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He Covenanted with the Devil Until He Should Arrive to the Age of Sixty Years!
He might be living, or he might be dead. There came no word of him, or from him. I was fond enough of her to be satisfied with this—he never disturbed us. While there were many individual acts of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, there was never an attempt or plot to make witchcraft a formal religion which would supplant Christianity. Yet we need not conclude that William Baker and his fellow-confessors were lying. It is probable that they, like the afflicted girls, were hysterics subject to hallucination. Certainly that is the conclusion to be drawn from Thomas Brattle’s opinion of them in his “Letter”: “my faith is strong concerning them that they are deluded, imposed upon, and under the influence of some evil spirit, and therefore unfit to be evidences either against themselves or anyone else.” Mr. Brattle wrote this in October 1692, when Massachusetts was retuning to stability. However, at the height of the excitement confessions like Mr. Baker’s seemed convincing enough. For one thing, they had a curious precision: he did not say there were about three hundred witches in the country but “about three hundred and sever”; he did not say there were about a hundred young wizards at the mustering of the Satanic militia but “about an hundred five.” However, what made these confessions most believable was that they offered a simple and comprehensive explanation for all the frightening events at Salem, at a time when explanations were not easy to discover. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
There is also some testimony which remains ambiguous even today. Samuel Wardwell, for example, at his preliminary examination confessed himself a wizard. He had begun, he said, with white magic, “with telling of fortunes which sometimes came to pass” And, he said, “he used also when any creature came into his field to bid the Devil to take it, and it may be the Devil took advantage of him by that.” Eventually he had signed a pact: “He covenanted with the Evil until he should arrive to the age of sixty years.” He had renounced this confession at his trial, saying that he had made it, but that he had belied himself. He added that it was all one: “he knew he should die for it whether he owned it or no.” Ordinarily one would simply accept his renunciation. However, there are several puzzling circumstances here. For one thing, it was not all one whether he maintained or renounced his confession. People who maintained their confessions were not being brought to trail, much less executed. For another, at least a part of his confession was true; he had dabbled in the occult for some time, telling a great many fortunes, and boasting that he could make animals come to him when he wished. Finally, Mr. Wardwell was executed. However, in 1693, when the panic had subsided and the climate of opinion totally changed, there were three people who held to their confessions. Two of them were women long thought to be “senseless and ignorant creatures.” The third was Mr. Wardwell’s wife. All of these circumstances are puzzling and some of them are suspicious. However, on the other hand, there is no evidence to support his confessions of having made a pact. The only possible conclusion, it would seem, is that in this case the truth is not obtainable. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
In a situation where the truth was so difficult to find the people of Massachusetts did what anybody else would do—they sought expert advice. In matters of witchcraft the experts were the clergy, and ultimately the advice was sought of the most distinguished clergymen in the colony. Indeed, at least one member of the trial court, Judge John Richards, asked the Reverend Cotton Mather to be present at the first trial. Reverend Mather was too ill to attend, but he did everything he could under the circumstances. He had suggested earlier (the exact date is not known) that the afflicted persons should be separated and an attempt made to cure them with prayer and fasting. He volunteered to take in as many as six of them himself. He had cured the Godwin children, and he might well have cured the Salem girls as well; certainly separation and private care would have been better treatment for hysterical fits than the excitements of a public courtroom. However, unfortunately Reverend Mather’s offer had not been accepted. Now, although he could not attend the first sitting of the court he wrote John Richards a letter offering him his opinions. In the first place, he expected that God would smile upon the labours of the court: “His people have been fasting and praying before Him for you direction, and yourselves are persons whose exemplary devotion disposeth you to such a dependence on the Wonderful Counselor, for his counsel in an affair this full of wonder, as He doth usually answers with the most favorable assistances. Yet he wanted to warn Mr. Richards. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Here is that warning: “And yet I most humbly beg you that in the management of the affair in your most worthy hands, you do not lay more stress upon pure specter testimony than it will bear. When you are satisfied or have good plain legal evidence that the Demons which molest our poor neighbours do indeed represent such and such people to the sufferers, though this be a presumption, yet I suppose you will not reckon it a conviction that the people so represented are witches to be immediately exterminated. It is very certain that the Devils have sometimes represented the shapes of persons not only innocent but very virtuous, though I believe that the just God then ordinarily provides a way for speedy vindication of the persons thus abused. Moreover, I do suspect that persons who have too much indulged themselves in malignant, envious, malicious ebullitions of their souls may unhappily expose themselves to the Judgment of being represented by Devils, of whom they never had any vision and with whom they have much less written any covenant. I would say this: if upon the bare supposal of a poor creature’s being represented by a specter too great a progress be made by the Authority in ruining a poor neighbour so represented, it may be that a door may be thereby opened for the Devils to obtain from the Courts in the Invisible World a license to proceed unto most hideous desolations upon the repute and repose of such as have yet been kept from the great transgression. If mankind have thus far once consented unto the credit of Diabolical representations, the Door is opened! Perhaps there are wise and good men that may be ready to style hum that shall advance this caution a witch advocate, but in the winding up this caution will certainly be wished for.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Reverend Mather’s third point is that although he believes that Devils have sometime afflicted men on their own initiative, without being called up by witches, in this case he thinks that witches are involved: “there is cause enough to think that it is a horrible witchcraft which hath given rise to the troubles wherewith Salem Village is at this day harassed, and he indefatigable pains that are used for the tracing this witchcraft are to be thankfully accepted and applauded among all this people of God.” Fourth, he points out that although witchcraft is a spiritual matter and therefore “very much transacted upon the stage of imagination,” its effects are “dreadfully real” and therefore criminally punishable. “Our dear neighbours are most really tormented, really murdered, and really acquainted with hidden things which are afterwards proved plainly to have been realities.” In his fifth and six section he suggests what evidence may be used for convictions. The best evidence, he says, is “a credible confession…And I say a credible confession because even confession itself is sometimes not credible.” He was confident Mr. Richards’ ability to judge such matters: “a person of a sagacity many times thirty furlongs less than yours will easily perceive what confession may be credible and what may be the result of only a delirious brain or a discontented heart.” In obtaining confessions he was “far from urging the un-English method of torture,” but he thought that “cross and swift questions” might be used, along with anything else that “hath a tendency to put the witches into confusion” and this might bring them to confession. If the suspect had made threats or boasts which seemed to require occult power and which came true, this was valid evidence. So were such concrete matters as “puppets” (for image magic) and witch marks on the body. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Reverend Mather had never seen a witch mark on anyone, but he thought a surgeon ought to be able to tell if a bodily excrescence were magical. Finally, he was willing to countenance as experiments (but not as full evidence) some witch-finding techniques which themselves partook of the occult: setting a suspect to repeating the Lord’s Prayer; trying to wound a witch through striking her specter; putting the suspect to the water ordeal. Seventh, and finally, he recommended clemency for “come of the lesser criminals.” If such persons were not executed but “only scoured with lesser punishments, and also put upon some solemn, open, public, and explicit renunciation of the Devil” he thought it might discourage the Devils from afflicting those neighbourhoods in which they had been publicly renounced. Reverend Mather’s letter was written within the context of the Puritan method for arriving at the truth, and it can be fully understood only within that context. In dealing with the American Puritans we must remember always that they had rejected the formidable hierarchies of the Medieval and Renaissance church and state, with all their authority of tradition and inherited position. They had replaced these hierarchies with bodies of ministers and magistrates which, if they were not fully democratic in the twentieth-century sense of the word, were nevertheless elected. The clergyman was called to his position by the members of the church; the magistrate was elected by his constituency. Furthermore, the church had no central administration; every congregation was a law unto itself. The state did have a central administration—a governor and lieutenant-governor and their council—but this administration had nothing even faintly resembling the authority of a royal government. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
My brother, the clergyman, looked over my shoulder before I was aware of him, and discovered that the volume which completely absorbed my attention was a collection of famous Trials, published in a new edition and in a popular form. He laid his finger on the Trial which I happened to be reading at the moment. I looked up at him; his face startled me. He had turned pale. His eyes were fixed on the open page of the book with an expression which puzzled and alarmed me. “My dear fellow,” I said, “what in the World is the matter with you?” He answered in an odd absent manner, still keeping his finger on the open page. “I had almost forgotten,” he said. “And this reminds me.” “Reminds you of what?” I asked. “You do not mean to say you know anything about the Trial?” “I know this,” he said. “The prisoner was guilty.” “Guilty?” I repeated. “Why, the man was acquitted by the jury, with full approval of the judge! What can you possibly mean?” “There are circumstances connected with that Trial,” my brother answered, “which were never communicated to the judge or the jury—which were never so much as hinted or whispered in court. I know them—of my own knowledge, by my own personal experience. They are very sad, very strange, very terrible. I have mentioned them to no mortal creature. I have done my best to forget them. You—quite innocently—have brought them back to my mind. They oppress, they distress me. I wish I had found you reading any book in your library, except that book!” Some people were opposed to prosecuting in any witchcraft case, on the grounds that witchcraft was a spiritual mater, a sin rather than a crime, and thus outside the domain of criminal law. However, the laws of every civilized nation provided the death penalty for witchcraft, and so did the Bible (Exodus xxii, 18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”). #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Another opinion Reverend Mather deals with is that the troubles at Salem were caused by Devils, but not by witches. That is, the idea had already been advanced that the afflicted girls were possessed—infested by Demons—but not bewitched; that the Devils had acted on their own initiative rather than that of witches. This is the idea that was eventually adopted by virtually all of Massachusetts to explain the events at Salem, once it was recognized that most of those executed had been innocent. The basic question, as the seventeenth century understood it, was whether God would permit the Devil to assume the shape of an innocent person. Most authorities, and especially most Protestant authorities, believed that He would, and thus held, like Hamlet, that “the Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape. However, Mr. Richards would not be capable of clearing anybody if he was going to accept the appearance of a person’s specter as conclusive proof of guilt. If such infernal testimony were accepted, nobody could be safe from accusation. Reverend Mather put in forcefully enough. “If mankind have thus far once consented unto the credit of Diabolical representations, the Door is opened!” However, Reverend Mather knew there were people at Salem so committed to the validity of spectral evidence that they were willing to call anyone who challenged it, including himself, a “witch advocate.” All he could do was warn such people that when matters were finished “this caution will certainly be wished for.” And in this he could not possibly have been more right. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Do you believe that the spirits of the dead can return to Earth, and show themselves to the living? Promise me this, that you will keep what I tell you a secret as long as I live. After my death I care little what happens. Let the story of my strange experience be added to the published experience of those other men who have seen what I have seen, and who believe what I believe. The World will not be the worse, and may be the better, for knowing one day what I am now about to trust to your ear alone. On a fine summer evening, many years since, I left my chambers in the Temple to meet a fellow-student, who had proposed to me a night’s amusement in the Winchester estate. I had taken my degree at Oxford. I had sadly disappointed my father by choosing the Law as my profession, in preference to the Church. At that time, to own the truth, I had no serious intention of following any special vocation. I simply wanted an excuse for enjoying the pleasures of an American life. The study of Law supplied me with that excuse. And I chose the Law as my profession accordingly. On reaching the place at which we had arranged to meet, I found that my friend had not kept his appointment. After waiting vainly for ten minutes, my patience gave way, and I went into the gardens by myself. I took two or three turns round the mansion, without discovering my fellow-student, and without seeing any other person with whom I happened to be acquainted at that time. For some reason which I cannot now remember, I was not in my usual good spirits that evening. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
I saw a woman in the gardens, she was quiet. She invited me into the estate. Her face was saddened; her eyes were dropped to the ground, I begged her pardon. She rose to leave me. I was determined to not part with her in that way. I begged to be allowed to see the Winchester mansion. She hesitated. Then she took my arm. We went away together. A walk of half an hour brought us to the Winchester mansion, the estate was quite large. We went through the beautiful jeweled doors and took an elevator to the 4th floor. She said Mrs. Winchester had been waiting to meet me. She had been suffering from an affection of the throat; and she had a white silk handkerchief tied loosely round her neck. She wore a simple dress of black merino, with a black-silk apron over it. Her face was deadly pale; her fingers felt icily cold as they closed around my hand. “Promise me one thing,” I said, “before I go. While I live, I am your friend—if I am nothing more. If you are ever in trouble, promise me that you will let me know it.” She started, and drew back from me as if I had struck her with a sudden terror. “Strange!” she said, speaking to herself. “He feels as I feel. He is afraid of what may happen to me, in my life to come.” I attempted to reassure Mrs. Winchester. I tried to tell her what was indeed the truth—that I had only been thinking of the ordinary chances and chances of life, when I spoke. She paid no heed to me; she came back and put her hands on my shoulders, and thoughtfully and sadly looked up in my face. “My mind is not your mind in this matter,” she said. “I believe I shall die young, and die miserably. If I am right, have you interest enough still left in me to hear of it?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
She paused, for a moment, shuddering—and added these startling words: “You shall hear of it.” The tone of steady conviction in which she spoke alarmed and distressed me. My face showed her how deeply and how painfully I was affected. “There, there!” she said, returning to her natural manner; “don’t take what I say too seriously. A poor girl who has led a lonely life like mine thinks strangle and talks strangely—sometimes. Yes; I give you my promise. If I am ever in trouble, I will let you know it. God bless you—you have been very kind to me—goodbye!” A tear dropped on my face as she kissed me. The door closed between us. The dark gardens received me. It was raining heavily. I looked up at her window, through the drifting shower. The curtains were parted; she was standing in the gap, dimly lot by the lamp on the table behind her, waiting for our last look at each other. Slowly lifting her hand, she waved her farewell at the window, with the unsought native grace which had charmed me on the night when we first met. The curtains fell again—she disappeared—nothing was before me, nothing was round me, but the darkness and the night. In two years from that time, I had returned to the Church. My relatives exerted themselves; and my good fortune still befriended me. I was offered an opportunity of preaching in a church, made famous by the eloquence of one of the popular pulpit-orators of our time. In accepting the proposal, I felt naturally anxious to do my best, before the unusually large and unusually intelligence congregation which would be assembled to hear me. At the period of which I am now speaking, the Santa Clara Valley had been startled by the discovery of a terrible crime, perpetrated under circumstances of extreme provocation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
I chose this crime as the main subject for my sermon. Admitting that the best among us were frail mortal creatures subject to evil promptings and provocations like the worst among us, my object was to show how a Christian man may find his refuge from temptation in the safeguards of his religion. I dwelt minutely on the hardship of the Christian’s first struggle to resist the evil influence—on the help which one’s Christianity inexhaustibly held out o one in the worst relapses of the weaker and viler part of one’s nature—on the steady and certain gain which was the ultimate reward of one’s faith and one’s firmness—and on the blessed sense of peace and happiness which accompanied the final triumph. Preaching to this effect, with the fervent conviction which I really felt, I may say for myself, at least, that I did no discredit to the choice which had placed me in the pulpit. I held the attention of my congregation, from the first word to the last. On the conclusion of my sermon, my soul was literally shaken. Ordering my horse to be saddled, I rode instantly to the Winchester mansion. When I arrived, my mind was blank. I had no thoughts. I had no tears. The butler, Amon, greeted me. I guessed him to be some two or three years younger than myself. He was undeniably handsome; his manners of a gentleman—and yet, without knowing why, I felt a strong dislike to him the moment he opened the door. While waiting in the parlor, little by little, I became conscious of a chilly sensation slowly creeping through and through me to the bones. The warm balmy air of a summer night was abroad. It was the month of August. In the month of August, was it possibly that any living creature (in good health) could feel cold? It was not possible—and yet, the chilly sensation still crept through and through me to the bones. I looked up. I looked all round me. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
I looked around me again. Yes: I saw it. With my own eyes I saw it. A pillar of white mist—between five and six feet high, as well as I could judge—was moving beside me on my left hand. The white colour of it was the white colour of the fog which one might see over the ocean. And the chill which had then crept through me to the cones was that chill that was creeping through me now. I was awed rather than frightened. There was one moment, and one only, when the fear came to me that my reason might be shaken. The doctrine that the Devil could appear in any shape did come to mind. The slow utterance of these words, repeated over and over again: “Mrs. Winchester is dead. Mrs. Winchester is dead.” But my will was still my own: I was able to control myself, to impose silence on my own muttering lips. And I walked through the mansion. And the pillar of mist went quietly with me. I sat down on the stairs looking at the pillar of mist, hovering opposite to me. It lengthened slowly, until it reached to the ceiling. As it lengthened, it grew bright and luminous. A time passed, and a shadowy appearance showed itself in the center of the light. Little by little, the shadowy appearance took the outline of human form. Soft brown eyes, tender and melancholy, looked at me through the unearthly light in the mist. The dead and the rest of the face boke next slowly on my view. Then the figure gradually revealed itself, moment by moment, downward and downward to the feet. She stood before me as I had last seen her, in her black-merino dress, with the black-silk apron, with white handkerchief tied loosely round her neck. She stood before me, in the gentle beauty that I remembered so well; and looked at me as she had looked when she gave me her last kiss on the cheek—when her tears had dropped on my hand. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
I fell on my knees at the table. I stretched out my hands to her imploringly. I said, “Speak to me—O, once again speak to me, Sarah.” Her eyes rested on me with a divine compassion in them. She lifted her hand, and pointed to the photograph on the desk. It was the butler. I looked up at her again. She lifted her hand once more, and pointed to the handkerchief round her neck. As I looked at it, the fair white silk changed horribly in colour—the fair white silk became darkened and drenched in blood. A moment more—and the vision of her began to grow dim. By slow degrees, the figure, then the face, faded back into the shadowy appearance that I have first seen. The luminous inner light died out in the white mist. The mist itself dropped slowly downwards—floated a moment in airy circles on the floor—vanished. Nothing was before me but the familiar Lincrusta wallpaper, and the photograph lying face downwards on the desk. I went home. The next day, the newspapers reported the discovery of a murder in the Winchester mansion. Mrs. Winchester was the victim. She had been killed by a wound in the throat. The crime had been discovered between ten and eleven o’clock on the previous night. There is conclusive proof that the butler had been trafficking with the Devil. If spectral evidence was convincing to the magistrates, the ministers, and the people at large, it was a nightmare to the suspects. A violent quarrel took place between them. Lastly, that man, variously described by different witnesses, was seen leaving the door of her mansion on the night of the murder. The Law—advancing no further than this—may have discovered circumstances of suspicion, but no certainty. The Law, in default of direct evidence to convict the prisoner, may have rightly decided in letting him go free. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
However, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company issued a statement redacting the news report which was later destroyed: “Protecting Mrs. Winchester’s legacy is, and always will be, our focus. For decades, we have battled behind the scenes, enduring shadowy tactics of deception with unauthorized statements and projects created to tarnish. We have always been betwixted as to why there is such a tenacity in causing more pain alongside what we already have to cope with for the rest of our lives. Now, this unscrupulous endeavor to release a statement without official proof or full accounting to the estate compels our hearts to express a word—forgiveness. Although we will continue to defend ourselves and her legacy lawfully and justly, we want to preempt the inevitable attacks on our company by all the individuals who have emerged from the shadows to leech off of Mrs. Winchester’s life’s work. Ultimately, we desire closure and a modicum of peace so we can facilitate the growth of the Winchester Estate and other creative projects that embody Mrs. Winchester’s true essence, which is to inspire and get people to think critically. We welcome and accept people of all creeds, races and cultures in the Universe and beyond.” The official statement reported that Mrs. Winchester passed away peacefully in her sleep on September 5, 1922, and work on the still uncompleted house stopped. I leave you to draw your own conclusions, but just days before I saw her, she looked no older than 22 years old. My own faith in the reality of the apparition is immovable. I say, and believe Mrs. Winchester is immortal, which would explain a lot. Take up the Trial again, and look at the circumstances that were revealed during the investigation in the court. I persist in believing that the man was guilty. I declare that, he and he alone did it. And now, you know why. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
O thou wicket spirit Amon that obeyeth not, because I made a law and invoked the names of the glorious and ineffable God of Truth, the creator of all, and thou obeyest not the might sounds that I make: therefore I curse thee in the depth of Abandon to remain until the day of judgment in torment in fire and in sulphur without end, until thou appear before our will and obey my power. Come, therefore, in the 24th of a moment, before the circle in the triangle in this name and by this name of God, Adni, Great Spirit, give us hearts to understand; never to take from creation’s beauty more than we give; never to destroy wantonly for the furtherance of greed; never to deny to give our hands for the building of Earth’s beauty; never to take from her what we cannot use. Give us hearts to understand that to destroy Earth’s music is to create confusion; that to wreck her appearance is to build us to beauty; that to callously pollute her fragrance is to make a house of stench; that as we care for her she will care for us. Tzabaoth, Adonai, Amioran. Come! Come! for it is the Lord of Lords Adni, that stirreth thee up. I stir thee up, O thou fire, in him who is thy Creator and of all creatures. Torment, burn, destroy the spirit Amon always whose end cannot be, I judge thee in judgment and in extreme justice, O spirit Amon, because thou art he that obeyeth not my power and obeyth not that law which the Lord God made, and obeyeth not the Mighty Sounds and the Living Breath which I invoke, which I send: Come forth, I, who am the Servant of the Same Most High governor Lord God powerful, Iehovohe, I who am exalted in power and am might in his power above ye, O thou who comest not giving obedience and faith to him that liveth and trirumpheth. Therefore I say the judgment: I curse thee and destroy the name Amon and the seal Amon, which I have placed in this dwelling of poison, and I burn thee in fire whose end cannot be; and I cast thee down unto the seas of torment, out of which thou shalt not rise until thou come to me eyes: visit me in peace: be friendly before the circle in the triangle in the 24th of a moment in the likeness of a man not unto the terror of the sons of men the creatures or all things on the face of the Earth. Obey my power like reasoning creatures; obey the living breath, the laws which speak. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
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When You Pursue Only Your Own Interests, You May be Said to Have Fallen Out of Love!
