere that young persons’ grow up. It looks busy and expansive, but it is rationally at a stalemate. A new civilization is forming. However, where do we fit into it? Do not today’s technological changes and social upheavals mean the end of friendship, love, commitment, community, and caring? Will not tomorrow’s electronic marvels make human relationships even more vacuous and vicarious then they are today? For example, so many people are impressed by the new BMW IX M60, which can change exterior paint colors by the push of a button, and also has the technology to heal the kidney grill if it is injured. Nonetheless, these are legitimate questions. They arise from reasonable fears, and only a naïve technocrat would brush them lightly aside. For if we look around us, we find widespread evidence of psychological breakdown. It is as though a bomb had gone off in out communal “psycho-sphere.” We are, in fact, experiencing not merely the breakup of the Second Wave techno-sphere, info-sphere, or socio-sphere but the crack-up of its psycho-sphere as well. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Throughout the affluent nations the litany is all too familiar: rising rates of juvenile suicide, dizzying high levels of alcoholism, widespread psychological depression, vandalism, and crime. In the United States of America, emergency rooms are crowded with “potheads,” “speed freaks,” “Quaalude kids,” “coke sniffers,” “heroin junkies,” “fentanyl fires,” “molly malfunctions,” “ecstasy electrocutes,” “lean limps,” and not to mention people having “nervous breakdowns.” Social work and mental healthy industries are booming everywhere. In Washington a President’s Commission on Mental Health announces that fully one fourth of all citizens in the United States of America suffers from some form of severe emotional stress. And a National Institute of Mental Health psychologist, charging that almost no family is free of some form of mental disorder, declares that “psycological turbulence is rampant in an American society that is confused, divided and concerned about its future.” It is true that spongy definitions and unreliable statistics make such sweeping generations suspect, and it is doubly true that earlier societies were such sweeping generations suspect, and it is doubly true that earlier societies were scarcely models of good mental health. Yet something is terribly wrong today. There is a harassed, knife-edge quality to daily life. Nerves are ragged, and—as the scuffles and shootings in subways or on gas queues suggest—tempers are barely under hair-trigger control. Millions of people are terminally fed up. They are, moreover, increasingly hassled by an apparently swelling army of heavy breathers, kooks, flakes, weirdos, and psycho whose antisocial behavior is frequently glamorized by the media. In the West at least, we see a pernicious romanticization of insanity, a glorification of the “cuckoo nest” inmate. Best-sellers proclaim that madness is a myth, and a literary journal springs up in Berkeley decided to the notion that “Madness, Genius, and Sainthood all lie in the same realm, and should be given the same name and prestige.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Meanwhile, millions of individuals search frantically for their own identities or for some magic therapy to re-integrate their personalities, provide instant intimacy or ecstasy, or lead them to “higher” states of consciousness. By the late 2000’s a human potential movement, spreading eastward from California, had spawned some 8,000 different “therapies” consisting of odds and ends of psychoanalysis, Eastern religion, experimentations with pleasures of the flesh, game playing, and old-time revivalism. In the words of one critical survey, “these techniques were neatly packaged and distributed coast to coast under like Mind Dynamic, Arica, and Silva Mind Control. Transcendental Meditation was already being peddled like speed reading; Scientology’s Dianetics had been mass-marketing its own popular therapy since the fifties. At the same time, America’s religious cults got into the swing, fanning out quietly across the country in massive fund-raising and recruitment drives.” More important than the growing human-potential industry is the Christian evangelical movement. Appealing to poorer and less educated segments of the public, making sophistical use of high-powered radio and television, the “born again” movement is ballooning in size. Religious huckster, riding its crest, send their followers scrambling for salvation in a society they picture as decadent and doomed. This wave of malaise had not struck all parts of the technological World with equal force. For this reason, readers in Europe and elsewhere may be tempted to shrug it off as a largely American phenomenon, while in the United States of America itself some still regard it as just another manifestation of California’s fabled flakiness. Neither view could be further from the truth. If psychic distress and disintegration are most strikingly evident in the Untied States of America, and especially in California, it merely reflects the fact that the Fourth Wave has arrived a bit earlier than elsewhere, causing Third Wave social structures to topple sooner and more spectacularly. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Indeed, a kind of paranoia has settled over many communities, and not just the United States of America. In Rome, Turin, and even in America, terrorists stalk the streets and secretly are employed in many communities. They have become like the old day klan, where many of their members hold jobs in the TV new media, at law firms, in the courthouses, in law enforcement, property management and the supermarket. They are everywhere. In Paris, and even in once peaceful London, muggings and vandalism increase. In Chicago, San Francisco, and Downtown Sacramento, elderly people are afraid to walk the streets after the street lights come on. In New York, schools and subways crackle with violence. And back in California, a magazine offers its readers a supposedly practical guide to “handguns and gun courses, attack-trained dogs, burglar alarm in door and outdoor home surveillance audio and visual, personal-safety devices, self-defense courses and computerized security systems that update homeowners on their mobile devices if fire or other danger is detected.” There is a sick odor in the air. It is the smell of a dying Third Wave civilization. Thank God, I found out Satan is no match for the believer who knows his authority, and position in Jesus Christ! When you are born again, you become the righteousness of God and a joint-heir with Jesus Christ. All that Jesus has is yours. His righteousness is imputed to you. “For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him,” reports 2 Corinthians 5.21. He hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in Heavenly places in Christ Jesus,” reports Ephesians 2.6. When you stand before Satan, he does not see you—he sees the authority of Jesus. The Word says you are the righteousness of God, created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God ordained. We have sung those old unbelieving songs so long that we thought it was true. “Jus a weary pilgrim, struggling through this World, I know not today what tomorrow will bring, shadows, sunshine or rain.