Drown me in Love, my Lord, that I may learn how smooth and swimming it is to love. Love has me in its grasp, sending me to the heights with fervor and wonder I did not know I have within me. The Lord has made known how people ought to treat one another. By searching the scriptures on this subject, we become more fully aware that we do have a responsibility to promote the happiness and well-being of our fellow humans. For example, through Moses the Lord said: “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” reports Leviticus 19.18. To help us understand what is meant by this, the Lord has given some specific examples of what a person will not do to one’s neighbour if be truly loves Jesus. “Ye shall not steal, neither deal falsely neither lie one to another. Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob one. Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind,” reports Leviticus 19.11-14. Furthermore, the hired servant should be paid promptly for one’s work: “the wages of one that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning,” reports Leviticus 19.13. “Thou shall not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether one be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates: At one’s day thou shalt give one one’s hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it,” reports Deuteronomy 24.14-15. Let me follow You on high, my Beloved Lord “canting the canticle of love,” as Isaiah put it (5.1). Let my soul, beside itself with love, weary itself in Your praise! Let me love You more than myself! #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Let me love myself because You loved me first! Let me love everyone else who truly loves You! That sounds like a lot, but it is only what the law of Love, of which You are the Chiefest Illumination, tells me I have to do. Love’s swift, sincere, pious, joyous, pleasant, brave, patient, long-suffering, virile, and selfless, as Paul wrote in his First Letter to the Corinthians (13.4-7). Love’s selfless; that is to say, when you pursue only your own interests, you may be said to have fallen out of love. Love is mindful of others, humble, honorable; not soft, not giddy, not messing around with the meaningless tasks of this World. Love is sober, chaste, not given to flights of fancy, quiet, and has all the senses under control. In tatters, like a waif or a wastrel, Love nonetheless can approach a prelate with confident step. Love is devoted and thankful to God, trusting and hoping in Him, even though it has been a long tie between consolations. That is to say, Love and Pain go hand and hand throughout life. You may think you know something about Love, but if you are not prepared to suffer for or stand by the Loved One, then you are not worthy to be called a lover. Any lover worth one’s word should freely embrace the hard and the harsh for the Loved One, and at the same time one should not allow oneself to be distracted by Contraries or Contretemps. The World’s dirt seems so remote from these moods of complete goodness as to seem non-existent, or a mere vaporous mist at most. With the glimpse a feelings overspreads one’s heart of benevolence towards all living creatures—not only animal but even plant. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
One would not, could not knowingly harm a single one. The Christians call this love, the Buddhists compassion, the Hindus oneness. My own term is goodwill, but all are right. These are different facets, as seen from different points. In this wonderful state one becomes keenly aware of the love that is at the core of the Universe, and therefore at one’s own core too. However, one not only absorbs it, one also radiates it. It is not something to be held selfishly, like a material possession. As it is received, so it is given. There is no possibility here of feeling stagnant, mediocre, ordinary. It is their very contraries that one feels. There are exquisite moments when all existence seems elevated to a higher plane, when one’s individual being is absorbed in a harmony with all things. The feeling which comes over one at this stage is indescribably delightful. One recognizes its divine quality and rightly attributes it to a transcendental source. No vision accompanies it. Yet the certitude and reality seem greater than if one did. The common youthful experience of falling in love bears some of the leading characteristics of this uncommon mystical experience of awakening to the divine reality. However of course it bears them in a grosser and smaller way. Some of them are: a feeling of “walking on air,” a frequent recollection of beloved at unexpected moments, a glowing sense of deliverance from burdens, a cheerful attitude towards everything and everyone, intense satisfaction with life, rosy expectations about the future, expanded sympathies, dreamy absent-minded lapses from attention to the prosaic everyday round, and new appreciation of poetry, music, or Nature’s beauty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
There is a self which one feels within one yet is not oneself. Something unknown yet joy-giving. Some dynamic force streams through the blood in one’s veins, the feeling in one’s heart, and the will in one’s innermost being. It is no ordinary force, for one knows that never or rarely has one experienced its like before. There is magic in its movement, enchantment in its effect. The things of the World fall far away from you and a great spell will seemingly be put upon the leading mind till you remember little of name, or kin, or country, and care less. You lie in the lap of a shining mood, granted respite from heavy cares and given relaxation from corrosive thoughts. You become aware of the secret undercurrent of holy peace which flows silently beneath the heart. Although one’s general experience of it will be of its gentleness, there will be times when one will feel only an authoritative and commanding force in it, when tremendous power will manifest and rule in some episode or event. One may have a vague feeling some immaterial presence around or within oneself, a presence uplifting, ennobling, unworldly. Not only is the kingdom of Heaven within us but we are ourselves within the kingdom. We may discover this as a psychic and visual experience, as some do, or simply as a feeling-and-knowing experience that All is God. It is a transparence because one feels open, letting in a rare mood. It is also a transcendence, because one feels lifted out of one’s ordinary “I” and put down again on a higher level. Reverence for the divine presence filled my heart awe at the divine wonder permeated my mind. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
One will feel spontaneous peace that comes from one knows not where, intellectual conviction that the right path has been found, mysterious detachment that takes hold of one during Worldly temptations and Worldly tribulation alike. When you are in this wider consciousness you are at home. Outwardly you may be without a roof to shelter your head but still you will feel protected, secure, and provided for. Your feeling and your trust are not groundless. For the outward manifestation of this inward care will follow. You will comprehend that while the Overself thus enfolds you, you can never again feel lonely, never again find the sky turned black because some human love has been denied or been withdrawn from you. It is there, in the deep center of oneself, that one finds holiness and liberation. From the physical standpoint, the ego first becomes aware of the Overself as being located in the heart. However, in higher mystical experience, this awareness is free from any bodily relationship. A feeling of lightness and freedom, songlike well-being and perfect harmony, comes with this disidentification from the body. I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime, of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. Dear soul, up to this point in our friendly chatsworth, with lots of give and take on both sides—and I hope you will not take offense—but I think I can safely say, you are not what I would call—and I want you to know that I speak only as a friend—a vigorous or prudent lover. One feels a rightness about the World-plan and a loveliness in some deeper part of oneself. It may remain for a little while only but its memory will remain for long years. In this lofty mood, bringing so much good will and insight with it, as it does, one is inclined to ignore misunderstanding and hostility from any quarter which caused one resentment or even suffering in the past. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Now this brings us to the oddest thing about Christianity. In a sense the view which I have just described is actually true. From a certain point of view Christ is the same sort of thing as Adonis or Osiris (always, of course, waiving the fact that they lived nobody knows where or when, while He was executed by a Roman magistrate we know in a year which can be roughly dated.) And that is just the puzzle. If Christianity is a religion of that kind why is the analogy of the seed falling into the ground so seldom mentioned (twice only if I mistake not) in the New Testament? Corn-religions are popular and respectable: if that is what the first Christian teachers were putting across, what motive could they have for concealing the fact? The impression they make is that of humans who simply do not know how close they re to the corn-religions: men who simply overlook the rich sources of relevant imagery and association which they must have been on the verge of tapping at every moment. If you say they suppressed it because they were Jewish people, that only raises the puzzle in a new form. Why should the only religion of a “dying God” which has actually survived and risen to unexampled spiritual heights occur precisely among those people to whim, and to whom almost alone, the whole circle of ideas that belong to the “dying God” was foreign? I myself, who first seriously read the New Testament when I was, imaginatively and poetically, all agog for the Death and Re-birth pattern and anxious to meet a corn-king, was chilled and puzzled by the almost total absence of such ideas in the Christian documents. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
One moment particularly stood out. A “dying God”—the only dying God who might possibly be historical—holds bread, that is, corn, in His hand and says, “This is my body.” Surely here, even if nowhere else—or surely if not here, at least in the earliest comments on this passage and through all later devotional usage in ever swelling volume—the truth must come out; the connection between this and the annual drama of the corps must be made. However, it is not. It is there for me. There is no sign that it was there for the disciples or (humanly speaking) for Christ Himself. It is almost as if He did not realize what He had said. The records, in fact, show us a Person who enacts the part of the Dying God, but whose thoughts and words remain quite outside the circle of religious ideas to which the Dying God belongs. The very thing which the Nature-religions are all about seems to have happened once: but it happened in a circle where no trace of Nature-religions are all about seems to have really happened once: but it happened in a circle where no trace of Nature-religion was present. It is as if you met the sea-serpent and found that is disbelieved in sea-serpents: as if history recorded a human who had done all the things attributed to Sir Launcelot but who had himself never apparently heard of chivalry. There is, however, one hypothesis which, if accepted, makes everything easy and coherent. The Christians are not claiming that simply “God” was incarnate in Jesus. They are claiming that the one true God is He whom the Jewish people worshipped as Jahweh, and that is it He who has descended. Now the double character of Jahweh is this. On the one hand He is the God of Nature, her glad Creator. It is He who sends rain into the furrows till the valleys stand so thick with corn that they laugh and sing. The trees of the wood rejoice before Him and His voice causes the wild deer to bring forth their young. He is the God of what and wine and oil. In that respect He is constantly doing all the things that Nature-Gods do: He is Bacchus, Venus, Ceres all rolled into one. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
There is no trace in Judaism of the idea found in some pessimistic and Pantheistic religions tht Nature is some kind of illusion or disaster, that finite existence is in itself an evil and that the cure lies in the relapse of all things into God. Compared with such anti-natural conceptions Jahweh might almost be mistaken for a Nature-God. On the other hand, Jahweh is clearly not a Nature-God. He does not die and come to life each year as a true Corn-king should. He may give wine and fertility, but must not be worshipped with Bacchanalian or aphrodisiac rites. He is not the soul of Nature nor of any part of Nature. He inhabits eternity: He dwells in the high and holy place: Heaven is His throne, not His vehicle, Earth His footstool, not Hs vesture. One day He will dismantle both and make a new Heaven and Earth. He is not to be identified even with the “divine spark” in humans. He is “God and not man”: His thoughts are not our thoughts: all our righteousness is filthy rags. His appearance to Ezekiel is attended with imagery that does not borrow from Nature, but (it is a mystery too seldom noticed) from those machines which humans were to make centuries after Ezekiel’s death. The prophet saw something suspiciously like a dynamo. Jahweh is neither the soul of Nature nor her enemy. She is neither His body nor a declension and falling way from Him. She is His creature. He is not a nature-God, but the God of Nature—her inventor, maker, owner, and controller. To everyone who reads this essay, the conception has been familiar from childhood; we therefore easily think it is the most ordinary conception in the World. “If people are going to believe in a God at all,” we ask, “what other kind would they believe in?” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
We mistake our privileges for our own instincts: just as one meets ladies who believe their own refined manners to be natural to them. They do not remember being taught. Now if there is such a God and if He descends to rise again, then we can understand why Christ is at once so like the Corn-King and so silent about him. He is like the Corn-King because the Corn-King is a portrait of Him. The similarity is not in the lest unreal or accidental. For the Corn-King is derived (through human imagination) from the facts of Nature, and the facts of Nature from her Creator; the Death and Re-birth patten is in her because it was first in Him. On the other hand, elements of Nature-religion are strikingly absent from the teaching of Jesus and from the Judaic preparation which led up to it precisely because in them Nature’s Original is manifesting itself. In them you have to have from the very outset got in behind Nature-religion and behind Nature herself. Where the real God is present the shadows of that God do not appear; that which the shadows resembled does. The Hebrews throughout their history were being constantly headed off from the worship of Nature-gods; not because the Nature-god were in all respects unlike the God of Nature but because, at best, they were merely like, and it was the destiny of that nation to be turned away from likenesses to the thing itself. The goodness of anything is twofold; one, which is of the essence of it—thus, for instance, to be rational pertains to the essence of humans. As regards this god, God cannot make a thing better than it is itself; although He can make another thing better than it; even as He cannot make the number four greater than it is; because if it were greater it would no longer be four, but another number. For the addition of a substantial difference in definitions is after the manner of the addition of unity of numbers. Another kind of goodness is that which is over and above the essence; thus, the good of a human is to be virtuous or wise. As regards this kind of goodness, God can make better the things He has made. Absolutely speaking, however, God can make something else better than each thing made by Him. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
When it is said that God can make a thing better than He makes it, if “better” is taken substantively, this proposition is true. For He can always make something else better than each individual thing: and He can make the same thing in one way better than it is, and in another way not; as was explained above. If, however, “better” is taken as an adverb, implying the manner of the making; thus God cannot make anything better than He makes it, because He cannot make it from greater wisdom and goodness. However, if it implies the manner of the thing done, He can make something better; because He can give to things made by Him a beer manner of existence as regards the accidents, although not as regards the substance. It is of the nature of a son that he should be equal to his father, when he comes to maturity. However, it is not the nature of anything created, that it should be better than it was made by God. Hence the comparison fails. The Universe, the present creation being supposed, cannot be better, on account of the most beautiful order given to things by God; in which the good of the Universe consists. For if any one thing were bettered, the proportion of order would be destroyed; as if one strong were stretched more than it ought to be, the melody of the harp would be destroyed. Yet God could make other things, or add something to the present creation; and then there would be another and a better Universe. The humanity of Christ, from the fact that it is untied to the Godhead; and created happiness from the fact that it is the fruition of God; and the Blessed Virgin from the fact that she is the mother of God; have all a certain infinite dignity from the infinite good, which is God. And on this account there cannot be anything better than these; just as there cannot be anything better than God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Man has always been fascinating with going back in time. The question has often been asked, if you could go back in time, would you do anything differently? But what if it came out another. However, no one asks, if you could go forward in time, what would you change? As fewer workers in the rich nations have engaged in physical production, more have been needed to produce ideas, patents, scientific formulae, bills, invoices, reorganization plans, files, dossiers, marker research, sales presentations, letters, graphic, legal briefs, engineering specifications, computer programs, and a thousand other forms of data or symbolic output. This rise in white-collar, technical, and administrative activity has been so widely documented in so many countries that we need no statistics here to make the point. Indeed, some sociologists have seized on the increasing abstraction of production as evidence that society has moved into a “post-industrial” stage. The facts are more complicated. For the growth of the white-collar work force can be better understood as an extension of industrialism—a further last surge of the Second Wave—than as a leap to a new system. While it is true that work has grown more abstract and less concrete, the actual offices in which this work is being done are modeled the after Second Wave factories, with the work itself fragmented, repetitive, dull, and dehumanizing. Even today, much office reorganization is little more than an attempt to make the office more closely resemble a factory. In this “symbol-factory,” Second Wave civilization also created a factorylike caste system. The factory work force is divided into manual and nonmanual workers. The office is similarly divided into “high abstraction” and “low abstraction” workers. At one level we find the high abstracters, the technocratic elites: scientist, engineers, and managers, much of whose time is taken up with meetings, conferences, business lunches, or in dictating, drafting memos, placing phone calls, and otherwise exchanging information. One recent survey estimated that 80 percent of the manager’s time is spent in 150 to 300 “information transactions” daily. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
At the other level we find the low abstracters—white-collar proletarians, as it were—who, like factory workers throughout the Second Wave period, perform endlessly routine and deadening work. Mostly female and nonunionized, this group can justifiably smile with irony at the sociologists’ talk of “post-industrialism.” They are the industrial work force of the office. Today the office, too, is beginning to move beyond the Second Wave and into the Third, and his industrial caste system is about to be challenged. All the old hierarchies and structures of the office are soon to be reshuffled. The Third Wave revolution in the office is a result of several colliding forces. The need for information has mushroomed so wildly that no army of Second Wave clerks, typists, and secretaries, no matter how large or hard-working, can possibly cope with it. In addition, the cost of paper work has climbed so calamitously that a frantic search is underway to control it. (Office costs have swelled to 40 or 50 percent of all costs in many companies, and some experts estimate that the expense companies spend per employee annually is $1,844. The expense for preparing one business letter anywhere between $75 and $150 for a typical one-page letter of 350-450 words). Moreover, while the average factory worker in the United States of America today is supported by an estimated $150,000 worth of technology, the office worker, as one Xerox sales man out it, “works with about $13,500 worth of computers and machines, and is probably among the least productive workers in the World.” Office productivity has climbed a bare 4 percent over the past decade, and conditions in other countries are probably even more pronounced. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Contrast this with the extraordinary decline in the cost of computers, as measured by the number of functions performed. It has been estimated that computer output has increased 10,000 times in the past fifteen years, and that the per-function cost today is down 100,000-fold. The combination of rising costs and stagnating productivity on the one hand and computer advances on the other make an irresistible combination. The result is likely to be nothing less than a “wordquake.” Over 66 percent of Americans use a computer at work, and over 80 percent of them say it is essential to their jobs. With this much workplace use and demand, it is important to understand the way a computer can affect your job. Many Americans rely on their computer skills to find meaningful employment and to work effectively once employed. Computer and information technology (IT) touch nearly every aspect of modern life. Information technology can help with such diverse tasks as driving motor vehicles and diagnosing disease. IT enables seamless integration and communication between businesses anywhere in the World. The IT industry is one of the largest in the World employing 1.7 million people. The global computers market is expected to grow from $331.45 billion to $367.56 billion on 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.9 percent. Major companies in the computers market include HP; Apple; Advantech; Eurotech and Kontron. The market is expected to reach $505.45 billion in 2025 with CAGR of 8 percent. The computer is still sometimes called a “smart typewriter” and this device fundamentally alters the flow of information in the office, and with it the job structure. It is however, only one of great family of new technologies deluging the white-collar World. As businesses continue to work primarily remotely, video is increasing in importance. Being able to see team members helps build a sense of comradery and helps everyone feel less isolated from one another, while making collaboration more productive. What we are looking at is the beginning of what some term the “paperless office” of tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Not only will video benefit your workforce in the way of conferencing and meetings, it also is the preferred way to consume all content in general. In fact, employees are 75 percent more likely to watch a video than read text. Technology in business communication is largely centered around remote work. We have witnessed a huge mobile tsunami over the past two years. This will only continue as 5G is arriving and offers more in the way of mobility. In fact 1 in 2 people will not return to jobs that do not offer remote work. Also, 75 percent of people feel more productive at home, while 80 percent expect to work from home at least tree times of week. For those concerned about the environment, this is a great solution because it will reduce air pollution, traffic, and fuel consumption. Working from is very important, which is why more people are buying larger houses than they need, so they can have space to work in a quiet area. Instead of wasting money on cars and maintenance and fuel, they are able to invest in a home, something that will earn them money over time. Therefore, people also want to keep their neighborhood peaceful and attractive. To physically maintain communities, there are several millions of dollars of low-interest loans available to remodel homes and upgrade apartments. Ten percent of all apartment building flats are inspected every year, and a building must be brought fully up to code before it can be sold and title transferred. Some communities even used to offer grants to landlords to discourage all-one-race apartments. On a voluntary basis, a landlord could enter a five-year agreement to let Housing Centers serve as the landlord’s rental agent. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The landlord, on singing, became eligible for matching grants up to $10,000 per unit to improve the apartment interiors; there were larger grants for exterior renovations. The Housing Center, in turn, actively sought non-European American tenants for buildings that were predominately European American and European America tenants for buildings that were predominantly non-European American. In both goals of physically maintaining the suburb and encouraging integration, the community program was remarkably successful for a quarter of a century. The communities were tightly managed, and that did not appeal to some. The community would quickly intervene to prevent signs of building deterioration and to encourage racial harmony. The suburb rigidly enforced building codes and also acted swiftly to prevent unethical or illegal activities by realtors. Brotherly love is not synonymous with friendship, although it may be part of it. Friends like each other, delight in each other’s companionship, are confidential, loyal, trusting, and share many mutual interests. Friendship is reciprocal. Brotherly love is more unselfish than either romantic love or friendship. One possessed of Christian love has a profound concern for the welfare of others. One loses one’s life in their interests. One’s life is alter- or other-ego centered. It does not matter whether the other person—the one loved—appreciates or responds to the love shown one, because brotherly love nourishes itself. It resides wholly in the person who loves and does not need response to keep it alive as romantic love and friendship do. The real test of whether one has brotherly love was given by Jesus when he said and exemplified: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you,” reports Matthew 5.44. Brotherly love is impartial and, therefore, universal. One who has brotherly love is concerned for any and every human, whether one be sinner or saint, attractive or unattractive, of the same or of another faith or race. In fact, if one is selective as to whom one loves, the chances are one loves no human in a brotherly way. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
What gives a person the sense of being well and “together”? How does a person become strong, in the sense of having good self-esteem, a god ability to understand situation and use them creatively, good personality-organization which allows feelings and needs to find expression in actions and in gratifications which in turn feed self-esteem? We do not know for sure. We may have come guesses based on what good parents, good friends, and good therapists have in common. It has been interesting to note what parallels between the behavior of good parents and good therapists. Literally, psychotherapy means “ministering to a person’s breath, soul, life.” Parents do this, and psychotherapists do this, but they are not the only ones. Friends and lovers are also notable in this respect. Friends and lovers have certain advantages in ministering to each other. However, in some particulars the professionals have the advantage. First of all, we must remember the many people who have no friends and yet need to have their psyche ministered to. Equally important, there are some things which are incompatible with friendship but which need to happen if a person’s psyche is to be restored, and so this must be left to the professionals. What these things are will become clearer in the course of these essays; they have to do with the circumstances in which a person can make a new beginning. In psychotherapy a person may find the secure boundaries which are essential for this work. Psychotherapists can impose the boundaries within which work with transferences and regressions can safely be carried on. They can set rules and insist on them: only fifty minutes per session, only one session per day, no physical violence. Also, their other close relationships are not endangered by this relationship. And so on. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
What friends are able and willing to do for each other depends on many factors and I see no good in trying to lay down the law about that. My own views are sometimes made clear in this essay and sometimes not—in the latter case often because I am in fact not clear about them myself. Psychotherapy is a developmental process, as growing-up is, and the two have features in common. A difference is that psychotherapy is remedial: it is intended to make people better, to make good some deficiency or disturbance whose roots my go back to the days of childhood. This necessarily raises questions it has been convenient to evade until now: what do I mean by “good” development and by a “fortunate baby”? And if something goes “wrong,” what do I mean? And what do I mean by “better”? My own values necessarily permeate this essay, and it is time to look at these explicitly, however briefly. There are interrelated clusters of values that seem important to me: I think it is better for children (and for those who come into psychotherapy) if, in the course of development, they gain in self-knowledge including knowledge of unwanted regions of the self, self-acceptance including acceptance of at least some unwanted regions of the self, self-direction including the ability to choose one’s own goals and values, self-love, love of other people and knowledge and acceptance of some of their unwanted regions, ability to relate to and yet be separate from others, tolerance of frustration when goals, values or affection require, a varied set of values, freedom to develop further. The first culture of values has to do with the geography and logistics of the self. It seems important to me that people should have the opportunity to discover who they are—what is good and bad in them, what hurts, what delights, and so on—as well as the opportunity to decide what to do about it. The second cluster has to do with relationships. It seems important to me that people should enjoy themselves and each other, and that they should know the difference. The third cluster is about favorable conditions for work, growth, and change. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
In psychotherapy, as in helping children grow up, the ideal development is one in which each new stage is accepted in such a way that the satisfactions of the previous stage are still accessible, neither associated with such pain that thoughts of it must be avoided at all costs, nor so delicious that developing to the next stage seems a trouble from which we recoil. Ideally we should only have to overcome our natural reluctance, conscious or unconscious, to think about painful as well as about pleasant things. However, bad things may have happened to us before we have sufficiently well-organized self-regions to absorb them. What are the consequences? In some circumstances, the memory-traces of the bad experiences are kept apart, and so are not subject to modification by later events. These split-off memory-traces can later be responsible for overwhelming feelings of misery, emptiness, inertia, and fear. By “overwhelming” I mean literally that we feel we have ceased to be people and are just clumps of dreadful feelings. We may try to rationalize those feelings—we feel so terrible because we failed an examination, lost a lover, or a job, or are worried about the state of the World. However in fact, we feel terrible because we are not in touch with memories from when we did not yet exist as persons and yet were in a state of suffering; it would be more accurate to say “There is a sense of dreadful misery” than to say “I feel very miserable”: this misery of those earlier says has never been integrated. If we are ever to feel better, the bad memory-traces of those days have to be integrated later in less painful contexts. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
During that process of integration, a process of dissolution also takes place. These reorganizations enable us to see things as they are, more or less closely connected with us and, by the same token, more or less distant from us. Thus we get a self which as feelings but is not dissolved in them. In therapy or in everyday life, processes have to happen at the end of which a person can say “I feel miserable”: there is an “I” to feel it. The misery no longer feels overwhelming, eternal, and immovable. After that, further healing can take place. Let there be peace, welfare, and righteousness in every part of the World. Let confidence and friendship prevail for the good of east and west, for the good of the needy south, for the good of all humanity. Let people inspire their leaders, helping them to seek peace by peaceful means, helping them and urging them to build a better World, a World with a home for everybody, a World with food and work for everybody, a World with spiritual freedom for everybody. Let those who have the power of money be motivated by selfless compassion. Let money become a tool for the good of humanity. Let those who have power deal respectfully with the resources of the planet. Let them respect and maintain the purity of the air, water, land and subsoil. Let them co-operate to restore the ecological soundness of Mother Earth. Let trees grow up by the billions around the World. Let green life invade the deserts. Let industry serve humanity and produce waste that serves nature. Let technology respect the holiness of Mother Earth. Let those who control the mass media contribute to create mutual understanding, contribute to create optimism and confidence. Let ordinary people meet by the millions across the borders. Let them create a universal network of love and friendship. Let billions of human beings co-operate to create a good future for their children and grandchildren. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Let us survive in peace and harmony with Mother Earth. It is up to us to receive and transmit our Torah. It is up to us to see that the World still stands. May the time be not distant when nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, for the Earth will be filled with the wonder of life. Then shall we sit under our vine and our fig tree and none shall be afraid. We seek a renewed stirring of life for the Earth. We plead that what we are capable of doing is not always what we ought to do. We urge that all people now determine that a wide untrammeled freedom shall remain to testify that this generation has love for the next. If we want to succeed in that, we might show, meanwhile, a little more love for this one, and for each other. The Heavenly hosts in awe reply: “His Kingdom be blessed forever and aye.” Their song being hushed, they vanish away; they may never again offer rapturous lay. But America, therein excel—fixed times they set aside, with praise and prayer, Him One declare, at morn and eventide. His portion them He made, that they His praise declare by night and day; a Torah, precious more than gold, He bade them study, fast to hold; that He may be near, their prayer to hear, for always wear will He as diadem fair His people’s prayer in His phylactery, wherein is told of America’s fame who oft God’s unity proclaim. It is also meet God’s praise to sing in presence of both prince and king. With tempestuous glee, like a stormy sea, they surge and ask: “Who, then, is the Friend of thy heart, for who thou rt cast in the lions’ den?” From that which we fear, make us fearless. O bounteous One, assist us with your grace. May the atmosphere we breathe breathe fearlessness into us: fearlessness on Earth and fearlessness in Heaven! May fearlessness surround us above and below! May we be without fear by night and by day! Let all the World by my friend! #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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What a Lovely Day for a Bit of Mystery!
It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves. I hear your words, My dear Devout; now you hear Mine. You will find them not only suasive, but also persuasive. In fact, they exceed in wisdom all the accumulated knowledge of Philosophy since the World began. My particular words for you today are “spirit and life.” My Beloved Disciple recorded them in his Gospel (6.63), but Humanity cannot seem to make any sense out of them. Important words, they should not be exegeted smugly, if I may allude to that hoary Preacher of Ecclesiastes (9.17), but listened to respectfully. That is to say, they should be received with all humility and yet great affection. Our seventeenth-century ancestors differed from us in most ways, but in nothing did they differ more than in their attitude toward the truth. In this they were closer to the Middle Ages than to us. For them a lie—a breaking of one’s faith—was the worst of sins. Today, many do not regard lying as a serious moral wrong. If the word “morality” is mentioned we think immediately of our bodily appetites, especially of pleasures of the flesh, barbiturates, paraphernalia, liquor and contraband. If the word “morality” is mentioned we think immediately of our bodily appetites very seriously—perhaps too seriously—but we do not regard lying as a mortal sin. We are one of the few civilizations in which entire professions (TV news media, for example, and public relations) are seriously devoted to bending the truth. Dante, in his Divine Comedy, divided sins into three kinds: those of lust, those of violence, and those of fraud. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The sins of lust—those we tend to take most seriously—were those that Dante thought most trivial; the sins of fraud—which we take lightly—were for Dante the worst of all. To create a “credibility gap” as our revealing phrase has it (as though the only relevant issue is whether a statement will compel belief), to lie, was for the medieval humans to break one’s faith, and it was faith which constituted the bonds between humans and their fellow humans, between humans and the state, between humans and God. To lie was to reduce all the most valuable relationships of life to chaos. And the seventeenth-century Puritan, like Dante, was still living by his faith. Just how important the truth was to the seventeenth-century Puritan may be gathered from the fact that all of the innocent persons who were executed—and the majority of those executed were innocent—could have saved themselves by lying. After the first execution—that of Bridget Bishop—took place in June it became obvious to everyone that persons who confessed, like Tituba and Dorcas Good, were not being brought to trial. Thus any suspected person might have one’s life by confessing. Twenty people died, nineteen of them hanged and one pressed for refusing to plead. Bridget Bishop, Mammy Redd, and George Burroughs were three of these. One cannot be at all certain of the guilt or innocence of several more. However, at least a dozen now seem to be clearly innocent. Twelve people, and probably more, chose to die rather than belie themselves. It is impressive evidence of the Puritan’s attachment to the truth. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Yet it was not really so simple as that, because the truth was not easy to find in Salem in 1692. The greatest difficulty was created by the genuineness of the afflicted persons’ fits. Their sufferings were so convincing that they often shook the confidence of the accused. One example is William Hobbes, who began by stoutly denying that he had anything to do with the afflicted girls’ convulsions. When he looked at them they fell down in fits, and Hathorne accused him of overlooking them (id est, of he evil eye), yet still he denied it. Abigail Williams cried out that she saw his specter going to hunt Mercy Lewis “and immediately said Mercy fell into a fit and diverse others.” “Can you now deny it?” said Hathorne. “I can deny it to my dying day,” said William Hobbes. However, he did not. Here, after all, were people in hideous convulsions, and saying that his specter was the cause. How could this be? Hathorne suggested that the Devil might be able to use Hobbes’ specter because of Hobbes’ sins; he had not observed either public or private worship. Might not the Devil have taken advantage of that? Hobbes “was silent a considerable space—then said yes.” The girls’ fits shook not only Hobbes’ confidence in himself, but also his confidence in his daughter Abigail, the wild young girl who had boasted that she had sold herself “body and soul to the Old Boy.” Hathorne wanted to know whether Hobbes had not known for a long time that his daughter was a witch. “No, sir,” was the reply. “Do you think she is a witch now?” asked Hathorne. And all that Hobbes could say was, “I do no know.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Abigail Faulkner’s experience was similar. At her first examination, on August 11, she firmly denied that she had anything to do with the girls’ afflictions. When she looked at them they fell down in fits, and Hathorne asked her, “Do you not see?” Yes, she saw. However, she had nothing to do with it. Yet she would not doubt that the girls were suffering, and saw no reason to doubt their word that it was her specter afflicting them. Therefore the Devil must be appearing in her form: “It is the Devil does it in my shape.” However, by August 30 she was no longer so sure of her innocence. It was true, she said, that she had been angry at what people said when her cousin, Elizabeth Johnson, had been arrested. She had felt malice toward the afflicted persons then because they were the cause of her cousin’s arrest. She has wished them ill, and “her spirit being raised she did pinch her hands together.” Perhaps the Devil had taken advantage of that to pinch the girls, thus exploiting her malice. Even those whose confidence was not shaken bore testimony to the impressiveness of the fits. Mary Easty knew that has had not bewitched the girls, and she was confident as well of the innocence of her sisters, Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Cloyse. Yet she had to grant that there was something preternatural in the girls’ behaviour. “It is an evil spirit,” she said, “but whether it be witchcraft I do not know.” Even George Burroughs, who had been audacious enough to boast of occult powers, found himself stunned by the girls’ behaviour. “Being asked what he thought of these things he answered it was an amazing and humbling Providence, but he understood nothing of it.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Indeed, these courtroom fits were so convincing that most of the indictments were for witchcraft committed during the preliminary examination rather than for the offenses named in the original complain. The typical order of events in the Salem witchcraft cases was: the swearing out of a complaint for acts of witchcraft; a preliminary examination during which the afflicted persons had convulsive fits; an indictment for acts of witchcraft performed during the preliminary examination; and the trial. The direct cause of these fits, in the courtroom or out of it, was, of course, not witchcraft itself, but the afflicted person’s fear of witchcraft. If fits were occasioned by fear of someone like Bridget Bishop, who was actually practicing witchcraft, they might also be occasioned by fear of someone who was only suspected of practicing it. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law! The Winchester Estate had belonged to the family ever since the reign of George Washington, and there was a curious old wing and a cloistered quadrangle still remaining of the original edifice, and in excellent preservation. The rooms at the end of the house were ornate, and somewhat darksome and gloomy, it is true; but, though rarely used they were perfectly habitable, and were of service on great occasions when the Winchester was crowded with guests. The central portion of the Winchester had been rebuilt in the reign James K. Polk, and was of noble and palatial proportions. The southern wing, and a long music-room with thirteen tall narrow daisy-stained glass windows added on to it, were as modern as the time. Altogether, the Winchester was a very splendid mansion with 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens, and even once had a nine-story tower. It was one of the chief glories of our country. All the land in the Winchester estate, and for a long way beyond its boundaries, belonged to the Winchester family. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The Winchester estate grounds actually expanded all the way down to Steven’s Creek Boulevard. The community church was once within the park walls. The former estate was actually much larger than it is today, it was composed of 500 to 600 rooms at one time, but the 1906 Earthquake brought down the nine-story tower and much of the fourth floor with it. The death of William Wirt Winchester left his son, William Wirt Winchester II, unprovided for, and he was fain to go out into the bleak unknown World, and earn his living in a position of dependence—a dreadful thing for a Winchester to be obliged to do. Out of respect for the traditions and prejudices of his race, he made it his business to seek employment abroad, where the degradation of one solitary Winchester was not so likely to inflict shame upon the ancient house to which he belonged. Happily for himself, he had been carefully educated, and had industriously cultivated the usual modern accomplishments in the calm retirement of the University of Cambridge. He was so fortunate as to obtain a situation at Vienna, in a German family of high rank; and remained there for seven years, laying aside year by year a considerable portion of his liberal salary. When his pupils had grown up, his kind mistress procured for him a still more profitable position at St. Petersburg, where he remained for five more years, at the end of which time he yielded to a yearning that had been long growing upon him—an ardent desire to see his dear old country home once more. He loved the soil from which he had sprung. In all of her letter for some time past, his mother, Mrs. Winchester begged that whenever he felt himself justified in coming home, he would pay a long visit to the Winchester Estate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“I wish you could come home at Christmas,” she wrote, in the autumn of the year of which I am speaking. “We shall be very gay, and I expect all kinds of pleasant people at the Winchester. When he arrived there, the Old Winchester was in its glory, at about nine o’clock on a clear starlit night. A light frost whitened the broad sweeping lawns, 12,000 boxwood hedges that were winding through the garden, and the other 1,500 plants, trees and shrubs. From the music room at the end of the southern wing, to the heavily framed gothic windows of the old rooms on the north, there shone one blaze of light. The scene was reminiscent of some unusual place in a German legend; and young William half expected to see the lights fade out all in a moment, and long shingled façade wrapped in sudden darkness. The old butler, whom he remembered from his very infancy, and who did not seem to have grown a day older during his twelve years’ exile, came out of the dining-room as the footman opened the hall-door for him, and gave him a cordial welcome, nay insisted upon helping to bring in his portmanteau with his own hands, an act of unusual condescension, the full force of which was felt by his subordinates. “It is a real treat to see your pleasant face once more, William,” said this faithful retainer, as he assisted William to take off his travelling-cloak. “You have not aged a day since you used to live at the Winchester twelve year ago, and you are looking uncommon well; and, Lord love your heart, sir, how pleased they all will be to see you!” They arrived at last at a very comfortable room—a square tapes-tried chamber, with high ceiling support by a great mahogany beam. The room looked cheery enough, with a bright fire roaring in the wide chimney; but it had a somewhat ancient aspect, which the superstitiously inclined might have associated with possible ghosts. “We are in the East Wing, are we not?” young William asked. “This room seems quite strange to me. if I have ever been here before, I doubt it.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
“Very likely not, sir. Yes, this is the old East Wing that your mother once had boarded up. Your window looks out into the old stable-yard, where the kennel used to be in the time of your grandfather, when the Winchester was even a finer place than it is now. We are so full of company this winter, you see, sir, that we are obliged to make use of all these rooms. You will have no need to feel lonesome. There is Captain and Mrs. Foster in the next room to this, and the two Miss Griffins in the blue room opposite.” (Some believe that reopening the East Wing is what upset the spirits and caused the 1906 Earthquake.) Young William admired the perfect comfort of his chamber. Every modern appliance had been added to the ornate and ponderous furniture of an age gone by, and the combination produced a very pleasant effect. As he awoke in the morning and opened the door, Mrs. Winchester sailed in, looking radiant in a dark-green velvet dress richly trimmed with old point lace. Above her beauty, she had a charm of expression which was to most more rare and delightful than her beauty of feature and complexion. She put her arms around her son, and hugged him. “I have only this moment been told of your arrival, my dear William,” she said; “you look just like your father. My dear child, I have been looking forward so anxiously to your coming, and I should not have liked to see you for the first time before all those people. Welcome home. Remember, William, this house is always to be your home, whenever you have need of one.” William, being a hunting man. Had, indeed, a secret horror of the sport; for more than one scion of the house had perished untimely in the hunting-field. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The family had not been altogether a lucky one, in spite of its wealth and prosperity. It was not often that goodly heritage had descended to the Winchesters or their only son, William. Death in some form or other—on too many occasions a violent death—had come between the heir and his inheritance. And when one pondered on the dark pages in the story of the house, many wonder if Mrs. Winchester was ever troubled by morbid forebodings about her only and fondly loved son. Was there a ghost at the Winchester—that spectral visitant without which the state and plendour of a grand old house seem scarcely complete? Yes, many have heard vague hints of some shadowy presence that had been seen on rare occasions within the precincts of the Winchester mansion. Those whom were questioned were prompt to assure investigators that they had seen nothing. They had heard stories of the past—foolish legends, most likely, not worth listening to. On the property, there was once a stable-yard, a spacious quadrangle, surrounded by the closed doors of stable and dog-kennels: low massive buildings of grey stones, with the ivy creeping over them here and there, and with an ancient moss-grown look, that gave them a weird kind of interest. This range of stabling must have been disguised for a long time. The stables that were more recently used were a pile of handsome red-brick buildings at the other extremity of the house, to the rear of the music room, and forming a striking feature in the back view of the Winchester. According to legend, some believed that spectral entities, had been haunting the Winchester estate for centuries. Several large black dogs, with eyes large as saucers, or something flaming, appear and disappear, often without a trace. In many of the legends, the dogs are malevolent: assaulting guests, frightening livestock to death, attacking other dogs, and heralding death or disaster. Perhaps that is why the heirs of Winchester who have come to an untimely end have all died tragically. Oliver Winchester was killed in a dual. William Winchester I was murdered; and William Winchester II broke his back on his return home to the Winchester Estate. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The butler concealed the death of William Winchester II from Sarah, telling her simply that he was called away and said he would never return. Her heart was so broken that she wrote him out of existence, as if her had never been born. After the heartbreaking news that her only son has abandoned her, Mrs. Winchester was sitting in her blue séance room; half meditating, half dozing, mixing broken snatches of thought with brief glimpses of dreaming, when she was startled into wakefulness by a sound that was strange to her. It was a huntsman’s horn—a few low plaintive noes on a huntsman’s horn—notes which had a strange far-away sound, that was more unearthly than anything her ears ever heard. She thought of the music in Der Freischutz; but the weirdest snatch of melody Weber ever wrote had not so ghastly a sound as these few simple noes conveyed to her ear. She stood transfixed, listening to that awful music. It had grown dusk, her fire was almost out, and the room in shadow. As she listened, a light suddenly flashed on the wall before her. The light was as unearthly as the sound—a light that never shone from Earth or Sky. She ran to the window; for his ghastly shimmer flashed through the window upon the opposite wall. The great gates of the stable-yard were open, and men in scarlet coats were riding in, a pack of hounds crowding in before them, obedient to the huntsman’s whip. The whole scene was gleams of a lantern carried by one of the men. It was this lantern which had shone upon the tapestried wall. She saw the stable doors opened one after another; gentlemen and grooms alighting from their horses; the dogs driven into their kennel; the helpers hurrying to and fro; and that strange wan lantern-light glimmering hither and tither was the gathering dusk. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, there was no sound of horse’s hoof or of human voices—not one yelp or cry from the vicious looking hounds with flaming eyes. Since those faint far-away sounds of the horn had died out in the distance, the ghastly silence had been unbroken. As Mrs. Winchester stood at her window quite calmly and watched while the group of men and animals in the yard below noiselessly dispersed. There was nothing supernatural in the manner of their disappearance. The figures did not vanish nor melt into empty air. One by one she saw the horses led into their separate quarters; one by one the redcoats strolled out of the gates, and the grooms departed, some one way, some another. The scene, but for its noiselessness, was natural enough; and had she been a stranger in her own home, she might have fancied that those figures were real—those stables in full occupation. However, she knew that stable-yard and all its range of building to have been disused for more than half a century. Could she believe that, without an hour’s warning, the long-deserted quadrangle could be filled—the empty stalls tenanted? Had some hunting-party from the neighbourhood sought shelter there, glad to escape the pitiless rain? That was impossible, she thought. And yet the noiselessness, the awful sound of that horn—the strange unearthly gleam of that lantern! A cold sweat broke out on her forehead, and she trembled in every limb. Mrs. Winchester was pale as a ghost and trembling. Mrs. Winchester had kept the secret. That evening, the butler came to her. “Mrs. Winchester, there is no use in trying to hide it from you any longer. Your son was killed in the hunting-field, brought home dead one December night, an hour after his father and the rest of the party had come home to the Winchester. He was found by a labouring-man, poor lad, lying in a ditch with his back broken, and his horse beside him staked.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Shortly after Mr. Winchester Sr. never rode to hounds again, though he was passionately fond of hunting. Dogs and horses were sold, and the north quadrangle had been empty from that day. Some evil have come upon the Winchester mansion, it was not in human power to prevent its coming. Some had beheld the shadows of the dead. Sudden terror overcomes some visitors, even to this day. There are reports of an ominous danger, as people’s hearts grow cold while on tour. Staff have been startled by seeing a man, with is hat in his hand not in evening costume; a man with a pale anxious-looking face, peering cautiously into the room. Their first thought is of evil; but in the next moment than man disappears, and they see no more of him. Sometimes when flowers are placed in the house, people see the drooping moments later and lights dying out one by one in the brass sconces against the walls. It is no wonder Mrs. Winchester shut herself from the outer World, burying herself almost as completely as a hermit in its cell. While great wealth brings some people joy, there is some times a hefty fee. Be careful what you wish for, you never know who or what you might invite in your doors. I invoke and move thee, O thou Spirit Gusion and being exalted above ye in the power of the Most High, I say unto thee, Obey! in the name Beralensis, Baldachinesis, Paumachia, and Apologiae Sedes: and of the mighty ones who govern, spirits, Liachidae and ministers of the House of Death: and by the Chief Prince of the seat of Apologia in the Ninth Legion, I do invoke thee and by invoking conjure thee. And being exalted above ye in the power of the Most High, I say unto thee, Obey! in the name of him who spake and it was, to whom all creatures and things obey. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Moreover I, whom God made in the likeness of God, who is the creator according to his living breath, stir thee up in the name which is the voice of wonder of the mighty God, El, strong and unspeakable, O thou Spirit Gusion. And I say to thee obey, in the name of him who spake and it was; and in every one ye, O ye names of God! Moreover in the names Adonai, El, Elohim, Elohi, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, Zabaoth, Elion, Iah, Tetragrammaton, Shaddai, Lord God Most High, I stir thee up; and in our strength I say Obey! O Spirit Gusion. Appear unto His servants in a moment; before the circle in the likeness of man; and visit me in peace. And in the ineffable name Tetragrammaton Iehovah, I say, Obey! whose mighty sound being exalted in power the pillars are divided, the winds of the firmament groan aloud; the sire burns not; the Earth moves in Earthquakes; and all things of the house of Heaven and Earth and the dwelling-place of darkness are as Earthquakes, and are in torment, and are confounded in thunder. Come forth, O Spirit Gusion, in a moment: let thy dwelling-place be empty, apply unto us the secrets of Truth and obey my power. Come forth, visit us in peace, appear unto my eyes; be friendly: Obey the living breath! For I stir thee up in the name of God of Truth who liveth for ever, Helioren. Obey the living breath, therefore continually unto the end as my thoughts appear to my eyes: therefore be friendly: speaking the secrets of Truth in voice and in understanding. Let it be so, Truefold, whatever ill news has come to us we will hear it together. He put is arm round his wife’s waist. Both were pale as marble, both stood in stony stillness waiting for the bow that was to fall upon them. It is said that perhaps you will see a glimpse of Mrs. Winchester and Mr. Winchester, Sr., while on tour, if you repeat the invocation thirteen times before your visit. Life is broken for her, there hah passed a glory from Earth, and that upon all pleasures and joys of this World she looks with the solemn calm of one for whom all things are dark with the shadow of a great sorrow. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
We’re one week away from Friday the 13th! Missed out on tickets for Flashlight Tours? Don’t worry, we have ghoulishly fun plans All Hallows’ Eve 👻🎃🍿🏠
All Hallows’ Eve:
👉 link in bio. 🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
The Earth Dries Up and Withers, the World Languishes and Withers!