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Do not just show up for work. Do not just go through the motions. No, be passionately fulfilling your destiny. That is the way we should be. Have some enthusiasm. Choose to be happy; live with excellence and integrity, and put a spring in your step. Put a smile on your face, and let the World know that you are enjoying the life God has given you! If you want to see God’s favor, do everything with your whole heart. Do it with passion and some fire. Not only will you feel better, but that energy will spread, and soon other people will want what you have. Do you want your life to make an impact? You can change the atmosphere of your home or your entire office with a little bit of enthusiasm. You may have to live or work around people who are prone to being pessimistic, who tend to drag you down. However, do not let them throw mud on your shine. Do not their lack of enthusiasm squelch your passion. If you live with a deadbeat spouse, make a decision tht you are going to be happy and enthusiastic anyway. If you work around people who are always negative, try to overcome that negativity by being optimistic, encouraging, and uplifting. Polish your shine more than usual to make sure the glow does not go out. When everybody else is down and defeated, when you are all alone with nobody nearby to encourage you, simply encourage yourself. Your attitude should be: It does not matter what anybody else does or does not do, I am going to live my life with enthusiasm! I am going to stay on fire. I am going to be aglow. I am going to be passionate about seeing my dreams come to pass. Stay full of zeal. Stay passionate about seeing your dreams come to pass. Stay on fire and aglow. Whatever you do, do it with enthusiasm! The Holy Bible says, “If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land,” reports Isaiah 1.19. Notice, we have to be more than obedient; we must be willing—willing to do the right thing, willing to live with a good attitude and with enthusiasm. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
God does not want you to drag through life defeated and depressed. No matter what you have been through, no matter whose fault it was, no matter how impossible your situation may look, the good news is that God wants to turn it around and restore everything that has been stolen from you. He wants to restore your marriage, your family, your career. God wants to restore your joy and give you a peace and happiness you have never known before. Most of all, He wants to restore your relationship with Him. God wants you to live a satisfied life. God does not want you simply to feel a little better for a few days. No, God is in the long-term restoration business. He wants you to have a life filled with an abundance of joy, an abundance of happiness. God does not want you simply to survive that marriage. God wants to turn it around and restore you with a strong, healthy, rewarding relationship. God does not want your business to merely make it through the murky economic waters. He wants your business to sail and to excel! When God restores, He always brings you out better, improved, increased, and multiplied. He has a vision of total victory for your life! Hold on to that new, enlarged vision of victory that God has given you. Start expecting things to change in your favor. Dare to boldly declare that you are standing strong against the forces of darkness. You will not settle for a life of mediocrity! Raise your level of expectancy. It is our faith that activates the power of God. Let us quit limiting Him with our small-minded thinking and start believing Him for bigger and better things. You can start to day to live a successful life now. Remember, if you obey God and are willing to trust Him, you will have the best this life has to offer—and more! Animals, referred to by John Muir as our horizontal brothers, have long been recognized as essential to our development and well-being. Throughout history they have played a major role in human thought and culture. They inhabit our myth, fables, proverbs, and stories. There is a profound, inescapable need for animals among all peoples, for while animals have inhabited a World without people, we have never lived without the companionship, example, and practical help of animals. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Today, because of the wide-spread pollution of air and water, the rapid expansion of cities, and the destruction of wilderness habitat, we are seeing an imminent and irreversible loss of untamed animal life. We can only guess at the future effect on our children of living in a World in which elephants exist only in zoos, the great whales no longer fill the seas with their song, and the remaining forests are silent. The fact that so many of us are increasingly isolated from the presence of animals may contribute to the growing despair we feel. Direct encounter with animals, meeting them eye to eye on their own ground, evokes a sudden wonder and respect. Their vivid life brings us alive to the source that creates and sustains all beings. Without such encounters we risk losing that part of ourselves which most deeply resonates with nature—the heart of compassion. In safety and in Bliss, may all creature be of a blissful heart. If our greatest loss with the animals have been to lose touch with the reality of their existence, our second loss has been to banish them from our minds. We assume they have nothing to teach us about the predicaments of our existence. We no longer know how to listen to the wisdom of the various four-legged, six-legged, finned and winged creatures that share our life on this Earth. We forget they are ancestors as well as kindred. Long before we existed, they worked out the round of life in thousands of variations, as though anticipating the experiments of human cultures. We must remember how to call upon our powers of empathy and compassion. We are asked to awaken to the plight of our animal relatives, to let their beauty and power come alive for us once more. Humanity has long been a pandemic on this Earth, on nature, and on the animals. We are members of a human family and society, but the presence of animal “others” enlarges our perception of the self beyond the city and opens us inward to that ground of being where live the lizard and monkey, the fish and the bear. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
These are our relations. These are, like us, offspring of the great mystery, and necessary parts of a balanced and living whole. Dear Lord in Heaven, thank You, Father, for giving me this amazing, incredible life, and for making it possible to enjoy every part of it, even the tough times. Thank You for being my Future; I know You have good things in store. I will praise You now and forever for all that You have done for me! O Lord, God of our fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, keep this forever in the inward thoughts of the heart of Thy people, and direct their heart unto Thee, for Thou being merciful, full of compassion, forgives iniquity and destroyest not; yea, many a time Thou turnest anger away. For Thou, O Lord, art good, and ready to forgive, and abounding in mercy unto all who call upon Thee. Thy righteousness is everlasting and Thy Law is truth. Thou wilt show faithfulness to Jacob and mercy to Abraham, as Thou hast promised unto our fathers from the days of old. Blessed be the Lord who day by day bears our burden. He is the God of Jacob be a stronghold unto us. O Lord of hosts, happy is the man that trusteth in Thee. Save, O Lord; O King, answer us on the day when we call. Blessed be our God hath created us for His glory, and hath separated us from them that go astray by giving us the Torah of truth, thus planting everlasting life in our midst. May He opened our hearts unto His Law, and with love and reverence may we do His will and serve Him with a perfect heart that we may not labour in vain, nor bring forth confusion. May it be Thy will, O Lord, our God and God of our fathers, that we keep Thy statutes in the World to come. May my soul sing Thy praise and not be silent; O Lord my God, I will give thanks unto Thee, forever. Blessed is the man that trusteth in Thee, O Lord, and whose trust Thou art. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord is an everlasting Rock. And they that know Thy name put their trust in Thee; Thou hast not forsaken them that seek Thee. Thou, O Lord, desirest for the sake of Thy righteousness to make the Torah great and glorious. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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We Are Endangered, Our Way of Life is Threatened, We Must Avenge Our Loss!
One thing I know: kindness is more important than wisdom. To know others is to know wisdom, to know oneself—enlightenment. “Peace!” was the watchword of the World into which baby George Baker was born in 1879, in Rockville, Maryland USA. The founder of the USA’s most successful twentieth-century Christian celibate communities was the son of former slaves whose struggling family needed even the tiny wages he earned as a part-time child labourer. George also attended school long enough to become an avid reader and a lifelong devotee of his teachers’ dogma of punctuality, cleanliness, temperance, and hard work. Rockville’s Jerusalem Methodist Church was George’s other transformative experience. Its African America lay preachers inspired him and its tightly knit community embraced him, protecting him against those who sneered at his slight stature: a mere five foot two when fully grown. When he was a teenager, George’s mother died, at 480 pounds “the largest woman in the county, is not the state,” the local newspaper noted. Soon after Nancy Baker’s death, George left home for Baltimore. In a permanent break with his past, he renounced all family ties and set out alone in pursuit of his personal truths. Baltimore taught the newcomer about urban-style brute labour, poverty, unionism, and racism as destructive as the lynch mods of rural Maryland. However, God had not abandoned the wicked city. George took refuge in its storefront churches, where he molded his oratorical powers and deepened his religious commitment. Gradually he developed a theology that combined African-American spirituality with current beliefs about the power is optimistic thinking, achieving oneness with God, embracing celibacy, and obliterating not merely racism but race itself, a construct he came to believe did not exist. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
George Baker’s intense religiosity led to a mystical experience in which he spoke in tongues and reached a new level of being. Afterward, he began to call himself the Messenger. By 1907, the Messenger believed he was the son of God and tht his destiny was to spread God’s word to the unenlightened and unredeemed. Once again, the God of celibacy had chosen as His representative one of the reviled, this time a man from a people recently delivered from slavery, still ground down by hatred and fear, habit and history, the might of unmajestic law and the forces of repressive order. The Messenger’s antiracist mission sent him south, to destroy Jim Crowism—“if it costs me my life,” he declared. It well could have—lynching, often accompanied by castration, was a common enough fate for unlucky or unwise Black men. Ignoring these dangers, the Messenger traveled to Georgia. There, the electrifying itinerant preacher exhorted his audiences to follow a loving God who had created a World where gender and race were meaningless labels. How were his listeners to experience this World, to defy the illusory existence of gender and race? Through the power of thought, the Messenger taught, for thought, clarified through celibacy, could overcome the terrible obstacles that race and gender created. This was a unique and stern message gently told: transform society by conquering your own most basic urges. In challenging the notion of race, the Messenger struck at the very foundations of American social structure. Here was a Black preacher, handsome and adored by his congregations, so scrupulous in his personal chastity that no undercover investigator or dissident follower would ever find a particle of evidence to suggest even a single lapse. The actual practice of and primacy of celibacy in the Messenger’s teachings strongly suggested that he was an honest man. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The Messenger’s devotees found his strictures against pleasures of the flesh unusual and exacting. However, to overburdened women, celibacy had the same enormous appeal Mother Ann Lee had encountered generations earlier. Before long, many wives attempted to break off pleasures of the flesh relations. Several even left their homes and moved in with the celibate Messenger. Suddenly, through celibacy, the Messenger had liberated the women in his impoverished commune. Most of these women were exhausted from lifetimes of drudgery, prolapsed uteruses from too frequent childbearing, and subservience to their “so-called males”—for the Messenger, remember, taught the gender, like race, did not exist. Frustrated husbands and African-American religious leaders banded together against the diminutive but handsome preacher. He had cast spells, they charged, and cause their wives and mothers to lose their minds. “If something was not done, the whole community would be crazed.” The police were brought in and the Messenger’s Black male accusers backed them up. Their combined strength overpowered the phalanx of enraged women protecting the Messenger and he was thrown into jail. The Messenger flourished. Visitors swarmed to his cell and converted en masse, even Caucasian men who seemed to be as wild over him as the African Americans. In segregated, small-town Georgia, this was a near miracle and strong testimony to the Messenger’s sincerity and charisma. Afterward, the Messenger led his mainly female followers throughout the South on a punishing, five-years trek of proselytizing. Finally, in 1917, with the handful of faithful who continued to travel with him, he settled down in Brooklyn. He also married the most devoted woman in his entourage, tall, stately Penniniah, who lived with him in obviously contented celibacy until her death. #RandolphHarri 3 of 23
Why would this virgin bachelor who preached the sanctity of celibacy get married? Of course, skeptics questioned whether the marriage was, indeed celibate, but all evidence indicates it was. It seems likely that, from the Messenger’s perspective, Mother Penniniah fended off seductive women attracted to the larger-than-life (figuratively if not literally) leader. She also lent credibility to her husband’s mission and, with the power of her own religious fervor, attracted many new disciples to the former bachelor’s movement. About this time, the Messenger adopted a new name, the Reverend Major Jealous Divine, implying religious and military authority, the jealousy of the biblical God, and his own divinity. His flock shortened this to Father Divine and chanted, “God is here on Earth today. Father Divine is his name.” Penniniah, of course, became Mother Divine. Soon after, Father Divine scraped together $700 plus a mortgage and purchased a Sayville, Long Island, property to house his commune. To maintain it, he established the Busy Bee employment agency, which furnished his neighbours with trustworthy hired help made up of his own people. In this commune, everyone worked with evenings and Sundays devoted to religious services. Even Father Divine tended chickens and gardened on top of his onerous pastoral duties. The difference between the new and the old way of life, however, was through his savvy management, Father Divine provided the Busy Bees with lodgings in a fine home, generous quantities of food, security from all want. On their own, as they well knew, they could never have achieved this. Like the old Shaker communes, Father Divine’s household was rigidly structured and monitored to ensure strict celibacy, devout religious observance, hard work, and shared prosperity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Smoking, swearing, drugs, and alcohol were banned. The house was “heaven” and Father Divine was “God.” His followers were “angels” who addressed each other as “brother” and “sister.” Each angel had a single room—surely a luxury for most—with men and women separated