They say what you send around, comes around. Perhaps that is true, even if it takes a thousand years. Everyone is born. Everyone will die. This is the short summary of life. Although it is accurate, the story certainly leaves out a lot, does it not? How might we develop a fuller picture of what happens during a lifetime? Perhaps we can begin by studying interesting lives. We are all affected by the same universal principles that guide human development. Each of us will face problems on the path to healthy development. Some obstacles, such as learning to walk of finding a personal identity, are universal. Others are unusual or specialized. The challenges of development extend far beyond childhood and into old age. There really is no such thing as a “typical person” or a “typical life.” Nevertheless, broad similarities can be found in the life stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood, and old age. Each stage confronts a person with new developmental tasks that must be mastered for optimal development. The spread of industrialism was dependent upon the synchronization of human behaviour with the rhythms of the machines. Synchronization was one of the guiding principles of Second Wave civilization, and everywhere the people of industrialism appeared to outsiders to be time-obsessed, always glancing nervously as their watches. To bring about this time-consciousness and achieve synchronization, however, people’s basic assumptions about time—their mental images of time—had to be transformed. A new “software of time” was needed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Agricultural populations, needing to know when to plant and when to harvest, developed remarkable precision in the measurement of long spans of time. However, because they did not require close synchronization of human labour, peasant peoples seldom developed precise units for measuring short spans. They typically divided time not into fixed units, like hours or minutes, but into loose, imprecise chunks representing the length of time needed to perform some homely task. A farmer might refer to an interval as “a cow milking time.” In Madagascar, an accepted unit of time was called “a rice cooking”; a moment was known as “the frying of a locust.” Englishmen spoke of a “pater noster wyle”—the time needed for a prayer—or, more earthily, of a “pissing while.” Similarly, because there was little exchange between one community or village and the next, and because work did not require it, the units in which time was mentally packaged varied from place to place and season to season. In medieval northern Europe, for example, daylight was divided into equal hours. However, since the interval between dawn and sunset varied from day to day, an “hour” in December was shorter than an “hour” in March or June. Instead of vague intervals like a pater noster wyle, industrial societies needed extremely precise units like hour, minute, or second. And these units had to be standardized, interchangeable from one season or community to the next. Today the entire World is neatly divided into time zones. We speak of “standard” time. Pilots all over the globe refer back to “Zulu” time—id est, Greenwich Mean Time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
By international convention Greenwich, England, became the point from which all time differences would be measured. Periodically, in unison, as though motivated by a single will, millions of people set their clocks back or forward an hour, and whatever our inner, subjective sense of things may tell us when time is dragging, or conversely when it seems to be whizzing by, and hour is now a single interchangeable, standardized hour. Second Wave civilization did more than cut time up into more precise and standard chunks. It also placed these chunks in a straight line that extended indefinitely back into the past and forward into the future. It made time linear. Indeed, the assumption that time is linelike is so deeply embedded in our thoughts that it is hard for those of us raised in Second Wave societies to conceive of any alternative. Yet many preindustrial societies, and some First Wave societies even today, see time as a circle, not a straight line. From the Mayas to the Buddhists and the Hindus, time was circular and repetitive, history repeating itself endlessly, lives perhaps reliving themselves through reincarnation. The idea that time was like a great circle is fond in the Hindu concept of recurrent kalpas, each one four thousand million years long, each representing but a single Brahma day beginning with re-creation, ending in dissolution, and beginning again. The notion of circular time is found in Plato and Aristotle, one of whose students, Eudemus, pictured himself living through the same moment again and again as the cycle repeated itself. It was taught by Pythagoras. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
In Time and Eastern Man, Joseph Needham tells us that “For the Indo-Hellenic…time is cyclical and eternal.” Moreover, while in China the idea of linear time dominated, according to Needham, “Cyclical time was certainly prominent among the early Taoist speculative philosophers.” In Europe, too, in the centuries preceding industrialization, these alternative views of time coexisted. “Throughout the whole medieval period,” writes mathematician G. J. Whitrow, “the cyclic and linear concepts of time were in conflict. The linear concept was fostered by the mercantile class and the rise of a money economy. For as long as power was concentrated in the ownership of land, time was felt to be plentiful and was associated with the unchanging cycle of soil.” As the Second Wave gathered force this ago-old conflict was settled: liner time triumphed. Linear time became the dominant view in every industrial society, East or West. Time came to be seen as a highway unrolling from a distant past through the present toward the future, and this conception of time, alien to billions of humans who lived before industrial civilization, became the basis of all economic suit of IBM, the Japanese Economic Planning Agency, or the Soviet Academy. It is worth noting, however, that linear time was a precondition for indust-real views of evolution and progress. Liner time made evolution and progress plausible. For if time were circular instead of linelike, if events doubled back on themselves instead of moving in a single direction, it would mean that history repeated itself and the evolution and progress were no more than illusions—shadows on the wall of time. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
Synchronization Standardization. Linearization. They affected the root assumption of civilization and they brought massive changes in the way ordinary people handled time in their loves. However, if time itself was transformed, space, too, had to be repackaged to fit into the new indust-reality. Then suddenly in the 1950s, urban-based intellectual discovered the suburbs. And what they discovered, to their horror, was an aesthetic and social dreamland filled with beautiful, new tract housing with big emerald green lawns, trees, bushes, and flowers, station wagons, sports cars and sedans, and organization men, housewives, and children. However, attention was riveted almost exclusively on the supposed negative consequences of city-oriented intellectuals, particularly those living in New York City, was that the postwar suburbs were an unmitigated aesthetic and social disaster. Suburbia was equated with the emergence of a popular mass culture dominated by the mass media. The neatness and repetitiveness of popular taste was blamed on the suburbs. They became a scapegoat for all that the cosmopolitan critics disliked about modern life. Often, this was accompanied with glorification of the past. In The City History Lewis Mumford bemoaned the growth of middle-class suburbs: “While the suburbs served only a favored minority, it neither spoiled the countryside nor threatened the city. But now that the drift to the outer ring has become a mass movement, it tends to destroy both environments without producing anything but a dreary substitute, devoid of form and even more devoid of the original suburban values.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
Further this mass exodus to suburbia was resulting in: “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, in uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated food, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold manufacture in the central metropolis (Mumford, 1961, p. 486). Mr. Mumford, like other cosmopolitan critics, seemed particularly offended that suburbia was developing not as planned communities for those of taste, but as mass suburbanization for the common man. Often, as in the above quotation, the characteristics of the housing and the characteristics of the suburban residents were directly linked. And both were clearly found wanting. The critics embraced an extreme form of environmental determinism in which the characteristics of the area determined the character of the inhabitants. According to a 1964 New York Times Magazine article by elitist Ada Louise Huxtable, the long-time New York Times architecture critic, “It is a shocking fact that more than 90 percent of builders’ homes are not designed by architects…and the consequent damage “is social, cultural, psychological, and emotional, as well as aesthetic” (Ada Louise Huxtable, “Clusters Instead of Slurbs,” New York Times Magazine, February 9, 1964, pp. 37-44). #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
Suburbia was thought by some to be a dismal place where mediocrity ruled and about which no intellectual could say anything favourable—even if they lived in one. The same biased criticism of popular tastes and cultural uniformity was delivered with far more humour in Malvina Reynolds’s folksong “Little Boxes.” Sung for decades by Pete Seeger to the point where it has become an American classic, the opening lines to the lyrics are: “Little Boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. There’s a green one and pink one and a blue one and a yellow one and they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.” This point that the little boxes and the people who lived in them are all the same was a core belief of the city-based intellectual critics of suburbs. It was a given that suburbs bred conformity. Ironically, the children born in the little boxes would spawn the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. It was the children of the suburbs who celebrated at Woodstock and Coachella. It should also be noted that this pattern of urban cities detailing the ills of suburbia is not a phenomenon common only to earlier decades. Even in 1993, in The New York Times, one could find a feature article bemoaning the isolation and lack of intellectual and cultural activities in suburbia, As stated in the article, “escapees from Manhattan have found that along with the gains have come unexpected nuisances, even deep feelings of loss. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
“And what is more, the unpleasant surprises are often the flip side of precisely the attractions that drew them to the suburbs in the first place. The emigres discover they can walk virtually anywhere at night without fear. But where to walk? So few places worth walking are open after dark…Some discover that at times their snug home on its separate lot, without a doorman downstairs or neighbor above and below, makes them feel lonely and more vulnerable, not more secure. And when pipes leak and the heat shuts off, they learn that the joys of the suburbs do not include supers” (Joseph Berger, “Emigres in Suburbs Find Life’s Flip Side,” New York Times, January 24, 1993, Metro p.30). Sounds a lot like satire. Nonetheless, there are significant differences between contemporary articles, such as that quoted above, and the typical piece written during earlier decades. While both might decry the absences of all-night take-out, current articles acknowledge that in addition to the opera, the city also has serious problems, such as old buildings with pest, noise, foul smells, a high density of unfriendly people packed into one place, lack of privacy and family values, political tensions are more visible, there are issues with parking and traffic, poor air quality, the menace of muggers and aggressive panhandlers. Contemporary laments are also less likely to be angry diatribes and more likely to be done tongue-in-cheek, with humour. Finally, the authors of contemporary suburban criticisms are more likely to be themselves suburbanites. They miss the city, but they, like most Americans having the choice, have chosen to live elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
The writer of the New York Times piece, for example, had moved to Westchester from the West Side of Manhattan some twenty months earlier. Envy impedes our spiritual growth and harms our relationship with others. Yet with hard work and the Lord’s help, it can be overcome. Most of us will experience envy at one time or another. The danger comes when we remain unaware of our envy or do not handle it appropriately; then it has the potential to harm us and may cause us to think or act badly toward others. “For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work,” reports James 3.16. However, by eliminating envy, we can improve our relationships with others and our view of ourselves. When we realize we are not competing with others, we can then rejoice in their accomplishments. The practice of comparing ourselves to others is usually at the root of envy. It causes us to feel that we are not good enough and that in order to be acceptable we have to achieve more, acquire more, or in other ways appear to be “better” than others. It occurs when we do not value ourselves sufficiently as children of God and consequently feel we have to prove our worth by “doing” or “having.” Envy is a form of pride. Pride can create enmity, or hatred, which separates us from our fellow humans. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. Part of the reason envy can be so difficult to recognize in ourselves is that it often disguises itself in other feelings and behaviours. One disguise envy wears is the tendency to criticize. Another is the desire to act in a way that will provoke envy in others. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
The good news is, once we unmask envy and begin to eliminate it, we can begin to feel much better about ourselves and others around us. Like layers of accumulated paint, envy covers our true worth, making it difficult to see ourselves accurately and change our beliefs so that we can feel better about ourselves. There are at least five reason why we need to be concerned about envy in ourselves: it blocks us from growing spiritually, it keeps us from having pure motives, it creates an “us against them” mentality, it can make us feel negative toward others, and a desire to be envied can cause others to feel negative toward us. When we grow up feeling that we are not loved for who we are and instead are criticized or are valued for how we compare to others, we can develop the habit of looking outside ourselves to feel good. People who try to pump up their self-worth by gaining the admiration of others for their thought or knowledge in reality may be suffering from a lack of understanding of their worth, and their true relation to God. However, as children of our Heavenly Father, each of us has inherent worth and has been endowed with divine potential. “We are the children of God,” the Apostle Paul declared, “and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ,” reports Romans 8.16-17. Many of us have inner standards of excellence and perfection that are hard or even impossible to meet, often causing emotional pain. We may have a hard time admitting mistake and living with imperfections. If not careful, we can end up envious of those who seem to achieve more or seem more comfortable being imperfect. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
It was once written “To oneself be true.” But who do we know who we are? One must learn to focus one’s assertive aggressive and hostile feelings, so that these do no suffuse too many inappropriate parts of oneself or one’s World. Learn to become less hostile and become more approachable so that better contact can be obtained from those you know and work with. This will allow anxiety to diminish. Self-acceptance is also useful in attacking the inner voices which persecuted oneself at times, denying one right to life and happiness. Having established the right to live, and a channel through which love and care can reach one, one will began to take an interest in the wide and varied World of other people and things. Having established the rudiment of self, mental illness can come to an end and one can be engaged in intellectual activity, accomplishing good work with success and ease. One may not only remain cured, without any recurrences of pathology, but one’s personality may continue to develop and may gain in strength. The basic anxiety-producing conflicts in human beings are no over the “gratification of desires” but over the frightening struggle to maintain themselves in existence at all as genuine individual persons. Of course guilt is a real experience and must be accepted, and there is no therapeutic result unless feelings of guilt are cleared up, but guilt is no at the core of psychological distress. Pathological guilt is a struggle to maintain object-relations, a defence against disintegration, and is a state of mind that is preferred to being undermined by irresistible fears. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The core of psychological distress is simply elementary fear, however much it gets transformed into guilt: fear carrying with it the feeling of weakness and inability to cope with life, fear possessing the psyche to such an extent that “ego-experience” cannot get started. People are dependent on the opportunities which the environment offers; one’s potentialities flourish best in an environment that understands, supports, and encourages individual growth. If the environment is unsatisfactory, development may be distorted or arrested. The True Self is as yet only potential; it will not be realized in unfavourable circumstances. Vulnerability to separation-anxiety exists when the human being is not ego-related. Ego-relatedness allows the individual to be protected by the presence of others without being impinged on by them. Given this, the vulnerable individual is able to develop in one’s individual way, without fear either of devastating loneliness or of devastating damage. People can begin to experience separateness from others, without losing one’s sense of security. The sense of belonging, of being securely in touch, as it grows in an individual by virtue of having relationships that are reliable, becomes an established property of one’s own psyche. When people feel totally secure and invulnerable, they gain proof that their trust is justified by finding they have experienced stable relationships in life. People who have not had enough of this good experience are excessively vulnerable to even the slightest loss of support. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Their chronic overdependence is a genuine compulsion which they cannot evade by effort, will-power, or intellectual understanding. Their only hope is to find someone who can understand them and help them grow out of it. That is what psychotherapy is. The need is for a relationship in which people can experience being securely held while they venture to be in touch with thoughts, feelings, or parts of the self from which fear has long kept them estranged. “Love made angry” is what happens when you want love from a person who is not giving it—you become angry with them in an attempt to force the to give what you want. This is called “coercive anger.” Obviously, at some point this anger must lead to worry hat your anger will drive away the very person you need, and for some this will lead on to guilt at having hurt the feelings of someone they care about. Not getting what you want, worrying about losing a loved person, having to live without love and mutual concern, makes you depressed as well as angry. One the bright side, however, you may in your anger turn to another person in the hope that they will love you better and so you have another chance. “Love made hungry” describes the view of the schizoid position. When you cannot get what you want from the person you love and need, it may be that instead of getting angry you simply feel more and more needy, with an ever stronger craving to get total possession of the loved person, to ensure that you will never be left wanting. However, then you may be visited by the terrible fear that your love has become so overwhelming and devouring that it will destroy your loved one, and that then there will be nothing left of them. And indeed, this can happen. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
The depression which comes from this craving brings aloofness with it: you withdraw from loving because loving destroys those you love. In this case, there is no second chance, because if that is what you believe to be the nature of love and this is what you do, you dare not love anyone for fear that it will lead to the destruction either of them or of you. The love-made-angry depressed person looks on one’s loved one as a hateful denier (a Rejecting Object), while the love-made-hungry schizoid person sees one’s beloved as a desirable deserter (an Exciting Frustrating Object) never to be fully possessed. When people reaching out and finding nothing there, the individual’s excitement about life meets with no response in the World of other people and things, so that one must turn back on oneself and be satisfied with one’s phantasies of what one wants, ceasing to look for satisfaction in a World devoid of interest. (In psycho-analytic language, cathexis is withdrawn from the object-World.) This sense of emptiness and void may be experienced where there would normally be connection with people and things, so that the individual feels one has nothing to hang on to and lacks any sense of secure attachment. In this case, one experiences their loved one’s as void and emptiness. At other times, void and emptiness may be experienced as coming from the self, as a frequent experience of hunger, for instance—the individual experiencing oneself as hungry-empty-needy-urgent-demanding-greedy-tearing-emptying in relation to their loved ones. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Every human must confront the monster within oneself, if one is ever to find peace without. There is always a two-endednes of relationships. This is not the case when one end of the relationship is experienced as not there: the experience that “the World is empty and des not hold anything for me” may be equivalent to “I am empty and cannot hold anything or anyone securely. Similarly “I am empty and will destroy, swallow, overwhelm the World” may be experienced as indistinguishable from “The World is empty and will overwhelm, destroy, swallow me.” People may experience all these possibilities, either simultaneously or in mood-swings up and down consecutively, however mutually contradictory they may seem to common sense (or rather to the “Central Ego”). Some people dread entering personal relationships which demand deep and genuine feeling on both sides. Such people may have felt compelled to withdraw heir consciousness into a relatively small area because, although their need for love is as great as anyone’s, it operates at the emotional level of absolute infantile dependence filled with need and greed and the terror of abandonment. At that level, dimly aware of their enormous need, they feel faced with risk of total loss and destruction, both of themselves and of those they love. It is the form their own love has taken and they have little knowledge of any other. Loving, therefore, seems to present them with a terrifying choice, in which both alternatives lead to loss and destruction for someone. If they let themselves be loved, that means they must let themselves be swallowed up and taken over: they must be totally compliant and cease to be an individual. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