except when religion or business required their collaboration. As in Shaker communities, with their vitriolic, self-righteous lyrics, language in Heaven was also regulated. However, Father Divine forbade his angels to use negative words and banned (rather than trumpeted) hell, Devil,and even hello, which he believed was a corruption of hell. He originated today’s wide spread greeting “Peace!” and the mantra “It is wonderful,” which dispelled negative ideas and conjured up optimistic thoughts that would lead, one day, to a peaceful World. Like the Shakers, Father Divine welcomed parents and their children, though he believed the latter were products of the sin of pleasures of the flesh that drained the body of “spiritual energy.” Also like the Shakers, he required his disciples to renounce Earthly kinships, including marriage, and substitute fraternal kinships with his other angels. Like Mother Ann, Father Divine devised mechanism to enforce celibacy by providing acceptable outlets for sublimating pleasures of the flesh. Not surprisingly, given Nancy Baker’s fatal obesity, her son was so obsessed with food that he used it as a took of ministry. The tasty fare at his bulging tables consoled, nursed, and converted, and his “Holy Communion banquets,” modeled on the Last Supper, were legendary. Decades earlier, he had inaugurated them in the South as potlucks. Later, they nourished overworked, underpaid Africa-Americans who packed into his dining room in such numbers that he had to host multiple sittings rather than turn anyone away. On the weekends, Father Divine often spent twelve hours daily hosting them. The banquets also plumped up his angels and ensured that at least one of their Earthly appetites was sated. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
For Father Divine eating was a consuming passion. Twice weekly he weighed the angels and chided any who lost weight. This, it would appear, was difficult to do. Consider a typical, Depression-era Holy Communion banquet menu: macaroni, rice, potatoes, peas, tomatoes, turnips, baked beans, turkey and pork chops, corn bread, biscuits, Graham bread, cake, pie, peaches, tea, milk, and Postum. After these feats, the stuffed diners burst into song and prayer, witnessing and confessing, shouting and dancing and speaking in tongues. Like Mother Ann, Father Divine favoured these exhausting and emotional outpourings, which obviously served to dissipate any erotic feelings that gluttony had not obliterated. (Even though gluttony is also a sin.) Father Divine’s commune had at least a couple of scandals. After an initial period of tolerance, the neighbour’s decided they hated living close to a large, pulsating community of Black people. They went on the attack, beginning with false rumors. They only actual scandal involved “John the Revelator,” a California millionaire disciple, who lured a seventeen-year-old he christened “Virgin Mary” into the movement, seduced her, then confessed his evildoing. Father Divine immediately expelled him and separated him from the young woman. Yet despite Father Divine’s overwhelming probity, the Heavenly movement was tarred by gossipmongers skeptical about the dapper little preacher’s personal chastity. His neighbours’ hostility, coinciding with an intensive crusade in New York City, finally drove Father Divine to relocate to welcoming Harlem. There an explosion of disciples recast his sect into a movement, as new angels replicated his commune in other location and baptized his crusade the Peace Mission. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Ironically, the Peace Mission’s expansion into business, and from East to West Coast, precipitated its decline. Its mainstay continued to be less affluent Blacks, though a small number of wealthy Whites also joined. One problem was that the public vastly overestimated the movement’s membership, making Father Divine more influential than the true number of his followers warranted. In consequence, the Mission was increasingly drawn into political debates and destructive ideological battles with other Black movements that deplored Father Divine’s steadfast refusal to segregation. Yet how could he, when a fundamental part of his creed was that race did not exist? By the end of the Depression, the Peace Mission was restructured as a church. Its membership shrank and new orders were born. A flamboyant California branch sprouted the Rosebubs, young virgin females who swore eternal celibacy, wore uniforms emblazoned with Vs for virginity, and celebrated Father Divine in giddy song. The male Crusaders, though not necessarily virginal, pledged themselves to celibacy and to Father Divine’s theology. However, the Rosebuds’ subservience—they strove to be submissive, meek, and sweet; they have hearts where Christ alone is heard to speak”—and the Crusaders’ militancy clashed with Father Divine’s genderless teaching. They were celibate but far from egalitarian. By 1943, when Penniniah died, Father Divine and his churches were in free fall. In 1946, he made the situation worse by marrying Edna Rose Ritchings, aka Sweet Angel, a pretty Caucasian, twenty-one-year-old Canadian. Father Divine justified this risky adventure by claiming that the new Mother Divine was Penniniah and the Virgin Mary reincarnated, and he likened their union to “the Marriage of CHRIST to HIS Church.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Ah, Father Divine! At sixty-seven, he was suddenly seized by irresistible longings and reincarnated in the skin of the young George Baker so long ago shucked off. Yet from all accounts, this second marriage was as successful as the first, with the new Mother Divine thriving on the same celibate regimen as her predecessor. And celibate she was, for Father Divine preempted suspicion about any possible pleasures of the flesh by assigning a Black angel to monitor her and presumably be a living witness to his Heavenly wife’s intact virginity. From a larger perspective, its leader’s questionable remarriage and, in 1965, his death certainly did not help the Peace Mission. However, the root causes of its decline lay elsewhere. By then, in a new era of permissiveness with pleasures of the flesh, widely available birther control, and the civil rights movement, celibacy was a harder sell except to those who could be convinced it was a moral imperative. The Peace Mission’s communal life seemed rigorous and restrictive, even bizarre. Its insistence on severing the parent-child bond has serious psychological and judicial implications. And though he was very old, Father Divine made the tactical error, nineteen years after he married again, of anointing his untested young wife, rather than a well-groomed protégé, to head his shriveled church. Today the Peace Mission sighs on in anachronistic relics, including Mother Divine’s mansion. Another is Philadelphia’s Divine Tracy Hotel, which segregates guests in gendered floors and prohibits tobacco, alcohol, and swearing. Women, in obligatory dress and hosiery, and men, in pants and shirts, mingle together only in the lobby. In the Divine Tracy Hotel, only the most determined guests can avoid a celibate sojourn. It is an odd but fitting monument to a movement that, at one time, ushered thousands of weary and oppressed converts into similar Heavens on Earth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
America’s Shakers and Father Divine’s angels had much in common, and he proudly acknowledged his debt to Mother Anne Lee’s theology. Most important of their shared tenets was the pleasures of the flesh were the root of human evil and therefore celibacy was essential in a righteous life. Their notion of celibacy stretched further than mere sexual negativism. It allowed them to redefine gender differences, so they effectively offered feminist lifestyles to their followers. Unlike cloisters, however, their communes included men and women, and Father Divine’s Heavens were located in the World into which most angels trooped out to work. Just as important, in America’s racially troubled society, celibacy defused the minefield of interracial pleasures of the flesh. It permitted African American Shakers to head communes and African American angels to live alongside European American ones, all under the guidance of a Black leaders who dismissed race as a meaningless designation and celebrated chaste marriage, first with an African American woman, and them with a Canadian European woman. Both Mother Less and Father Divine proselytized among people oppressed by an unfair World and offered them safe haven in a new, righteous one. They taught tht celibacy was a great moral good that required the sacrifice of all blood ties, including children, who became the responsibility of the commune rather than individual parents. The rewards for joining either sect were immediate and substantial. Women won unheard-of equality, while hard work, discipline, and obedience provided collective material comfort, security, and the camaraderie of the spiritual fraternity that replaced blood relationships. Mother Ann and father Divine adopted remarkably similar strategies to enforce celibacy. They segregated men and women, permitted them to mix only in controlled situations. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
They addressed the need to sublimate passions of pleasures of the flesh through rituals of frenzied dancing and singing, speaking in tongues, public confessions, and near-hysterical worship. They even regulated language to promote their sectarian metaphors. Above all, Mother Lee and Father Divine exemplified the celibate life they demanded of others and never succumbed to temptation. Ironically, the twice married but never bedded Father Divine faulted Mother Ann for having once had a life involving pleasures of the flesh. That she had terminated it, after divine revelation taught her that pleasures of the flesh were the root of all evil, was not sufficient. From the vantage point of his own sinlessness, the virgin Father Divine judged the long-celibate Mother Ann and found her wanting. He believed her pleasures of the flesh experience in marriage, though short-lived and unwilling, had deprived her of immortality. However, if it is not taught by their parents as being necessary, it is rare that someone would adopt celibacy and remain a virgin before having a divine revelation because everyone else teachers that pleasures of the flesh are natural, normal, and the thing to do. So it takes one to mature and establish their own values after they are socially engineered in a particular manner. Perhaps Father Divine was trying to do that very thing, stop people from engaging in pleasures of the flesh and keep their virginity and stay celibate, which is why he called out Mother Ann. Shakerism and the Peace Mission were not failed experiments, though neither outlasted its founder for more than a few decades. What has endured are their legacies of a courageous celibacy that dared to challenge society’s underpinnings of women’s inequality and racial subjugation. The illiterate immigrant women and the disempowered African American man defied their social realities and bestowed on their followers the equality and personal dignity the law denied. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Celibacy, combined with highly structured discipline and hard work, was briefly the answer for thousands of aliened, mostly unaffluent Americans. However, what turns people from Christian morality to secular ethics is the loss of the reality of grace, the power to accept the unacceptable person, and the turn to moralistic preaching centered on religious and moral law. Yet unless principles for right action are rooted in being and thus in some religious depth to existence, one can never escape relativism. The reality of grace is the principle of morality rooted in being itself. Still, modern moral philosophers have insisted that morality is autonomous, unrelated to religion. The question of what is right and good must be determined on grounds other than appeal to God and God’s will because one can always ask whether obedience to the divine will is itself good. Yet to ask that question is to demand a standard outside of the will of God. Ethics is thus autonomous, independent of religion. Second, in reaction to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberal theologians, from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Albrecht Ritschl, Wilhelm Herrmann, and the Social Gospelers, who often granted the autonomy of morals, many twentieth-century theologians have attempted to reassert the distinctiveness of Christian ethics. This was done, as in the case of Karl Barth, through the revealed Word and command of God or, more recently, by appeal to the distinct practices, beliefs, and narratives of the Christian community insofar as these constitute a distinctive way of life. In making these arguments, theologians claim that the validity of Christian ethics can be established only internal to Christian beliefs or God’s commands. Once again, the connection between religion and general moral reflection seems cut. However, one can find graceless moralism, ethical relativism, and the reduction of reason to merely technical rationality. The moral aim is becoming a person within a community of persons. This aim is essentially religious. The modern philosophical attempt to sever the connection between religion and morality is foiled at the outside. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
However, by the same token, the demand that this places upon the theologian is not to establish the particularity of the Christian moral vision, but rather to show how Christian faith answers the moral aim. We must relate properly ethical thinking to systematic theology. A thought experiment. I am in the World alone. I have always been alone. Nothing and no one to protect me. Just my wits and my strength and such weapons as I find or contrive. In the driving wind the freezing rain is like arrows. I find a cave—a cave, I discover, that has been found already by a bear. If I can, I will drive him out. I do not think: This is not fair, it belongs to him. I do not wonder: Who has the greater need, he or I? I drive him out. I am hungry; a fawn comes within range of my stone/ I do not ponder contending rights, do not weigh the fawn’s life against my own; I kill. I am warm; I am full, the day is over, I lie down to sleep. I keep my club close to hand. One day I encounter another man. I cannot read his gestures or understand his strange sounds. I give him a wide berth, go on my own way. He follows. I make threatening gestures, he retreats. At night I do not sleep well. How close is he? What does he intend? The next day, at my bidding, he comes closer. I kill him. For the solitary savage, should ever a creature have existed, there is no guilt, no right and no wrong. Years pass. Millennia. Now I live in a community. There are thirty or forty of us. We hunt together, sit around the fire together, are frightened as one by the evil spirits of the forest. Withing this group I do not kill, do not steal, do not deceive. I am no longer free, I live within limits, I have become moral. Another group moves into our territory. They are fishing in our streams, killing our game. One of our men is found with an arrow in his back. We lament, we wail, we rage. Our chief calls a council. We are endangered, he tells us; our way of life is threatened; we must avenge our loss. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