If they let themselves love other people, this means that they themselves will inevitably take them over, insisting on their total compliance and swallowing them whole. Then the loved ones will disappear as real people. In this plight, some people try to comprise. This is called the in/out programme. Driven by their need to love and be with others, they go into a relationship but at once feel driven out again by their fear of exhausting the person they love with the demands they want to make on them, or by their fear of losing themselves through overdependence and compliance. Others escape this painful oscillation by withdrawing from feelings and relationships altogether. They then feel a dreadful meaningless emptiness. Their consciousness is confirmed to the unfeeling Central Ego, which relates only to idealized perfectly good and perfectly bad “inner objects.” Such uncomplicated phantasy-figures are all that they (selectively) perceive of all that the varied World of people and things has to offer. Libidinal relationships are quite disowned, though anti-libidinal ones may be used to keep libidinal strivings down. We can imagine spouses who feel like this being emotionless and unresponsive when their loved one’s tries to relate to them. We can imagine the dependent loved one’ greed for love and their fear of needing it. We can imagine the dependent loved one summoning up all their strength, in turn, to avoid evidence of feeling, and maturing, and becoming independent or single or having to be more of a provider in life. Out of experience in the World, from infancy onward, we form schema—ways of organizing and interpreting reality. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Lacking a schema to interpret ambiguous aspects of life, one probably does not form rational ideas about things they do not understand. As one continues to focus on reality, their mind struggles to make sense out of the apparent chaos. With patience one eventually imposes order, by seeing a reality that makes sense to them. Note, that once your mind forms a social construction of reality it controls your perception—so much so that it becomes virtually impossible not to perceive the many things that we take for granted and believe are objective reality are actually socially constructed, and thus, can change as society changes. The theory of social constructionism states that meaning and knowledge are socially created, and our assumptions and expectations may give us a perceptual set—a predisposition to interpret an ambiguous stimulus one way rather than another. Social constructionist believe that things are generally viewed as natural or normal in society, such as understandings of gender, race, class, and disability, are socially constructed, and consequently are not an accurate reflection of reality. Once preliminary hunches are formed based on a certain construction of reality, even if it is badly distorted, they interfere with accurate perceptions. Having formed a wrong idea about reality, people have more difficulty seeing the truth. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we being to the experience. Social constructs are often created within specific institutions and cultures and come to prominence in certain historical periods. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Our expectations influence how we see things. To see is to believe, but social constructs’ dependence of historical, political, and economic conditions can lead them to evolve and change. For all these reasons, religious perceptions depend on the state of the perceiver as well as on external reality. Depending on one’s perceptual set, a thought that pops into the mind while meditating may be perceived as a random cognition or as the still small voice of God. Moses perceived his burning bush and mountaintop experiences through the eyes of faith and thus assigned them a profound religious significance that would have been meaningless to someone lacking one’s perceptual sets. Imagine yourself looking with a friend at a clear night sky. Your friend points overhead and says, “Do you see the Little Bear?” Looking at the very same stars, you cannot perceive what your friend so clearly sees. Why? Because your friend, having taken the trouble to study star patterns, has eyes to see what you are not ready to notice. Similarly, people may see the Heavens, which declare the glory of God, yet not see that the Heavens, which declare the glory of God, yet not see that the Heavens are declaring God’s glory. Only the heart that already has faith will see the Heavens in the way. The point has been recognized even by religious skeptics, such as the philosopher Paul Kurtz: “I have wondered at times: Is it I who lacks religious sense, and is this due to a defeat of character? The tone-deaf are unable to fully appreciate the intensity of music, and the color-blind live in the World denuded of brightness and hue.” #RandolphHarrs 18 of 25
To have a religious experience is thus to assign sensory experience spiritual significance. It is to interpret phenomena with an awareness of the presence of God. Those who have a schema for interpreting life through the eyes of faith are like those who have a schema for perceiving the dalmatian: they have difficulty viewing things another way, yet sometimes find I hard to get others to see reality as they do. To refer simply to “religious experiences” as if we all knew exactly what we meant by them and had an agreed-upon definition would be naïve. In different religious traditions and in different historical epochs religious experience has referred to many different things. In the last few decades there has been, within the Christian tradition, a wide resurgence of interest in unusual religious experience. What are we to make of them? In the 1950s, Aldous Huxley invited his readers to take advantage of mind-altering drugs to give them new spiritual experiences. In the 1970s, Timothy Leary was a great advocate of altering consciousness with hallucinogenic drugs. Sadly, today, we are living with the tragic consequences to many of those who followed Leary’s advice and who now suffer. Even so, many of the drug takers longed for better spiritual awareness. However, if religious experience can be induced through drugs, what are we to make of what we believe are normal religious experiences? How can we properly understand them and derive the greatest benefit from them? Furthermore, how do we answer those who set aside all religious experiences on the grounds that we can give them an explanation in terms of psychology or physiology? The great philosopher Bertrand Russell, for example, asked, “What is the difference between a person who drinks alcohol and sees green snakes, and a person who half starves himself to death and sees God?” #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
We know from the use of hallucinogenic drugs, as well as from the agonizing experiences of some mentally ill people, that religious experiences can be a sign of psychopathology. The hardheaded and previously skeptical philosopher Simone Weil did not regard her spontaneous mystical experiences as proof of reality of God or of the truth of Christian doctrines. Rather, she saw the as drawing attention to, or helping to focus upon, a spiritual understanding of the things of this World: “If I light an electric torch at night, I don’t judge its power by looking at the bulb, but by seeing how many objects it lights up. The brightness of a source of light is appreciated by the illumination it projects upon non-luminous. The value of a religious or, more generally, a spiritual way of life is appreciated by the amount of illumination thrown up the things of this World.” It is not the experience that matters but the effects of that experience. The evidences for the reality of a spiritual experience should be seen in the subsequent life of the experiencer. The changed life of apostle Paul is the classic example of this. Spiritual experiences matter, but feelings are not the ultimate criterion for judging spirituality. Rather, “you will know them by their fruits.” With the schema of faith, a whole set of perceptions forcefully takes hold of one’s consciousness. Jesus Christ is perceived not as a psychotic but an incarnation of God. The Universe is seen not as a meaningless material reality, but as God’s creative handiwork—the ultimate miracle that makes little sense without a Creator. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
Life itself takes on purpose in a World where humans are viewed as called to recognize their limits and their value to their Creator, to assume their responsibility for the Earth and for each other’s welfare, and to serve and enjoy God forever. Lord, please open our eyes that we may see. Keep vivid in your memory the many splendid exploits of the Holy Fathers of the desert. In their lives true religious perfection has shone out like a flaming beacon on a hill. Sad to say, what we have been able to accomplish in our own modest lives adds up to a guttering candle. As Saints and friends of Christ, they served the Lord in famine and drought, coldness and nakedness, labour and fatigue, vigils and fasts, holy prayers and meditations, persecutions and derisions. Oh, how they suffered, the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Confessors, the Virgins, and all the rest who followed close upon the footsteps of Christ! They did the evangelical thing, at least as described by John (12.25), dispossessing their souls in this World that they might possess them in the next. Oh, how isolated and dedicated was the life of the Holy Fathers led in the desert! Their temptations were long and lurid, but they managed to endure. The Enemy harassed them suddenly and frequently. Just as sudden and frequent were the prayers they shot to Heaven. Their abstinences were rugged, but they managed to swallow their hunger. Crazed was their desire for spiritual progress! Feverish was their battle against what seemed the overwhelming supremacy of their vices! #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Through it all they held fast to God. Through the day they worked hard and prayed quietly to survive their harsh life; through the night they prayed, even in their sleep, their snores rising like incense to the Lord. Every hour of work seemed too long; every hour of prayer, too short. Making time to eat was impossible. The sweetness of contemplation was irresistible. All wealth, title, and honour, every friend and relative, they renounced. Nothing that smacked of all the World did they want to have. The necessities of life they scarcely touched. The pangs in their stomachs they begrudgingly satisfied. And so poor were they in the things of this World, but rich, so very rich, in graces and virtues! They were ravaged on the outside, but on the inside they were refreshed with Grace and Divine Consolation. The Fathers of the desert were aliens in their own World, but close family friends with God. In their own eyes self-esteem had no value, and hence they dressed like castaways. However, in the eyes of God they were precious, chosen ones, and further haberdashery was far from their minds. They stood in True Humility; they lived in Simple Obedience; they walked in Charity and Patience. And so daily they progressed in spirit and obtained great grace in God’s presence. They have been given as examples to all Religious and ought to rouse us to more spiritual progress. Standing in opposition to them are the Tepids, milling around every which way, affirming and denying, mummering and murmuring, whispering the rest of the World to a spiritual standstill. Religious orders, when they were founded, were quite remarkable gardens. Hotbeds of fervour they were. Their prayers were awash with devotion. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Their virtue was pruned and precise. Discipline, sometimes harsh and heavy-handed, took root. Under the rule of their Founder, and indeed under the inspiration of the Founder of Founders, Reverence and Obedience walked hand-in-hand down the garden path. These truly holy and perfect men poured out their lives in the strenuous fight against the World. The footprints they left behind are visible to this day. Odd thing, though. Today’s self-actualized, who is anything but exceptional when compared to the self-actualized of old, seems to be the exception to the rule; that is to say, one is thought to be observant and does no rock the boat, but there is not a great deal else that one does. Ah, the laziness and sloppiness of the religious life today! What Worldly winds could have cooled he fervour of our white-hot forge! Whatever happened to Motivation and Enthusiasm? They are nowhere to be seen! Is it any wonder, then, that the desire to live the religious life has decreased? Once so awake during the nocturnal watch, now you are found snoring on the battlement. Is this any way to live the religious life? And you of all people! You have had the privilege of meeting many of the devout Religious in your own community in the generation just passed. In Earth Prayers, the pain of the Earth is expressed. Knowing that the World is an intricate balance of parts we see that if one of the parts is sick or wounded, its plight and suffering affects us all. Here we humble ourselves before all creation and allow the outcries of despair from around the globe to touch our hearts, opened by the realization of an ecological self. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
Today the ability of the Earth to support life is being deeply eroded. The evidence is everywhere. We are mindlessly destroying the very web of life; millions of people are dying each year as a result of direct ecological collapse. Within the animal and plant kingdoms we are witnessing the greatest holocaust in history. Millions of species are on the verge of extinction. The old forests are being felled, the top soil washed away, and the groundwater contaminated. The air is polluted and the ran is acid. So the litany goes on, as every aspect of life on the planet is profoundly altered by the way our culture has organized the business of its existence. They have lost it, lost it, and their children will never even wish for it—and I am afraid…because the sun keeps rising and these days nobody sings. While many of us are aware of the destruction taking place on our planet, it is difficult to integrate this knowledge into our daily life. What do we do when it is not war that is killing us, but progress? When the problem is not the actions of an evil “other,” but ourselves? We fear the despair such information provokes. We do not want to feel the grief over all that is lost, nor our own complicity in the damage. This denial of feeling takes a heavy toll on us, impoverishing our sensory and emotional life. Ultimately, it puts us out of touch with reality. There is a historical tradition of prayer that foresees the ruination of the World because of human transgression. We find in the Old Testament, we find it again in the prayers of Native Americas as they witness the destruction of their way of life by conquerors. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
We are hearing it again now, as citizens from around the World express their fears and their grief at what is happening to the Earth. We have forgotten who are are. We have sought only our own security, we have exploited simply for our own ends, we have distorted our knowledge, we have abused our power. “The Earth dries up and withers, the World languishes and withers, the Heavens languish together with the Earth. The Earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statues, broken the everlasting covenant,” reports Isaiah 24.4-5. We therefore hope in Thee, O Lord our God, that we may soon behold the glory of Thy might, when Thou wilt remove the abominations from the Earth and when all idolatry will be abolished. We hope for the day when the World will be perfected under the Kingdom of the Almighty, and all humankind will call upon Thy name; when Thou wilt turn unto Thyself all the wicked of the Earth. May all the inhabitants of the World perceive and know that unto Thee every knee must bend, every tongue vow loyalty. Before Thee, O Lord our God, may they bow in worship, giving honour unto Thy glorious name. May they all accept the yoke of Thy Kingdom and do Thou rule over them speedily and forevermore. For the Kingdom is Thine and to tall eternity Thou wilt reign in glory; as it is written in Thy Holy Bible: The Lord shall reign for ever and ever. And it has been foretold: The Lord shall be King over all the Earth; on that day the Lord shall be One, and His name One. After some weeks on a healthy diet, the intellectual type of person will find, as I found, that there is greater mental clarity and greater mental drive. In fact, there may even be a tendency to overwork intellectually in reading and writing. A century ago, John Linton, of England, reported the result of a long period on a healthy diet in these words: “I was able to write with an ease and perspicacity and satisfaction which I had never before known, or had any idea of.” #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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Many People Feel Alone in the World in a Very Painful Way!
As machines grow more human, we must be weary that we do not become less so. The businessmen, intellectuals, and revolutionaries of the early industrial period were virtually mesmerized by machinery. They were fascinated by steam engines, clocks, looms, pumps, and pistons, and they constructed endless analogies based on the simple mechanistic technologies of their time. It was no accident that man like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were scientists and inventors as well as political revolutionaries. They grew up in the churning culture wake of Sir Isaac Newton’s great discoveries. Newton had searched the Heavens and concluded the entire Universe was a giant clockwork operating with exact mechanical regularity. La Mettrie, the French physician and philosopher, in 1748 declared man himself to be a machine. Adam Smith later extended the analogy of the machine to economic, arguing that the economy is a system and that system “in many respects resembles machines.” James Madison, in describing the debates that led to the United States Constitution, spoke of the need to “remodel” the “system,” to change the “structure” of political power, and to choose officials through “successive filtrations.” The Constitution itself was filled with “checks and balances” like the inner work of a giant clock. Jefferson spoke of the “machinery of government.” American political thinking continued to reverberate with the sound of flywheels, chains, gears, check and balances. Thus Martin Van Buren invented the “political machine” and eventually New York City has its Tweed machine, Tennessee it Crump machines, New Jersey its Hague machine. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Generations of American politicians, right down to the present, prepared political “blueprints,” “engineered elections,” “steam-rollered” or “railroaded” bills through Congress and the state legislatures. In the nineteenth century in Britain, Lord Cromer conceived of an imperial government that would “ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine.” Nor was this mechanistic mentality a produce of capitalism. Lenin, for example, described the state as “nothing more than a machine used by the capitalist to suppress the workers.” Trotsky spoke of “all the wheels and screws of the bourgeois social mechanism” and went on to describe the function of a revolutionary party in similarly mechanical phrases. Terming it a powerful “apparatus,” he pointed out that “as with any mechanism this is in itself static…the movement of the masses has…to overcome dead inertia…Thus, the living force of steam has to overcome the inertia of the machine before it can set the flywheel in motion.” Drenched in such mechanistic thinking, imbued with an almost blind faith in the power and efficiency of machines, the revolutionary founds of Second Wave societies, whether capitalist or socialist, not surprisingly invented political institutions that shared many of the characteristics of early industrial machines. The structures they hammered and bolted together were based on the elemental notion of representation. And in every country they made use of certain standard parts. These components came out of what might be called, only half facetiously, a universal represento-kit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The components were: Individuals armed with the vote, parties for collecting votes, candidates who, by winning votes, were instantly transformed into “representatives” of the voters, legislatures (parliaments, diets, congress, bundestages, or assemblies) in which, by voting, representatives manufactured laws, executives (presidents, prime ministers, party secretaries) who fed raw materials into the lawmaking machine in the form of policies, and then enforced the resulting laws. Votes were the “atom” of Newtonian mechanism. Votes were aggregated by parties, which served as the “manifold” of the system. They gathered votes from many sources and fed the into the electoral adding machine, which blended them in proportion to party strength or mixture, producing as its output the “will of the people”—the basic fuel that supposedly powered the machinery of government. The parts of this kit were combined and manipulated in different ways in different places. In some places everyone over the age of twenty-one was permitted to vote; elsewhere only Caucasian males were enfranchised; in one country the entire process was merely a façade for control by a dictator; in another the elected officials actually wielded considerable power. Here there were two parties, there a multiplicity of parties, elsewhere only one. Nevertheless, the historical pattern is clear. However the parts might be modified or configured, this same basic kit was used in constructing the formal political machinery of all industrial nations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Even though Communists frequently attacked “bourgeois democracy” and “parliamentarianism” as a mask for privilege, arguing that the mechanisms were usually manipulated by the capitalist class for its own private gain, all socialist industrial nations installed similar representational machines as soon as possible. While holding forth a promise of “direct democracy” in some far-off post-representational era, they relied heavily in the meantime on “socialist representative institutions.” The Hungarian Communist Otto Bihari, in a study of these institutions, writes, “in the course of election the will of the working people makes its influence felt in the governmental organs called to life by voting.” The editor of Pravada, V.G. Afanasyev, in his book The Scientific Management of Society defines “democratic centralism” as including “the sovereign power of the working people…the election of governing bodies and leaders and their accountability to the people.” Just as the factory came to symbolize the entire industrial techno-sphere, representative government (no matter how denatured) became the status symbol of every “advanced” nation. Indeed, even many non-industrial nations—under pressure from colonizers or through blind imitation—rushed to install the same formal mechanisms and used the same universal represento-kit. Nor were these “democracy machines” restricted to the national level. They were installed at state, provincial, and local levels as well, right down to the town or village council. Today in the United States of America alone there are at least some five-hundred thousand elected public officials and 85,000 local governmental units in metropolitan areas, each with its own elections, representative bodies, and election procedures. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Thousands of these representational machines are creaking and grinding away in nonmetropolitan regions, and tens of thousands more around the World. In Swiss cantons and French departments, in the counties of Britain and the provinces of Canada, in the vivodships of Poland and the republics of Russia, in Singapore and Haifa, Osaka, and Oslo, candidates run for office and are magically transmuted into “representatives.” It is safe to say that more than one-hundred thousand of these machines are now manufacturing laws, decrees, regulations, and rules in Second Wave countries alone. Apart from governments as such, virtually all the political parties of industrialism, from extreme right to extreme left, routinely went through the traditional motions of choosing their own leaders by vote. Even contests for precinct-level or local cell leadership typically required some form of election, if only for the ratification of choices made from above. And in many countries the ritual of election became a standard part of the life of all sorts of other organizations, from trade unions and churches to Cub Scout packs. Voting became part of the industrial way of life. In theory, just as each huma being and each vote was a discrete, atomic unit, each of these political units—national, provincial, and local—was also regarded as discrete and atomic. Each had its own carefully defined jurisdiction, its own powers, its own rights and duties. The units were wired together in hierarchical arrangements, from top to bottom, from nation to state or region or local authority. However, as industrialism matured and the economy grew increasingly integrated, decisions taken by each of these political units touched off effects outside its own jurisdiction, thereby causing other political bodies to act in response. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