We beat our drums to drive away our fear, paint horizontal stripes of red and white on our bodies. At midnight we set forth. In silence and stealth we approach the sleeping camp. We drink strong spirits. Two boys with torches set fire to the straw huts. As the occupants rush out, silhouetted by the flames, we let loose our arrows, our spears. When our enemies are in blind panic, we fall upon them, club them to death. And totally destroy the village and everyone in it and violate their ways of life. On the march home we are content, relaxed, fulfilled. We sing, we laugh, we are triumphant. The members of the group have become moral, they live within limits, while the group itself there is no good and no evil. Morality is conservative, aims to preserve what is valuable in life. Meaning, therefore, must be antecedent to morality. For meaning establishes value. If life is without meaning, there is nothing worth preserving: All is equal, anything goes. What binds us together in a community is shared beliefs. Vital yet unnoticed, like the air we breathe, they constitute the meaning of life, tell us how to interpret our experience, determine what we experience. With them we grasp the World, make sense of what happens to us, find our place, arrange our lives into know patterns. We feel at home; we know how to live. They constitute our scheme of things. However, something is left over. Something of bereavement or pain or mystery is unaccounted for, experience of which we cannot make sense, with which we cannot come to terms. This is the margin of terror. If we are loyal to the received wisdom, we look away, pretend it does not exist, is of no importance, a deviation, a neurosis perhaps; experience is falsified, but the scheme of things is not impugned. The received wisdom spreads it sheltering umbrellas. If one is loyal to deviant experience, to the pain and the mystery, one is apostate to the common faith and hence estranged from those who live by it, which is pretty much everybody. Once finds oneself alone in a desert where one’s specialness is scant comfort. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Nothing stays. The World would fling us away, spins like a carousel. Do you know? Do you feel it, this losing of grip? The received interpretations no longer work, do not fit, do not take hold. We cannot grasp the World. Some people do not hear the screaming; the old fictions still work. Some hear it keenly: The chalk has worn down, the fingernail drags across an endless blackboard, the sky is empty. In times of peace most people find it possible to believe, at lest nominally, in the received wisdom. In times of great social upheaval—the Napoleonic Wars, the Russian Revolution—the received wisdom is shattered for everyone. The World is lost—because it was those shared beliefs, now overturned and discredited, that constituted the World. Our holiest fictions designate what is right and what is wrong, constitute a scheme of things that redeems the way things are. The way things are is the will to power of groups. The scheme of things conceals the ways of power behind a lofty and glittering façade. The whole system hands on the efficacy of images and words, the keeping of promises, the observance of convention. The reign of order which is that of symbols and signs, always results in fairly general disarmament, beginning with visible arms and gradually spreading to the will. Swords get thinner and vanish, characters get rounder. The age when fact was dominant fades imperceptibly away. Under the names of foresight and tradition, the future and the past, which are imaginary perspectives, dominate and restrain the present. However, the general disbarment is only within the system of order. The brutality and barbarism of the individual have but passed to the collective. The sword of the citizen gets thinner, vanishes; the sword of the state gets longer and sharper. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Parts serve the whole. The organism grows larger and more powerful by virtue of finding better and better ways to exploit its constituents. Slaves may be made to man the oars and drive the galley, but it requires the constant attention of a slave master cracking the whip. However, if the slaves can be converted to a faith in the ship and its mission, then no slave master will be needed—he will now be free to help with the cannon—while the ship slices forward ever fast, with more power, more dangerous to its enemies. There is no alternative to power, no other position—not Christianity nor the Golden Rule nor brotherly love nor nonviolence; not self-sacrifice nor the turning of the other cheek. For all these various abnegations of power by parts of a whole are, unwittingly, in the service of increased power to the whole; and the whole morality created by such renunciations is used by the aggregate to increase the power with which it then pursues more power. Good and evil come into existence as defined by power and are shaped to protect power. They filter down from rulers, magistrates, educators, from bishops, priests, and Sunday school teachers to parents, who shape the conscience of children, imprint the limits, instill the guilt. Order and safety are maintained; citizens need not bear arms; violence is proscribed, banished beyond borders. (More important than gun control is violence control and self-control.) And so it comes about that the modern state is thought to be a moral state, even a Christian state, the source and the defender of morality, of civilization, of high culture. However, the morality that is here, rightly, ascribed to the state is internal, the lawfulness of cells within an organism. In its conduct with other states, and with those barbarians beyond its borders, the state is a killer. And utterly self-righteous in its exterminations. The state claiming morality is like a murderer claiming innocence by pointing out that his hands and feet moved lawfully during the performance of the crime. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
The state does not intend itself to become moral; it requires morality of its subjects as the necessary basis of its own amoral power, of its continued ability to conduct international brigandage abroad and the torture of political prisoners at home. The unselfishness of individuals empowers the selfishness of states. The selflessness of patriots becomes the arrogance of nations. Morality constricts and diminishes the life of the individual as its strengths and enlarges the life of the collective. The cohesiveness of the group, achieved by the morality and lawfulness of its constituents, enables the group to become larger and stronger. The morality of the individual thus has survival value for the amora collective and, insofar as the safety of the individual depends upon the power of the collective, also for the individual. However, the group can never, as a group, govern itself, cannot organize and exploit its potential power. For this, leaders are required, leaders with a vision of how the group may become even stronger. If only certain individuals within the morally organized collective are themselves immoral, and break the rules in pursuit of personal power, such leaders can appear. So the greatest chance of survival falls, paradoxically, to that collective which has achieved solidarity by mortality and, at the same time, contains within itself a leaven of opportunists who will exploit that morality for personal power. Let us go on to the Occupational Outlook of those who are verbally bright. Among this group, simply because they cannot help asking more general questions—exempli gratia, about utility—the problem of finding man’s work is harder, and their disillusion is more poignant. He explained to her why it was hard to find a satisfactory job of work to do. He had liked working with the power drill, testing the rocky envelope of the shore, but then the employers asked him to take a great oath of loyalty. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
“What!” cried Rosalind. “Do you have scruples about telling a convenient fib?” “No, I do not. However, I felt uneasy about the sanity of the director asking me to swear to opinions on such complicated questions when my job was digging with a power drill. I cannot work with a man who might suddenly had a wild fit.” “Why do you not get a job driving one of the big trucks along here?” “I do not like what is in the boxes,” said Horatio sadly. “It could just as well drop in the river—and I would make mistakes and drop it there.” “Is it had stuff?” “No, just useless. It takes the heart out of me to work at something useless and I begin to make mistakes. I do not mind putting profits in somebody’s pocket—but the job also has to be useful for something.” “Why do you not go to the woods and be a lumberjack?” “No! they chop down the trees just to print off the New York Times!” The more intelligent worker’s “indifference” is likely to appear more nakedly as profound resignation, and his cynicism may sharpen to outright racketeering. “Teaching,” says the Handbook, “is the largest of the professions.” So suppose our now verbally bright young man chooses for teacher, in the high school system or, by exception, in the elementary schools if he understands that the elementary grades are the vitally important ones and require the most ability to tech well (and of course they have less prestige). Teaching is necessary and useful work; it is real and creative, for it directly confronts an important subject matter, the children themselves; it is obviously self-justifying; and it is ennobled by the arts and sciences. Those who practice teaching do not for the most part succumb to cynicism or indifference—the children are too immediate and real for the teachers to become callous—but, most of the school systems being what they are, can teacher fail to come to suffer first despair and then deep resignation? Resignation occurs psychologically as follows: frustrated in essential actions, they nevertheless cannot quit in anger, because the task is necessary; so the anger turns inward and is felt as resignation. (Naturally, the resigned teacher may then put on a happy face and keep very busy.) #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
For the job is carried on under impossible conditions of overcrowding and saving public money. Not that there is not enough social wealth, but first things are not put first. Also, the school system has spurious aims. It soon becomes clear that the underlying aims are to relieve the home and keep the kids quiet; or suddenly, the aim is to produce physicists. Timid supervisors, bigoted clerics, and ignorant school boards forbid real teaching. The emotional release and the pleasures of the flesh expression of the children are taboo. A commercially debauched popular culture makes learning disesteemed. The academic curriculum is mangled by the demands of reactionaries, liberals, and demented warriors. Progressive methods are emasculated. Attention to each case is out of the questions, and all the children—the bright, the average, and the dull—are systematically intellectually disabled one way or another, while the teacher’s hands are tired. Naturally the pay is low—for the work is hard, useful, and of public concern, all three of which qualities tend to bring lower pay. It is alleged that the low pay is why there is a shortage of teachers and why the best do not choose the profession. My guess is that the best avoid it because of the certainty of miseducating. Nor are the best wanted by the system, for they are not safe. Bertrand Russel was rejected by New York’s City College and would not have been accepted in a New York grade school. What we see here are the outlines, therefore, of a wholly new way of life, affecting not only individuals but the planet as well. The new civilization sketched here can hardly be termed a utopia. It will be agitated by deep problems, sone of which we will explore in the future. Problems of self and community. Political problems. Problems of justice, equity, and morality. Problems with the new economy (and especially the relationship between employment, welfare, and presumption). All these and many more will arouse fighting passions. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
However, the Fourth Wave is also no “anti-utopia.” It is not 1984 writ large nor Brave New World brought to life. Both these brilliants books—and hundred of derivative science fiction stories—paint a future based on highly centralized, bureaucratized, and standardized societies, in which individual differences are eradicated. We are now heading in exactly the opposite direction. While the Fourth Wave carries with it a deep challenge for humanity, from ecological threats to danger of nuclear terrorism and electronic fascism, it is not simply a nightmarish linear extension of industrialism. We glimpse here instead the emergence of what might be called a “pratopia”—neither the best nor the worst of all possible Worlds, but one that is both practical and preferable to the one we had. Unlike a utopia, a practopia is not free of disease, political nastiness, and bad manners. Unlike most utopias, it is not static or frozen in unreal perfection. Nor is it reversionary, modeling itself on some imagine ideal of the past. Conversely, a practopia does not embody the crystallized evil of a utopia turned inside out. It is not ruthlessly antidemocratic. It is not inherently militarist. It does not reduce its citizens to faceless uniformity. It does not destroy its neighbours and degrade its environment. In short, a practopia offers a beneficial, even a revolutionary alternative, yet lies within the range of the realistically attainable. Fourth Wave civilization, in this sense, is precisely that: a practopian future. One can glimpse in it a civilization that makes allowance for individual differences, and embraces (rather than suppresses) racial, regional, religious, and subcultural variety. A civilization built in considerable measure around the home. A civilization that is not frozen in amber but pulsing with innovation, yet which is also capable of providing enclaves of relative stability for those who need or want them. A civilization no longer required to pour its best energies into marketization. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
A civilization capable of directing great passion into art. A civilization facing unprecedented historical choices—about genetics and evolution, to choose a single example—and inventing new ethical or moral standards to deal with such complex issues. A civilization, finally, that is at least potentially democratic and humane, in better balance with the biosphere and no longer dangerously dependent on exploitative subsidies from the rest of the World. Hard work to achieve, but not impossible. Flowing together in grand confluence, today’s changes thus point to a workable countercivilization, an alternative to the increasingly obsolete and unworkable industrial system. They point, in a word, to practopia. Life brings humans what they need, which is sometimes what one desires but at other times what one fears. The modern World badly needed a shake-up, and got one. However, it received only what it deserved. The war descended on it in accordance with Universal Law. When nation arouse against nation, it was only an end-expression of the innate selfishness which had been actuating them. We must expect such situations, for they are the natural and inevitable consequence of all that has happened before. Unless the war has brought a vivid realization of the truth of law of compensation, it has not brought any spiritual progress. However, it is too much at this time to expect the modern World to understand the cause of its tribulations. What valuable ethical and psychological significances, what striking illustrations of the inexorable law of retribution, could be drawn from the War! The evolutionary pressure upon humanity is not to give up its fratricidal warfare, although it will eventuate in that, but to give up the aggressive selfishness in which such warfare has its roots. If the nations cannot settle their differences peacefully it is because the ego in them is too strong, the passions too violent, and the antagonisms too blind. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