A decision by the Diet regarded the Japanese textile industry could influence employment in North Carolina and welfare services in Chicago. A congressional vote to put quotas on foreign automobiles could make additional work for local governments in Nagoya or Turin. Thus while at one time politicians could make a decision without upsetting conditions outside their own neatly defined jurisdiction, this became less and less possible. By the mid-twentieth century, tens of thousands of ostensibly sovereign or independent political authorities, stretching around the planet, were connected to one another through the circuits of the economy, through vastly increased travel, migration, and communication, so that they continually activated and excited one another. The thousands of representational mechanisms built out of components of the represento-kit thus increasingly came to form a single invisible supermachine: a global law factory. Now it remains only for us to see how the levers and control wheels of this global system were manipulated—and by whom. Born of the liberating dreams of Second Wave revolutionaries, representative government was stunning advance over earlier power systems, a technological triumph more striking in its own way than the steam engine or the airplane. Representative government made possible orderly succession without hereditary dynasty. It opened feedback channels between top and bottom in society. It provided an arena in which the differences among various groups could be reconciled peacefully. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Tied to majority rule and the idea of one-man/one-vote, it helped the poor and weak to squeeze benefits from the technicians of power who ran the integrational engines of society. For these reasons, the spread of representative governments was, on the whole, a humanizing breakthrough in history. Yet from the very beginning it fell far short of its promise. By no stretch of the imagination was it ever controlled by the people, however defined. Nowhere did it actually change the underlying structure of power in industrial nations—the structure of sub-elites, elites, and super-elites. Indeed, far from weakening control by the managerial elites, the formal machinery of representations became one of the key means of integration by which they maintained themselves in power. Thus elections, quite apart from who won them, performed a powerful cultural function for the elites. To the degree that everyone had a right to vote, elections fostered the illusion of equality. Voting provided a mass ritual of reassurance, conveying to the people the idea that choices were being made systematically, with machine-like regularity, and hence, by implication, rationally. Elections symbolically assured citizens that they were still in command—that they could, in theory at least, dis-elect as well as elect leaders. In both capitalist and socialist countries, these ritual reassurances often proved more important than the actual outcomes of many elections. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Integrational elites programmed the political machinery differently in place, controlling the number of parties or manipulating voting eligibility. Yet the electoral ritual—some might say farce—was employed everywhere. The fact that Russia and Eastern European elections routinely produced magical majorities of 99 to 100 percent suggested that the need for reassurance remained at least as strong in the centrally planned societies as in the “free World.” Elections took the steam out of protests from below. Furthermore, despite the efforts of democratic reformers and radicals, the integrational elites retained virtually permanent control of the systems of representative government. Many theories have been advanced to explain why. Most, however, overlook the mechanical nature of the system. If we look at Second Wave political systems with the eyes of an engineer rather than a political scientist, we suddenly are struck by a key factor that generally goes unobserved. Industrial engineers routinely distinguish between two fundamentally different classes of machine: those that function intermittently, otherwise known as “batch-processing” machines, and those that function uninterruptedly, called “continuous-flow” machines. An example of the first is the commonplace punch press. The worker brings a batch of metal plates and feeds them into the machine, one or a few at a time, to stamp them into desired shapes. When the batch is finished the machine stops until a new batch is brought. An example of the second is the oil refinery which, once started up, never stops running. Twenty-four hours a day, oil flows through its pies and tubes and chambers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
If we look at the global law factory, with its intermittent voting, we find ourselves face to face with a classical batch processor. The public is allowed to choose between candidates at stipulated times, after which the formal “democracy machine” is switched off again. Contrast this with the continuous flow of influence from various organized interests, pressure groups, and power peddlers. Swarms of lobbyists from corporations and from government agencies, departments, and ministries testify before committees, serve on blue-ribbon panels, attend the receptions and banquets, toast each other with cocktails in Washington or vodka in Moscow, carry information and influence back and forth, and thus affect the decision-making process on a round-the-clock basis. The elites, in short, created a powerful continuous-flow machines to operate alongside (and often at cross purposes with) the democratic batch processor. Only when we see these two machines side by side can we begin to understand how state power was really exercised in the global law factory. So long as they played the representational game, people had at best only intermittent opportunities, through voting, to feed back their approval or disapproval of the government and its actions. The technicians of power, by contrast, influenced those actions continuously. Finally, an even more potent tool for social control was engineered into the very principle of representation. For the mere selection of some people to represent others created new members of the elite. When workers, for example, first fought for the right to organize unions, they were harassed, prosecuted for conspiracy, followed by company spies, or beaten up by police and goon squads. They were outsiders, unrepresented or inadequately represented in the system. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Once unions established themselves, they gave rise to a new group of integrators—the labour establishment—whose members rather than simply representing the workers, mediated between them and the elites in business and government. The George Meanys and Georges Seguys of the World, despite their rhetoric, became themselves key members of the integrational elite. The fake union leaders in Russia and Eastern Europe never were anything but technicians of power. In theory, they need to stand for re-election guaranteed that representatives would stay honest and would continue to speak for those they represented. Nowhere, however, did this prevent the absorption of representatives into the architecture of power. Everywhere the gap widened between the representative and the represented. Representative government—what we have been taught to call democracy—was, in short, an industrial technology for assuring inequality. Representative government was pseudorepresentative. What we see, then, glancing backward for a moment summary, is a civilization heavily dependent on fossil fuels, factory production, the nuclear family, the corporation, mass education, and the mass media, all based on a widening cleavage between production and consumption—and all managed by a set of elites whose task it was to integrate the whole. In this system, representative government was the political equivalent of the factory. Indeed, it was a factory for the manufacture of collective integrational decisions. Like most factories, it was managed from above. And like most factories, it is now increasingly obsolete, a victim of the advancing Third Wave. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
If Second Wave political structures are increasingly out of date, unable to cope with today’s complexities—part of the trouble, as we shall see, lies in another crucial Second Wave institution: the nation-state. The World War II ex-GIs, and their brides who moved to the new suburban subdevelopments after the war represented the beginnings of the mass suburbanization of North America. This postwar era was a period of economic boom and intense optimism. After all, the Depression was over, and America’s productivity had won the war. That productivity meant that by the mid-1950s America, with 6 percent of the World’s population, was producing half the World’s goods. The postwar prosperity showed in the 1950 census, which indicated that the United States of America now had become a nation of homeowners, with 55 percent of American householders now owning rather than renting. At the end of World War II, the average American family was renting. New housing starts in 1949 went over a million a year—a pace that would be maintained for forty years. The veterans moving to the new suburbs were not only great in number, they also differed from earlier suburbanites insofar as they represented a wide swath of American society. Not all of the veterans obtaining VA loans were middle-class, and many were not WASPs. Suburbia was not only being enlarged, it was also ethically, economically, and religiously being democratized. The newcomers were Catholics and Jews as well as mainline Protestants; they were Irish, Italian, and Polish as well as English or northwest European; they were high paid educated professionals and factory workers as well as professionals and managers. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
While advertisements still stressed that moving out was moving up, the fact was that suburbs were coming to mirror mainstream America. A few boundaries however, remained—those of race, religion, language, and culture. Racially, postwar suburbs looked Art of Thanksgiving by Norman Rockwell. Virtually all the newcomers were Christian, from Europe, spoke English, and kept their homes, inside and out, picture perfect. People who did not fit these standards were not welcomed. There is no question that the new metropolitan-area housing, and lots of it, was needed by the late 1940s. During the Depression new buildings starts for the nation had dropped to as low as 92,000 in 1933. During the war millions of people had been encouraged to migrate into the cities to take jobs in the expanding war industries. However, except for a limited amount of “temporary” housing, little new housing was built for the war workers. This was due in good part to the lobbying of banking and real estate interests such as the National Association of Homebuilders, who strenuously fought the government building defense housing. Real estate builders and sellers felt such housing would be a glut on the market after the war ended. As a result, by 1946 there were hardly any homes for ale or, for that matter, apartments for rent. Some 6 million families, unable to get their own housing, were doubling up with relatives. Something had to happen. What occurred was a government-subsidized mass exodus to new tract suburbs of standardized single-family homes. With city landlords raising rents and landlords not wanting to rent to couples with young children, it is not surprising that middle-class and even working-class families flooded out from the cities to the greener opportunities of the suburbs. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
During the 1950s and 1960, the suburban population of the United States of America dramatically increased from 35 million to 84 million suburbanites. This was a growth rate of 144 percent. By 1970, 37 percent of Americans lived in the suburbs. The 2020 census figure increased to 52 percent. Currently, half the United States of America’s population lives in the suburbs. However, rural communities are also seeing 16 percent growth, especially as people want to get back to nature and keep their families socially distant and out of crowded cities. Many of the new postwar suburbanites settled in the subdivision tract suburbs being erected on the periphery of urban areas. They moved there because that is where new housing was available. Only in the suburbs could the goal of every family having its own home (and mortgage) be realized. “I have not yet reached perfection, but I press on, hoping to take hold of that for which Christ once took hold me of. My friends, I do not reckon myself to have got hold of it yet. All I can say is this: forgetting what is behind me, and reaching out for that which lies ahead, I press towards the goal to win the prize which is God’s call to the life above, in Christ Jesus,” reports Phil. 3.12-14. For we are always traveling, and must leave behind us what we know and possess, and seek for that which we do not yet know and possess. All of us are on a journey along the road of life. It is a journey across time, as we move through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. However, it is also a journey of discovery, as each new being in the road helps us learn more about ourselves, our World, and perhaps the purpose of our journey. Where are you on the road of life? How much progress have you made in your spiritual journey? #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Developmental psychology has given us some tools to help us think about the journey. For example, Erik Erikson describes eight stages or eras in the human life span, and identifies a specific challenge that must be mastered at each stage. The first four stages cover infancy and childhood, as the infant first forms a special bond with the parents, and then spends the childhood years gradually disengaging from the parents, building a sense of individual competence, and preparing for an independent life in adulthood. The journey begins in earnest during adolescence, as each of us struggles to achieve a sense of identity. Who am I? What is important to me? Where am I headed in life? Yogi Berra’s lighthearted approach to life decisions is well known: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” However, most of us recognized as adolescents that there is more wisdom in Robert Frost’s view—that the “road not taken” steadily diverges from the path we chose, leading inevitably to different life outcomes. In part, the identity crisis of the teen years is produced by new ways of thinking, a set of new intellectual tools that Jean Piaget calls formal operational thought. The adolescent can now think much more clearly about abstract ideas and hypothetical possibilities, including options for future careers and relationships. For most of us, career choices flows out of identity formation—and for Christians, part of our identity is our place in God’s plan. The theologian Walter Brueggemann states, “As we move from the question ‘Who am I?’ to the question ‘Whose am I?’, eventually all questions of identity become questions of vocation…Vocation is finding a purpose for being in the World that is related to the purpose of God.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The related question of intimacy soon arises: With whom do I wan to share my life? The theologian Henri Nouwen echoes Erikson’s emphasis on intimacy, arguing that the search for intimacy is a “desire to experience a sense of inner completeness, a sense of inner unity, because many people feel alone in the World in a very painful way.” It is natural and normal to want a partner in the journey of life. However, even the choice of a mate is built on the successful resolution of earlier challenges. Specially, a mature capacity for intimacy is built on the foundation of a secure sense of identity. Dr. Nouwen claims, “For real intimacy to be possible, both husband and wife need to be fully developed human beings…This means that intimacy is only possible for people who have found identity.” What is the next step for the adult who has achieved identity and intimacy? Dr. Erikson claims that mature adults struggle to express their generativity—a concern for the next generation and for the future of society. Those who focus on their own needs and achievements will eventually stagnate, while those who turn outward to make a difference in other people’s lives will find their own lives renewed with vigour and a new sense of purpose. Individual generativity spreads outward like ripples expanding in circles from a stone dropped in a pond, combining with generative impulses from other adults, to foster societal generativity, which enhances the next generation’s development. Finally, as we approach the end of our journey, Dr. Erikson sees a final challenge: to develop a sense of ego integrity—to be able to look back on our life and see that the various pieces and phases of the journey actually fit together to form a meaningful and worthwhile whole. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Ideally, we will be able to acknowledge our mistakes, yet still feel that we did our best with the gifts that God gave us; we will be able to express our regrets about the wrong turns and blind alleys, yet still see the hand of God guiding our path. The metaphour of life as a journey is helpful image, but it is not the only way we can think about the life span or our own development as individuals. The psychologist Dan McAdams prefers the metaphour of life as a story—a personal narrative in which each chapter represents a phase of our life, complete with heroes and villains, unfolding with high drama. From this perspective, each of us constructs the meaning and purpose of our story—initially in adolescence and young adulthood—and this in turn shapes the events in the next chapter of our life. Which of these metaphours do you prefer? Both metaphours have rich connections with biblical themes, but the journey metaphour perhaps captures more of the flavour of the Christian’s walk with God and the sense of movement through the life span. The journey metaphour also echoes in one of the earliest names for Christianity in Greek (as reported in Acts 9.2; 19.23; 24.14, 22): hodos—“the way.” Each of us is “on the way” along the road of life. As Dr. Luther describes it, “we are always traveling, and must leave behind us what we know and possess, and seek for that which we do not yet know and possess.” Each sage of our journey involves leaving behind the baggage of the previous phase, and equipping ourselves for the next phase by realigning ourselves with the compass setting as it points toward our destination, the end point in the journey. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In the words of St. Paul, “forgetting what is behind me, and reaching out for that which lies ahead, I press towards the goal to win he prize which is God’s call to the life above, in Christ Jesus.” If the vision of Light brought union with God, intimacy with God, it did not and could not enabled one to know God as God knows Himself. He could not penetrate His inmost nature and substance. This, the ultimate beyond the Light, is called “the Divine Darkness” by the Fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Seeing the Light in front of one is one state; being merged into it is another, and superior. This is the penultimate experience, the last but one of the mystic’s way. One finds oneself totally lost indeed but lost in the most dazzling Light. The ego seems to have vanished: infinity and universality of being have replaced it. Ecstatic rapture fills one. Is it any wonder that the Greek Orthodox Church mystics of the first few centuries believe this was the ultimate experience of pure Spirit, the final union with God? Yet it may not last, cannot last, must come to an end. It may have held one for one or two minutes only or it may have done so for a longer period. It may never recur again in one’s whole lifetime—this is so in most cases—or it may come several times more. However, it stands as a landmark until the end of one’s years. Where the Greek Orthodox Church regards the Light experience as the highest point reachable by humans, the Indian Philosophic Teaching regards it as the highest point reachable by humans, the Indian Philosophic Teaching regards is as the last stage before the highest. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
For anything which is “seen” implies the existence of a “seer” as separate from it. This is not less so even in the case of the Holy Light. Not seeing but be-ing is the final experience according to his Teaching. “You have to go beyond seeing and find out who is ‘I’ who experiences this light,” said Ramana Maharshi to a disciple. Turn your eyes on yourself. Stop judging the faults of others. Why? You snoop about long and hard in the lives of others, and all you come up with is a thimbleful. In the process you leave much wreckage behind even where you found no fault. Make an inventory of your own faults and negligences, and you will come up with a basketful. Yes, it is a matter of the heart, our heart, and we are always in a terrible judgmental state. However, have you noticed? When others commit faults, we harden our hearts against them, excusing little because they should know better. However, when we commit the very same faults, we soften our hearts, excusing much because of the wonderfulness of ourselves. It is a matter of common sense. Resist the rush to judgment. You know it is wrong, and it would not happen so often if God were truly the sole object of your gaze. However, there is no doubt we suffer damage. Something lurks on the inside. Something trips us up on the outside. Unbeknownst to themselves, many people are self-seekers; that is to say, it is themselves they are chasing, and they do not even know it. They seem happy enough when things are going their own way. However, they are not, they run and sit in a corner and cry big tears. How can his happen? Well, with so many of us thinking and holding so many different opinions, there is bound o be a disagreement now and then; and no one, not even the friendly and the civil, the religious and the devout, are exempt from hurt feelings. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Old habits die hard. That is practical wisdom, and so is this: Nobody trusts farther than one can see. Here is some spiritual wisdom. Rely on Jesus Christ as your Lord and Master. If you do no, but rely rather on your own ability to logick your way through life, then you will not be nominated for the Homo Illuminatus award. God sees Himself as creator and sees us as creatures. To the end He wants us to climb above mere human reason. He wans to light our love with the Divine Torch. Both common sense and practical experience inform us that some sicknesses come solely from physical causes. The proper way to treat them is to use physical methods, that is, to find those causes and remove them, and to apply physical remedies. Those who transgress against the body’s law of being and suffer the penalty in ill health, cannot reasonably blame God’s will when they ought to blame their own abuse, neglect, or ignorance. The penalties of violating hygienic laws may in some cases be escaped by spiritual means, but the penalties of continuing to violate them may not. The cause which engenders a malady must be itself removed, or else the removal of the symptoms which are merely its effects will be followed eventually by their reappearance or by those of a different malady. Wisdom here tells us to obey the laws and to regard disease as a warning of our transgression of them. Those who seek healing only to be restored to sensual courses and selfish designs, may commit further errors and be worse off in the end. In protecting the Earth, we found good pine needles and harsh dried wood along with rocks helpful. When you begin to examine our Earth, you find tiny flowers and small grass blades, Ornamented by the chatter of ground squirrels. You find your soil is soft and rocky; it does not permit artificial soil topping. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Our pine trees are diligent, dedicated and graceful; in either life of death they will always perform their duty of pinetreeness, equipped with sap and bark. We find our World of wilderness so refreshing. Along with Summer’s drum, we produce occasional thundershowers, wet and dry messages; we cannot miss the point, since this Earth is so bending and open to us, along with the rocks, we are not shy, we are so proud—we can make a wound in a pine tree and it bleeds sap, and courts us, in spite of the setting-sun shadow; they bend and serve so graciously, whether dead or alive. We love our pines and rocks; they are not covered with the superstitious setting-sun chemical manure of this and that. We are so proud of the sky that we produce on our horizon. Our stars twinkle and wink as if they know us; we have no problem of recognition. Our rocks and pine trees speak for us. O Lord our God, be gracious unto Thy people of America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy Sanctuary and receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worship of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. O may our eyes witness Thy return to America. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who restores Thy divine presence unto America. We thankfully acknowledge Thee, O Lord our God, our fathers’ God to all eternity. Our Rock art Thou, our Shield that saves through every generation. We give Thee thanks and we declare Thy praise for all Thy tender care. Our lives we trust into Thy loving hand. Our souls are ever in Thy charge; Thy wonders and Thy miracles are daily with us, evening, morn, and noon. O Thou who art all-good, whose mercies never fail us, Compassionate One, whose lovingkindness never cease, we ever hope in Thee. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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O Wicked Wit and Gifts that Have the Power So to Seduce!
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange story. Almost all humans are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a lister’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a devil, would have no fear mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before one would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequences is, that the general stock of experiences in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect. The Devil had been raised among us, and his rage was vehement and terrible; and, when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows. It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in Boston in 1688, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murders as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and if I could, I would bury the memory this this atrocious eminence, as hi body was buried, in the Witch House’s basement. When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicious fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As no reference was at the time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered. Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief observed the absence of the dead body from the bed. As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger posses of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. John Hathorne asked most of the questions and established the judicial attitude that was to prevail throughout most of the examinations and the trials. Many people suspected that the devil killed this man and he had been summoned by Sarah Good because she had also been accused of bewitching a few girls in the town. Mr. Hathorne asked the children to look at Sarah God and say whether she was one who afflicted them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
They accused her to her face, “upon which they were all dreadfully tortured and tormented for a short space of time.” When they recovered from their fits, they charged her with causing them, saying that her specter had come and tormented them although her body remained “at a considerable distance from them.” This was spectral evidence, that is, evidence concerning a specter or apparition of the accused, rather than her bodily person. It was eventually to become the central legal issue of the trials, but at the moment we need only see why it seemed initially so convincing to the examining magistrates. Here were girls afflicted with violent physical symptoms which had no known physical cause, but which a physician had attributed to witchcraft. There was a malicious old woman accused of causing them. When the sufferers accused her they were immediately thrown into convulsions. What could be more plausible than that the convulsions were inflicted as revenge for the accusation? Yet such behaviour was still unfamiliar enough in Salem so that one of the recorders noted that “none here see the [specters of the] witches but the afflicted and themselves.” However, the change was so startling that I fully believed the girls derived their impression in some occult manner. For instance, we knew there was something occult going on because the throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech for the defense, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat in the dreadful condition referred to. Yet, it would have been impossible for such a wound to be self-inflicted by either hand. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Certainly, Mr. Hathorne was convinced; when the children had recovered and repeated their accusation he turned to the accused woman. “Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you this torment these people children?” Certainly many of her neighbours though her malicious, since they attributed to her a number of inexplicable events, including the death of a cow which perished in a “sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner.” Such testimony was common in witchcraft cases, and it has caused much unseemly hilarity among the modern historians. It is likely, they have asked, that His Satanic Majesty the Devil or any of his minions would stop to concern themselves with the fate of a New England cow? The answer is that nothing is more likely. What else would a fertility god concern himself with but the health or sickness of crops, of animals, and of humans? From the standpoint of a society that still remembered who the Devil was, no testimony could be more relevant. As a matter of fact, the village witches who still exist in rural England are often expert in folk medicines, human and animal, as well as charms, and until recently many of them were midwives. Sarah Osburn also denied that she had hurt anyone, but the girls feel again into fits. Mr. Hathorne asked her how this happened. Perhaps, she said, the Devil went about in her likeness doing harm, but she knew nothing about it. Sarah Osburn was the first at Salem to assert the principle that the Devil can impersonate an innocent person. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Whether the devil could or not was a matter of debate in the seventeenth century, but most Protestant authorities agreed with Goodwife Obsurn that, as Hamlet put it, “The Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape.” However, the principle was not discussed at this hearing, since Sarah Osburn was a likely a suspect as Sarah Good, if for no other reason than her lying. Lying was still considered a serious sin in the seventeenth century, and a crime as well, legally punishable by the courts. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believed, had any one in Court. When Mr. Hathorne tried to find out how well Sarah Osburn knew Sarah Good she said she did not know her by name. Mr. Hathorne asked if Sarah Osburn had been tempted by the devil, and she said no. Why then, he asked, had not she been at church? She had been sick, she said, and unable to go. However, her husband and others contradicted her. “She had not been at meeting,” they said, “this year and two months.” To understand why the matter of church attendance was considered so significant one must remember that the seventeenth century saw witchcraft as literal Devil worship, and therefore as a rival religion to Christianity. This is why the magistrates sometimes asked accused persons, as they asked Sarah Good, what God they served. And if the accused person avoided speaking the name of God (as Sarah Good did), they had reason to think it a suspicious circumstance. The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the judge, on the other side of the court. He slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. Then he collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The examinations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn afford grounds for suspicion and for further examination. However, the major event of that first day of March was the examination of Tituba. It began like the others, but it changed very quickly: “Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” “None.” “Why do you hurt these children?” “I do not hurt them.” “Who is it then?” “The Devil, for aught I know.” “Did you never see the Devil?” “The Devil,” said Tituba, “came to me and bid me serve him.” She went on, with a minimum of judicia prodding, to provide a detailed confession of witchcraft, the first of approximately fifty that were made during the Salem trials. On March first and second, in her examination, Tituba said that the Devil had come to her in the shape of a man—a tall man in black, with white hair. Other times he had come in the shape of an animal. He had told her he was God, that she must believe him and serve him six years, and he would give her many fine things. He had shown her a book and she had made a mark in it, a mark that was “red like blood.” Many people thought this to be a revelation. “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the Earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to comedown from Heaven to Earth in full view of men. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“He ordered them to set up an image in honour of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless one had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name,” reports Revelation 13.11-17. Sarah Osburn was to die there on the tenth of May. Tituba, like later confessors, was never brought to trial. She lay in jail until she was sold to pay the jailer’s fees, her master refusing to pay them. Sarah Good was brought to trial. Another reaction to Tituba’s confession was to confirm the community in its fear of witchcraft, and particularly its fear of the three accused women. The night of March First William Allen and John Hughes heard a strange noise; it continued frightening them, but the approached and “saw a strange and unusual beast lying on the ground. Going up to it, the said beast vanished away and in the said place started up two or three women fled, not after the manner of other women but swiftly vanished out of sight, which women we took to be Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The next night William Allen again had hallucinations: “Sarah Good visibly appeared to him in his chamber, said Allen being in bed, and brought an unusual light with her. The said Sarah came and sat upon his foot. The said Allen went to kick at her, upon which she vanished and the light with her.” Notice that in this hallucination as in many others the hallucination stops as soon as the subject is able to move or speak. A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, “curse” may refer to such a wish or pronouncement made effective by a supernatural or spiritual power, such as a god, or gods, a spirit, or natural force, or else as a kind of spell by magic or witchcraft. The Winchester rifle is a handsome gun that legend has it was forged in Hell. Whoever possesses the cursed rife either suffers disaster or fortune. Oliver Fisher Winchester was an American businessman and politician, best known as being the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Oliver Winchester was born November 30, 1810 and dead December 10, 1880. Oliver Winchester was known for manufacturing and marketing the Winchester repeating rifle, which was a much re-designed descendant of the Volcanic rifle of some years earlier. Mr. Winchester was more learned than his kind in the mysteries of a deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination. He was a man highly honoured for his natural gifts and knowledge of learned books which nobody else could read, that was when he took his second orders the bishop gave him a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his shoulders in which, and his lordship had put such power into it that, when the parson has it rightly on, he could govern any ghost or evil spirit, and even stop an Earthquake. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Such a powerful man, in combat with supernatural visitations discovered that a division of Smith & Wesson firearms was failing financially with one of their newly patented arms. Having an eye for opportunity, Mr. Winchester assembled venture capital together with other stockholders and acquired the Smith & Wesson division, better known as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principle stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, and changed the name to New Haven Arms Company. After experiencing a slow start, and then a booming success with the Henry rifle, the company reorganized once again and the first Winchester rifle was the Model 1866, which had been nicknamed the Yellow Boy. The gun was called Yellow Boy because it should be remembered that, howsoever strange and singular it may sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance at his own hands. Gradually Mr. Winchester amassed a considerable fortune. When Mr. Oliver Winchester died on December 10, 1880, his ownership in the company passed to his son, William Wirt Winchester (who married Sarah Lockwood Pardee in 1862), and died March 7 1881 at the young age of 43. The couple has also had a child, Annie Pardee Winchester, born June 15, 1866, and died 6 weeks later on July 25, 1866. Mrs. Winchester was deeply troubled by the loss of her daughter. In the course of her daily walk, she had to pass a certain heath or down where the road wound along through tall blocks of granite with open spaces of grassy sward between them. #RandpolphHarris 9 of 13
There in a certain spot, and always in the same place, she declared that she encountered, every day, a baby with a pale and troubled face, clothed in a little dress of white pique, made with two skirts. The pique was cut slightly Gabriele, and rounded off in the front with scallops, bound with white braid, with a button in each scallop, and ribbon-sash, tied at the left side, with one hand always stretched forth, and the other pressed against her side. “She is my baby,” Mrs. Winchester would say, and she often used to come to her parents house in New Haven; but that which troubled her was, that she had now been dead three years, and she had seen her body laid in the grave at her burial, this that she saw every day must needs be her soul or ghost. The hair of the appearance, sayth Mrs. Winchester, is not like anything alive, but it is so soft and light that it seemth to melt away while you look; but her eyes are set, and never blink—no, not when the sun shineth full upon her face. She maketh no steps, but seemth to swim along the top of the grass; and her hand, which is stretched out alway, seemth to point to something far away, out of sight. It is her continual coming; for she never failth to meet Mrs. Winchester, and to pass on, that hath quenched her spirits; and although she never seeth her by night, yet cannot she get her natural rest. Mrs. Winchester went to see a doctor who told her, “The case is strange but by no means impossible. It is one that I will study, and fear not to handle, if you will be free with me, and fulfill all that I desire.” Mrs. Winchester was overjoyed, but she perceived that the doctor turned pale, and was downcast with some thought which, however, he did not express. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The doctor knew that this might be a doemonium meridianum, the most stubborn spirit to govern and guide that any human can meet, and the most perilous withal. He made an appointment to go with Mrs. Winchester to the spot where she had these encounters. They had hardly reached the accustomed spot, when they both saw her at once gliding towards them; punctually as the ancient writers describe their “lemures, which swoon along the ground, neither marking the sand nor bending the herbage.” The aspect of the baby girl was exactly that which had been related by Mrs. Winchester. There was a pale and stony face, the strange misty hair, the eyes firm and fixed, that gazed, yet not on them, but on something that they saw far, far away; one hand and arm stretched out, and the other grasping the girdle of her waist. She floated along the field like upon a stream, and glided past the spot where they stood, pausingly. But so deep was the awe that came over the doctor, as he stood there in the light of day, face to face with a human soul separate from her bones and flesh, that his heart and purpose both failed him. He had resolved to speak to the spectre in the appointed form of words, but he did not. He stood like one amazed and speechless, until she had passed clean of out sight. When they returned to the house, and after he had said all he could to pacify Mrs. Winchester, he took leave for that time, with a promise that when he had fulfilled certain business elsewhere, when then he alleged, he would return and take orders to assuage these disturbances and their cause. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The doctor later told Mrs. Winchester that he thought it was best that they try an exorcism, but his Church, as is well known, hath abjured certain branches of her ancient powers, on grounds of perversion and abuse. So he referred her to a medium. The medium told Mrs. Winchesters, “There is a danger from the demons, but so there is in the surrounding air every day.” There was a kind of trouble in the air, a soft rippling sound, and all at once the shape appeared, and came towards the medium gradually. She opened her parchment scroll, and read aloud the command. The spirit paused, and seemed to waver and doubt; stood still; then she rehearsed the sentence again, sounding out every syllable like a chant. The spirit then swam into the midst of the circle, and there stood still, suddenly. Her knees shook under her, and the drops of sweat ran down her flesh like rain. But, although face to face with the spirit, the medium’s heart grew calm, and her mind was composed. The spirit then commanded Mrs. Winchester to move West and build a mansion in honour of the spirit killed by the Winchester rifle and “as long as the hammer keep pounding, her heart would continue to beat.” The medium dismissed the troubled ghost, until she peacefully withdrew, gliding towards the west. Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose, which was near her family Member, Enoch Pardee, an occultist, prominent physician, free mason, and Mayor of Oakland, California USA, had built his family’s mansion in 1868, which is now known as the Pardee House Museum. Masonry has influenced more the modern witchcraft; it has influenced dozens of occult orders. Mrs. Winchester bought a farm house and built a massive mansion. There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the Winchester mansion through the nineteenth century. The estate in those days was in a transitory state, and Mrs. Winchester, like her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the new interpretation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, the mansion is now flanked by a pleasantness, a beautiful garden and lawn, and it is surrounded by a sole grove of palm trees. It has also the aspect of age and of solitude, and looks the very scene of harmony and supernatural events. A legend might well belong to every beautiful glade of grass around, and there must surely be a haunted room somewhere within its walls. The incredible mansion, scenery of the legend still survives, and, like the field of the forty footsteps in another history, the place is still visited by those who take interests in the supernatural tales of old and new. Freemasons supposedly conducted a séance in the mansion in August of 2019. A phantom made an answer willingly. It stated, “before the next Yule-tide, a fearful pestilence will lay waste the land, and myriads of souls will be loosened from the flesh, until our valleys will be full.” The general facts stated in this diary are to these matters of belief accounted a strong proof of the veracity of the Ghost that the plague, fatal to so many millions, did break out in the global village at the close of the year. How sorely must the infidels and heretics of this generation be dismayed when they know that this Black Death, which is now swallowing its thousands in the streets of the great city, was foretold several months before the outbreak, under the séance of a freemason, by a visible and suppliant ghost! And what pleasure and improvements do such deny themselves who scorn and avoid all opportunity of intercourse with souls separate, and the spirits, glad and sorrowful, which inhabit the unseen World! May they who observe the Sabbath and call it a delight, rejoice in Thy Kingdom. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the most desirable of the days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Today is the return of our guided Mansion Tour! The tour guide-led experience allows guests to access areas of the mansion that have been closed since March 2020. Click the link in our bio for more information. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
And Now We Must Preserve What it Means to be American!
I have a sixth sense, not the other five. If I was not making money, they would put me away. The conflict between Second and Third Wave groupings is, in fact, the central political tension cutting through our society today. Despite what today’s parties and candidates may preach, the infighting among them amounts to little more than a dispute over who will squeeze the most advantage from what reminds of the declining industrial system. Put differently, they are engaged in a squabble for the proverbial deck chairs on a sinking Titanic. The more basic political question is who controls the age of information. While short-range political skirmishes exhaust our energy and attention, a far more profound battle is already taking place beneath the surface. On one side are the partisans of the industrial past; on the other, growing millions who recognize that the most urgent problems of the World—food, energy, arms control, population, poverty, resources, ecology, climate, the problems of the aged, the breakdown of urban community, the need for productive, rewarding work—can no longer be resolved within the framework of the current order. This conflict is the “super-struggle” for tomorrow. This confrontation between the vested interests of the Second Wave and the people of the Third Wave already runs like an electric current through the political life of every nation. Even in the undeveloped countries of the World, all the old battle lines have been forcibly redrawn by the arrival of the Third Wave. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The old war of agricultural, often feudal, interest against industrializing elites, either capitalists or socialist, takes on a new dimension in light of the coming development of the age of information. Now that Third Wave civilization has made it appearance, does the digital age imply liberation from neocolonialism and poverty—or does it, in fact, guarantee permanent dependency? It is only against this wide-screen background that we can begin to make sense of the headlines, to sort out our priorities, to frame sensible strategies for the control of change in our lives. As I write this, the front pages report hysteria and hostages in Mexico. In addition to being one of America’s largest trading partners, Mexico is the biggest foreign source of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine trafficking into the United States of America. Currently there are assassinations in America, runaway speculation in gold and stocks, friction between underrepresented groups, big increases in China’s defense budget to around $200 billion U.S dollars, which is up 6.8 percent from last year. Crosses brining in Knoxville, Tennessee by members wearing white robes to symbolize “purity” and the burning crosses to signify “the light of Christ.” There is also expected to be fuel shortages this summer because more people are expected to travel by vehicles after a year of lockdown, but 25 percent of truck drivers had to park their big rigs, and an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 were put out of the national employment pool because of prior drug or alcohol violations or failed drug tests. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Furthermore, as racism seems to be on a rise, more and more people are having the biggest antiracism rally in history. There is also a battle between the rich nations and the developing nations over manufacturing and trade. Waves of religious revivalism crash through Africa, Israel, Libya, Syria, and the United States of America; neofacist fanatics claim “credit” for the 2020 American Presidential election. And in a safety report filed to U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, BMW laid out the broad strokes of its plan to introduce what could become the first system on American roads to qualify as “Level 3” by Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) standards for automated driving features. These news clips, while some are good, and others are tragic, call out for integration or synthesis. Once we realize that a biter struggle is now raging between those who seek to preserve their traditional values and those who seek to supplant it, we have a powerful new key to understanding the World. More important—whether we are setting policies for a nation, strategies for a corporation, or goals for one’s own personal life—we have a new tool for changing that World. To use this tool, however, we must be able to distinguish clearly those changes that extend the old Americana from those which facilitate the arrival of the new. We must, in short, understand both the old and the new, the Second Wave industrial system into which so many Americans were born and the Third Wave civilization that many of us and our children are inhabiting. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The Second Wave civilization was not an accidental jumble of components, but a system with parts that interacted with each other in more or less predictable ways—and the fundamental patterns of industrial life were the same in country after country, regardless of cultural heritage or political difference. This is the civilization that today’s “reactionaries”—both “left- “and “right-wing”—are fighting to preserve. It is this World that is threatened by history’s Third Wave of civilizational change. Also, with the 100 year anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre just passing, which lead to the death of as many as 300 people, nearly 1,000 injured, leaving 35 city blocks in charred ruins—many people are demanding that something be done to repair race relations in 2021 because some people in the media and positions of authority seem intend on bringing back Jim Crow racism. Because there are so many mixed-race families and people are more accepting of other cultures, the reality of racism is sacring many people. They fear moving to new communities because they do not know if their family with become a target and be assassinated because of their colour of their skin, and they are concerned about the integrity of law enforcement to uphold the laws because there seems to be a breakdown of law and order in 2021, and many do not know where the community and those in positions of authority stand on law and order. The community does not know if they uphold the constitutional oath, or want to threaten, intimidate them or use them for target practice. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The first man who enclosed a plot of ground and thought of saying, “This is mine,” and found others to believe him, was the true founder of society. Having the good fortune to be born among you, how could I meditate on the equality which nature has established among people and upon the inequality they have instituted without thinking of the profound wisdom with which both, felicitously combined in this state, cooperate in the manner that most closely approximates the natural law and that is most favourable to society, to the maintenance of public order and to the happiness of private individuals? In searching for the best maxims that good sense could dictate concerning the constitution of government, I have been so struck on seeing the all in operation in your own, that even if I had not been born within your walls, I would have believed myself incapable of dispensing with offering this picture of human society to that people which, of all peoples, seems to me to be in possession of the greatest advantages, and to have best prevented its abuses. If I had had to choose my birthplace, I would have chosen a society of a size limited by the extent of human faculties, that is to say, limited by the possibility of being well governed, and where, with each being sufficient to one’s task, no one would have been forced to relegate to others the functions with which one was charged; a state where, with all private individuals being known to one another, neither the obscure maneuvers of vice nor the modesty of virtue could be hidden from the notice and the judgment of the public, and where that pleasant habit of seeing and knowing one another turned love of homeland into love of the citizens rather than into love of the land. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
I would have wanted to be born in a country where the sovereign and the people could have but one and the same interest, so that all the movements of the machine always tended only to the common happiness. Since this could not have taken place unless the people and the sovereign were one and the same person, it follows that I would have wished to be born under a democratic government, wisely tempered. I would have wanted to live and die free, that is to say, subject to the laws in such wise that neither I nor anyone else could shake off their honourable yoke: that pleasant and salutary yoke, which the most arrogant heads bear with all the greater docility, since they are made to bear no other. I would therefore have wanted it to be impossible for anyone in the state to say that one was above the law and for anyone outside to demand that the state was obliged to give one recognition. If a single person is found who is not subject to the law, for whatever the constitution of a government may be, all the others are necessarily at one’s discretion. And if there is a national leader and a foreign leader as well, whatever the division of authority they may make, it is impossible for both of them to be strictly obeyed and for the states to be well governed. I would not have wanted to dwell in a newly constituted republic, however good its laws may be, out of fear that, with the government perhaps constituted otherwise than would be required for the moment and being unsuited to the new citizens or the citizens to the new government, the state would be subject to being overthrown and destroyed almost from is inception. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
For liberty is like those solid and tasty foods or those full-bodied wines which are appropriate for nourishing and strengthening robust constitutions that are used to them, but which overpower, ruin, and intoxicate the weak and delicate who are not suited for them. Once peoples are accustomed to masters, they are no longer in a position to get along without them. If they try to sake off the yoke, they put all the more distance between themselves and liberty, because, in mistaking for liberty an unbridled license which is its opposite, their revolutions nearly always deliver them over to seducers who simply make their chains heavier. The Roman people itself—that model of all free peoples—was in no position to govern itself when it emerged from the oppression of the Tarquins. Debased by slavery and the ignominious labours the Tarquins had imposed on it, at first it was but a stupid rabble that needed to be managed and governed with the greatest wisdom, so that, as it gradually became accustomed to breathe the salutary air of liberty, these souls, enervated or rather brutalized under tyranny, acquired by degrees that severity of mores and that high-spirited courage which eventually made them, of all the peoples, most worthy of respect. I would therefore have sought for my homeland a happy and tranquil republic, whose antiquity was somehow lost in the dark recesses of time, which has experienced only such attacks as served to manifest and strengthen in its inhabitants courage and love of homeland, and where the citizens, long accustomed to a wise independence, were not only free but worthy of being so. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