The differences must be faced on deeper than physical levels, and the refusal to do this on the grounds that such are idealistic and not practical results in superficial and not true considerations and results. How hard it is to get people to draw accurate conclusions from their experience one can read from the annals of history. Again and again the people of one nation, race, or religion who have been subjected to persecution by a different one, have failed to behave justly and tolerantly when the turning wheel of destiny put them later into power. The gusts of hate or anger or greed which blow humans off their mental balance, blow them eventually to war. In spite of the spiritual messages which have been given to humankind by the great prophets, the savagery of war still continues to show the strength of the animal in humans. If their compassion for helpless animas is so small that they will not give up fighting each other, by what right do they call upon God to show compassion toward them and stop war? The World war was not only the consequence of the desecration of the Egyptian graves, of course. It was much more a consequence of the evil thoughts and feelings which exit in human’s hearts and of the spiritual ignorance which exists in their minds. The desecration was itself only one of the symptoms of that ignorance. Evil desires and unjust acts were the seed: the horrors of war were the fruit. The awful retribution which fell upon whole nations was impelled and guided by the power behind the eternal an immutable law of consequences. Up to a certain point, it could have been modified and even prevented, but beyond this point nothing could annul its appointed course. Let us blame none but ourselves. This holocaust was needed in order to bring humanity fully to its senses, to purge its materialistic atheism of its pride, and to show it how hollow and hypocritical was its façade of civilization. When we penetrate these social, economic, political, educational, and national problems to rock bottom, we find that they are really ethical problems. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Virgil, the Roman, dreamt of Universal Peace. Many today entertain the same dream but at the same time they are contradicted by piled-up evidences of the violence in human nature, the strife engendered by blind self-interest, the killing instinct that is a heritage from the animal. So long as egos come into conflict with one another, so long will nation do the same. We are to expect the brutal carnage and concentrated massacre of war until and unless we are impelled to renounce it at last as a method of removing affronts to justice. Be open and honest and tell the whole truth. Learn to listen to your conscience. God put that inside of you so you would have an inner rule by which to know right from wrong. When you start to compromise, you will hear that alarm go off in your conscience. Do not ignore it. Do what you know in your heart is the right thing. Is somebody watching you? Oh, yes; people are watching, and so is your Heavenly Father. Live this day to please Him, and you will be pleased with yourself. “Never be lazy in your work, but serve the Lord enthusiastically,” reports Romans 12.11. Make a decision that you are not going to live another day without the joy of the Lord in your life; without love, peace, and passion; without being excited about your life. And understanding that you do not have to have something extraordinary happening in your life to be excited. You may not live in the perfect environment or have the perfect job or the perfect marriage, but you can still leave each day with enthusiasm. Wherever you are in life, make the most of it and be the best that you can be. Do your work with such excellence that others will be impressed with your God merely by observing you excellent work ethic. We should be so excited, and so full of joy that other people will want what we have. In other words, are you drawing people to God because of your joy, your friendliness, your enthusiasm, your attitude of faith? If you want to point people to God, or simply to a better way of living, have some enthusiasm and be excited about life. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Dear Lord in Heaven, please help me to do the right thing whether anyone is watching or not. I know you see my actions, and beyond that, You know the motives of my heart. I want my words and deeds to be pleasing to you. Please let my enthuaism for life be contagious; may I live in such a way that causes other people to want to know You and how they can discover a different, better quality of life now and forever. Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you, we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings, we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky, and say thank you. We are standing by the water looking out in difference direction, back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging, after funerals we are saying thank you, After the news of the pandemic, we are saying thank you. Whether or not we knew those who died, we are saying thank you. Looking up from tables we are saying thank you. In a culture up to its chin in shame, we are saying thank you. Living in the stench it has chosen, we are saying thank you. Over telephones, we are saying thank you. In doorways and in the backs of cares and in elevators, remembering the wars and the police at the back door, and the beatings on stairs, we are saying thank you. In the banks that use us, we are saying thank you. With the crooks in the office with the rich and fashionable unchanged we go on saying thank you. With the animals dying around us, our feelings we are saying thank you. With our forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives, we are saying thank you. With the words going out like cells of a brain, with the cities growing over us like the Earth, we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening, we are saying thank you. We are saying thank you and waving, dark though it is. And wind lifted me up, and I heard behind me a mighty chorus proclaiming: Blessed be the glory of the Lord everywhere. [Then a wind lifted me up, and I heard behind me the mighty moving sound of those who uttered praises and said: Blessed be the glory of the Lord from the place of His abode.] The Lord shall reign for ever and ever. [The kingdom of the Lord is established forever and to all eternity.] #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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I’ve got a heart that hollers when my Cresleigh Home is not close to me. But when I am near my Cresleigh Homes it sorta follows that there isn’t a lovelier Heaven or a bubblier place to be.
Randolph Harris II International 