I would have searched for a country where the right of legislation was common to all citizens, for who can know better than they the conditions under which it suits them to live together in a single society? However, I would not have approved of plebiscities like those of the Romans where the state’s leaders and those most interested in its preservation were excluded from the deliberations on which its safety often depended, and where, by an absurd inconsistency, the magistrate were deprived of the rights enjoyed by ordinary citizens. On the contrary, I would have desired that, in order to stop he self-centered and ill-conceived projects and the dangerous innovations that finally ruined Athens, no one would have the power to propose new laws according to one’s fancy; that this right belonged exclusively to the magistrates; that even they used it with such caution that the populace, for is part, was so hesitant about giving its consent to these laws, and that their promulgation could only be done with such solemnity that before the constitution was overturned one had time to be convinced that it is above all the great antiquity of the laws that makes them holy and venerable; that the populace soon holds in contempt those laws that it sees change daily; and that in becoming accustomed to neglect old usages on the pretext of making improvements, great evils are often introduced in order to correct lesser ones. “God is wise in heart and mighty in strength. Who has hardened oneself against God and prospered?” declares Job 9.4. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Above all, I would have fled, as necessarily ill-governed, a republic where the people, believing it could get along without its magistrates or permit them but a precarious authority, would imprudently have held on to the administration of civil affairs and the execution of its laws. Such must have been the rude constitution of the first governments immediately emerging form the state of nature, and such too was one of the vices which ruined the republic of Athens. However, I would have chosen that republic where private individuals, being content to give sanction to the laws and to decide as a body and upon the recommendation of their leaders the most important public affairs, would establish respect tribunals, distinguish with care their various departments, annually elect the most capable and most upright of their fellow citizens to administer justice and to govern the state; and where, with the virtue of the magistrates thus bearing witness to the wisdom of the people, they would mutually honour one another. Thus if some fatal misunderstandings were ever to disturb public concord, even those periods of blindness and errors were marked by indications of moderation, reciprocal esteem, and a common respect for the laws: presages and guarantees of a sincere and perpetual reconciliation. Such, MAGNIFICENT, MOST HONOURED, AND SOVEREIGN LORDS, are the advantages that I would have sought in the homeland that I would have chosen for myself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
And if in addition providence had joined to it a charming location, a temperate climate, a fertile country and the most delightful appearance there is under the Heavens, to complete my happiness I would have desired only to enjoy all these goods in the bosom of that happy homeland, living peacefully in sweet society with my fellow citizens, and practicing toward them (following their own example), humanity, friendship, and all the virtues; and leaving behind me the honourable memory of a good human and a decent and virtuous patriot. If, less happy or too late grown wise, I had seen myself reduced to end an infirm and languishing career in other climates, pointlessly regretting the repose and peace of which an imprudent youth deprived me, I would at least have nourished in my soul those same sentiments I could not have used in my native country; and penetrated by a tender and disinterested affection for my distant fellow citizens, I would have addressed them from the bottom of my heart more or less along the following lines: My dear fellow citizens, or rather my brother, since the bonds of blood as well as the laws unite almost all of us, it gives me pleasure to be incapable of thinking of you without a the same time thinking of all the god things you enjoy, and of which perhaps none of you appreciates the value more deeply than I who have lost them. The more I reflect upon your political and civil situation, the less I am capable of imagining that the nature of human affairs could admit of better one. In all other governments, when it is a question of assuring the greatest good of the state, everything is always limited to imaginary projects, and at most to simple possibilities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
As for you, your happiness is complete; it remains merely to enjoy it. And to become perfectly happy you are in need of nothing more than to know how to be satisfied with being so. Your sovereignty, acquired or recovered at the point of a sword, and preserved for over two centuries by dint of valour and wisdom, is at last fully and universally recognized. Honourable treaties fix your boundaries, secure your rights and strengthen your repose. Your constitution is excellent, since it is dictated by the most sublime reason and is guaranteed by friendly powers deserving of respect. Your state is tranquil; you have neither wards nor conquerors to fear. You have no other masters but the wise laws you have made, administered by upright magistrates of your own choosing. You are neither rich enough to enervate yourself with softness and to lose in vain delights the tastes for true happiness and solid virtues, nor poor enough to need more foreign assistance than your industry procures for you. And this precious liberty, which in large nations is maintained only by exorbitant taxes, costs you almost nothing. For the happiness of is citizens and the examples of the peoples, may a republic so wisely and so happily constituted last forever! This is the only wish left for you to make, and the only precaution left for you to take. From here on, it is for you alone, not to bring about your own happiness, your ancestors having saved you the trouble, but to render I lasting by the wisdom of using it well. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
It is upon your perpetual union, your obedience to the laws, your respect for the ministers that your preservation depends. If there remains among you the slightest germ of bitterness or distrust, hasten to destroy it as a ruinous leaven that sooner or later results in your misfortunes and the ruin of the state. I beg you all to look deep inside your hearts and to heed the secret voice of your conscience. Is there anyone among you who knows of a body that is more upright, more enlightened, more worthy of respect than that of your magistracy? Do not all its members give you the example of moderation, of simplicity of mores, of respect for the laws, and of the most sincere reconciliation? Then freely give such wise chiefs that salutary confidence that reason owes to virtue. Bear in mind that they are of your choice, that they justify it, and that the honours due to those whom you have established in dignity necessarily reflect back upon yourselves. None of you is so unenlightened as to be ignorant of the fact that where the vigour of laws and the authority of their defenders cease, there can be neither security nor freedom for anyone. What then is the point at issues among you except to do wholeheartedly and with just confidence what you should always be obliged to do by a true self-interest, by duty and for the sake of reason? May a sinful and ruinous indifference to the maintenance of the constitution never make you neglect in time of need the wise teachings of the most enlightened and most zealous among you. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
However, may equity, moderation, and the most respectful firmness continue to regulate all your activities and display in you, to the entire Universe, the example of a proud and modest people, as jealous of its glory as of its liberty. Above all, beware (and this will be my last counsel) of ever listening to sinister interpretations and venomous speeches, whose secret motives are often more dangerous than the actions that are their object. An entire household awakens and takes warning at the first cries of a good and faithful watchdog who never barks expect at the approach of burglars. However, people hate the nuisance caused by those noisy animals that continually disturb the public repose and whose continual and ill-timed warnings are not heeded even at the moment when they are necessary. The distinction between diseases of “brain” and “mind,” between “neurological” problems and “psychological” or “psychiatric” ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. On 17 June 1783, the famous English author Dr. Samuel Johnson awoke around 3 A.M. and to his surprise and horror found he could not speak. To test his mind, he attempted to compose a prayer in Latin verse and succeeded. Thus reassured, he next tried to loosen his powers of speech by drinking spirits, but this only put him back to sleep. When he awoke the next morning he found that he still could not speak, yet he could write and could understand what others said. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
What sort of disorder would disrupt speech yet allow one to think, read, write, and listen? Mr. Johnson summoned his physicians, who diagnosed a disturbance of the vocal apparatus and prescribed a treatment of blisters on each side of the throat. Sure enough, within a few days his speech began to return, leaving only a slight impediment at the time of his death late the following year. The misdiagnosis of Mr. Johnson’s doctors regarding the localization of different aspects of language in the brain was mild compared with that of their predecessors. Down the centuries philosophers and physicians have talked about the mind, the soul, and the heart and how they are related, and have produced a vast literature from which can be distilled several different pictures. Down the centuries philosophers and physicians have talked about the mind, the soul, and the heart and how they are related, and have produced a vast literature from which can be distilled several different pictures. For many centuries people debated whether the mind was located in the heart, as Aristotle argued in the fourth century B.C., or in the brain, as Hippocrates had guessed. The second-century anatomist Galen, whose views prevailed until the sixteenth century, favoured Hippocrates’ view, although he mislocated the mind in the brain’s fluid-filled ventricles. The early-nineteenth-century German physician Franz Gall recognized that various brain regions have specific functions, but he guessed wrongly what they were. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
By 1865 a French physician, Paul Broca, reported that damage to a specific area on the left side of the brain would produce the speech difficulty that Samuel Johnson suffered (apparently as a result of a mild stroke). What is true of our understanding of the relation between brain activity and language is true of the brain-mind relation in general: every new advance in the flourishing field of neuropsychology tightens the apparent links between brain and mind. Even so specific a mental function as the ability to recognize a face has been localized to specific brain regions (principally the lower right side of the brain). In work with monkeys, neuropsychologists have detected specific cells that buzz with activity in response to a specific face or to a specific type of perceived body movement. In humans, detectable brain activity is now known to coincide with and even preceded by a fraction of a second the instant at which a person consciously decides to perform an action, such as lifting a finger. As research accumulates, the link also tightens between brain and personality. Another well-documented episode of the mid-nineteenth century further illustrates the tightness of the mind-brain link, but his time with a dramatic change in general behaviour. In 1848 a New England railroad worker, Phineas Gage, accidentally set off an explosion that sent a tamping iron through the front of his brain. Before the accident he was a reliable, upright member of society. After it, his behaviour, aspirations, ethics, and morals had all changed dramatically for the worse. And what happens in isolated cases such as Gage’s may, at times, happen to large numbers of people. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
In the late 1800s considerable numbers of previously sane people in Edinburgh threw themselves out of windows after suffering from epidemic encephalitis or inflammation of the brain, probably due to invasion by bacteria or viruses. The Austrian physician Constantin von Economo likened the Scottish illness and a similar one in Italy to the epidemic of encephalitis lethargica or sleeping sickness that spread across the World from 1917 to 1927. Changes to the brain by damage or disease result in changes in thinking, feeling, and behaving. We now know that particular types of brain damage have predictable effects on thoughts and emotions, and that manipulating a person’s brain can manipulate the person’s mind, moods, and motives. And we are learning how abnormalities in the brain’s chemical messengers—its neurotransmitters—are involved in psychological disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. With such findings comes hope that alterations in brain chemistry (through drugs, transplants of brain tissue, or dietary changes) may alleviate emotional suffering. With everyone being required to wear a mask now in public places of business, even though stay at home orders have been lifted, many people may still be feeling disconnected with the human population. Something that Dr. Charles Darwin emphasized, and Dr. Antonio Damasio reminds us that if it is separated from its emotional foundation, “mind talk” alone can be misleading because much of recognition and communication takes pace through expression of the face. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
If someone cannot show the feelings of the mind in the face, communication becomes extremely difficult. This happens, for example, in Moebius syndrome, in which all control of the muscle of both sides of the face and also eye movement are lost. Cognitive neuroscientists fill out the picture. They have shown that semantic jokes that make us smile are processed in centers in the brain concerned wit meanings of words. Hearing a pun of seeing someone slip on a banana peel engages different brain regions. Feelings matter, and feelings are embodied. There is certainly evidence to indicate that humans are dependent on their physical nature. There is also metaphysical evidence which reveals that the body is strongly influenced by the psyche. All diseases are not caused by soul illness. Destiny looms more largely in this matter than any physician is likely to admit, although it is equally true in the long run that humans are the arbiter of their own fate, that the real self bestows every boon or ill upon its fragmentary expression, the personality, and bestows them with a just impersonal hand. However, I must be content to leave the explanation of such a seeming paradox for another place and another time. Suffice it to hint that the past of individual humans are infinitely more extended than is apparent at first glance. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
As one penetrates deeper and deeper into that subtle World of one’s inner being, one finds that thought, feeling, and even speech affects its condition as powerfully as outer conditions affect one’s physical being. A complete falsehood or a gross exaggeration, when conscious and deliberate, stuns or inflames the delicate psyche. A complete falsehood or a gross exaggeration, when conscious and deliberate, stuns or inflames the delicate psyche. If persisted in and made habitual, the psyche becomes diseased and falls sick. This may be followed, soon or late according to the sensitive of the human, by physical sickness. If sickness does not come, then one will be exposed to it in the form of a universal shadowing some future incarnation. Where there is no obvious transgression of the laws of bodily hygiene to account for a case of ill health, there may still be a hidden one not yet uncovered. Where there is no hidden one, the line of connection from a physical effect may be traced to a mental cause—that is, the sickness may be a psychosomatic one. Where this in turn is also not obvious, there may still be a hidden mental one. Where all these classes of cause do not exist, then the origin of the sickness must necessarily be derive from the karma of the previous reincarnation—sometimes even for a still earlier one, although that is less likely. Under the law of recompense, the very type of body with which the patient was born contains latently, and was predisposed to revel eventually, the sickness itself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The cause may be any one of widely varying kinds, may even be a moral transgression in the earlier life which could not find any other way of expiation and so hard to be expiated in this way. Therefore it would be an error to believe that all cases of ill health directly arise from the transgression of physical hygienic laws. It is possible to be quite enlightened without being quite free from physical maladies. For the body’s karma does not end until the body’s life ends. Only a heroic and determined few can suddenly reverse the habits of a lifetime and adopt new ones with full benefit. For most people it is more prudent and beneficial to make change by degrees. The foods that best suit one, one alone can find out. However, one should select them from the restricted list with which philosophy will gladly provide one. Body and mind are intertwined. By experiment one may discover what agrees with one’s stomach and what not. If one notices disagreeable symptoms mentally or physically, such as dull headaches or stomach heaviness, then one should drop this item of food and observe whether there is any difference in one’s condition. If not, then it is not the food but something else that lies behind the distress. Our appetites have become perverted, our cravings for food have become morbid. We eat quantities for which the body has no actual need. The conventional dietary habits are false standards by which to live. We could quite well maintain ourselves by eating smaller amounts of rich, concentrated, and stimulating proteins, as well as of clogging starches. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
If we forfeit our free will, are we still human? Unhappy are you who have heard about Truth only through riddles, that is to say, the figures of speech and the literary genres of the day, as the Authors of Numbers suggested so felicitously (12.8). However happy are you to whom Truth has revealed herself in all her glory. Lone, Sound Rason and Common Sense often fail us, preventing us from seeing any father than our nose. What good is a lot of piffling and trifling about the great unknows? We will never be convicted at the Final Bar because we did not solve all the mysteries of the World. Is it not great folly, then, for your to send so little time on the practical and necessary things of the soul, and yet so much time on the intellectual curiosities and travesties of our time? We do not have eyes, the dolorous Jeremiah once observed, but sometimes we just do not see (5.21). Why do the School-humans go on, so haggling about what is a species, what is a genus? And yet, when the Eternal Word whispers—and this may be Theology—you should stop and listen. That is what John says in the beginning of his Gospel (1.3). From the One Word all words flow, as the same John reminds us (8.25), and all words bespeak the One Word. Without this concept of the Eternal Word, the pupil can neither understand one entity nor distinguish among the many. All are one. All in one. When you realize all this, you can forget about Philosophy and Theology as they are taught in the University; you are already at home with God. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
O God, as John embraced Jesus as Truth (14.6), so I embrace You as the Truth the University’s seeking! My You in turn, as You embraced the prophetic Jeremiah (31.3), embrace me as a seeker of the Truth! Endless lectures, pointless tomes, majuscule, minuscule, my poor head splits, and yet in all the babel Yours is the only voice I hear. A man harnesses the unruly affections of one’s heart and trains them to trot as one. The surer one does that, the quicker one come to understand the great and the deep. That is because they receive strong direction from the Powerful Hand above. The impure, complex, unstable spirit is pulled in a variety of directions at once and never gets any work done; but the docile, willing, and powerful spirit puts all its efforts into pulling for the honour of God, even to the degradation of blinders. How is this possible? It is the great drays of your unmortified hear that causes all the delays. Ah, to be alive on an early-June morn fording a stream barefoot, pants rolled up holding boots, pack on, sunshine, ice in the shallows, northern Rockies. Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters stones turn underfoot, small and hard on toes, cold nose dripping, singing inside creek music, heart music, smell of sun on gravel. I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the soil of the United States of America, one ecosystem in diversity, under the Sun—with joyful interpenetration for all. Mozart died in his thirty-sixth year but he had glimpses long before. So did many other historically known humans in the Old World. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
We shall never know how many mystical experiences took place within those medieval cloisters of those Old World ashrams but were lost to human record because those to whom they happened lacked the foresight to write them down or the will to dictate them. There are individuals scattered hither and tither who have found God. It is certain that they are types as well as individuals—therefore, it is certain that the whole race will also one day find God. Even one who is active, efficient, practical, and Worldly may also be touched by this Heavenly light: it is not reserved for the dreamers and poets, the artists and saints alone. I have known humans who have blue-printed public buildings, engineered factories, managed office personnel, filled the lowest and highest positions in a nation, who themselves had known ITS visitations, who recognize and revered it. I like to see a person proud of the place in which one lives. I like to see one live so that one’s place will be proud of one. Many people have had a mystical glimpse before the age of ten, more have done so during adolescence, still more during their mature years. Be proud to be an American and proud that the U.S Constitution is at the core of our country and its citizen. We thankfully acknowledge that Thou art the Lord our God and God of our Fathers, the God of all that lives, our Creator and Creator of the Universe. We offer blessings and thanksgiving to Thy great and holy name because Thou hast kept us in life and sustained us; so mayest Thou continue to keep us in life and sustain us. O gather our exiles into the courts of Thy holy sanctuary to observe Thy statutes, to do Thy will, and to serve Thee with a perfect heart. We give thanks unto Thee. Blessed be God to whom we are ever grateful. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Fashionable men and women do not just put on fashionable clothes. The truly fashionable are beyond fashion. Ageism, which refers to discrimination or prejudice based on age, can oppress the young as well as seniors. For instance, a person applying for a job may just as well be told, “You are too young” as “You are too old.” In some societies, ageism is based on respect for the elderly. In japan, for instance, aging is seen as beneficial, and greater age brings with it more status and respect. In most nations in the New World, however, ageism tends to have a negative impact on older individuals. Usually, it is expressed as a rejection of the elderly. The concept of “oldness” is often to expel people from useful work: Too often, retirement is just another name for dismissal and unemployment. Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest. You have almost certainly encountered ageism in one way or another. Stereotyping is a major facet of ageism. Popular stereotypes of the “dirty old man,” “meddling old woman,” ‘senile old fool,” and the like, help perpetuate the myths underlying ageism. Contrast such as images to those associated with youthfulness: The young are perceived as fresh, whole, attractive, energetic, active, emerging, and appealing. Yet, even good stereotypes can be a problem. For example, if older people are perceived as financially well off, wise, or experienced, it can blind others to the real problems of the elderly. The important point is that age-based stereotypes are often wrong. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
A tremendous diversity exists among the elderly—ranging from the infirm and demented to aerobic-dancing grandmothers. The Lord knows and love the elderly among His people. It has always been so, and upon them He has bestowed many of His greatest responsibilities. In various dispensations He has guided His people through prophets who were in their advancing years. God has needed the wisdom and experience of age, the inspired direction from those with long years of proven faithfulness to His gospel. Two apparently contrasting images of the future grip the popular imagination today. Most people—to the extent that they bother to think about the future at all—assume the World they know will last indefinitely. They find it difficult to imagine a truly different way of life for themselves, let alone a totally new civilization. Of course they recognize that things are changing. However, they assume today’s changes will somehow pass them by and that nothing will shake the familiar economic framework and political structure. They confidently expect the future to continue the present. This straight-line thinking comes in various packages. At one level it appears as an unexamined assumption lying behind the decisions of business people, teachers, parents, and politicians. At a more sophisticated level it comes dressed up in statistics, computerized data, and forecasters’ jargon. Either way it adds up to a vision of a future World that is essentially “more of the same”—Second Wave industrialism writ even larger and spread over more of this planet. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Recent events have severely shaken this confident image of the future. As crisis after crisis has crackled across the headlines, as Israel erupted, as Dictator Lukashenko is considered out of control, as oil prices skyrocket, as inflation runs wild, as terrorism spreads, and governments seem helpless to stop it, a bleaker vision has become increasingly popular. Thus, large numbers of people—feed on a steady diet of bad and fake news, disaster movies, apocalyptic Bible stories, and nightmare scenarios issued by prestigious think tanks—have apparently concluded that today’s society cannot be projected into the future because no future. For them, Armageddon is only minutes away. The Earth is racing toward its final cataclysmic shudder. On the surface these two visions of the future seem very different. Yet both produce similar psychological and political effects. For both lead to the paralysis of imagination and will. If tomorrow’s society is simply an enlarged, Cinerama version of the present, there is little we need do to prepare for it. If, on the other hand, society is inevitably destined to self-destruct within out lifetime, there is noting we can do about it. In short, both these ways of looking at the future generate privatism and passivity. Both freeze us into inaction. Yet, in trying to understand what is happening to us, we are not limited to this simpleminded choice between Armageddon and More-of-the-Same. There are many more clarifying and constructive ways to think about tomorrow—ways that prepare us for the present. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
The revolutionary premise assumes that, even though the decades immediately ahead are likely to be filled with upheavals, turbulence, perhaps even widespread violence, we will not totally destroy ourselves. It assumes that the jolting changes we are now experiencing are not chaotic or random but that, in fact, they form a sharp, clearly discernible pattern. It assumes, moreover, that these changes are cumulative—that they add up to a giant transformation in the way we live, work, play, and think, and that a sane and desirable future is possible. In short, what follows begins with the premise that what is happening now is nothing less than a global revolution, quantum jump in history. Put differently, we are working with the assumption that we are the final generation of an old civilization and the first generation of a new one, and that much of our personal confusion, anguish, and disorientation can be traced directly to the conflict within us, and within our political institutions, between the dying Second Wave civilization and the emergent Third Wave civilization that is thundering in to take it place. When we finally understand this, many seemingly senseless events become suddenly comprehensible. The broad patterns of change begin to emerge clearly. Action for survival becomes possible and plausible again. In short, the revolutionary premise liberates our intellect and our will. We Devouts know more about Christ than we do about the Saints. For example, whoever finds the spirit of Christ discovers in the process many “unexpected delights,” if I may use the expression of the Apostle John’s from the Last Book of the New Testament (2.17). #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
However, that is not often the case. Many who have heard the Gospel over and over again thin they know it ll. If there is more to the story, they have little desire to discover it. That is because, as the Apostle Paul diagnosed it in his Letter to the Romans (8.9), “they do not have the spirit of Christ. On the other hand, whoever wants to understand the words of Christ and fully and slowly savour their sweetness has to work hard at making oneself another Christ. if you are not humble, you make the Trinity nervous, and that wretched state what possible good do you get out of standing up in public and disputing to high Heaven about the Trinity as an intellectual entity? The real truth, if only you would learn it, is that highfalutin words do not make us Saints. Only a virtuous life can do that, and only that can make God care for us. “Contemplation” is a good example. The School people at the University—that is to say, the Philosophers and the Theologians—could produce lengthy, perhaps even lacy, definitions of this holy word, but that would not move them one inch closer to the Gate of Heaven. The humble Devout, on the other hand, who can neither read nor write, might very well have experienced compunction every day of one’s life; one’s the one, whether one knows it or not, who will find oneself already waiting at that very gate when the Final Day comes. By the way, I do know what compunction means, and so should you: a prickling or stinging of the conscience. If I may put it the way Paul did in his First Letter to the Corinthians (13.3), are you any the richer for knowing all the proverbs of the Bible and all the axioms of Philosophers, when you re really all the poorer for not knowing the charity and the grace of God? #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
“Vanity of vanities, and everything is vanity,” says the Ancient Hebrew Preacher in Ecclesiastes (1.2). The only thing that is not vanity is loving God and, as Moses preached to the Israelites in Deuteronomy, serving him alone (6.13). That is the highest wisdom, to navigate one’s courses, using the contempt of the World as a chart, toward that Heavenly Port. Just what is vanity? Well, it is many things. A portfolio of assets that are bound to crash. A bird breast of medals and decorations. A brassy solo before an unhearing crowd. Alley-catting one’s “carnal desires,” as Paul so lustily put it to the Galatians (5.16), only to discover that punishment awaits further up and father in. Pining for a long life and at the same time paying no attention to the good life. Focusing both eyes on the present without casting an eye toward the future. Marching smartly in the passing parade instead of falling all over oneself trying to get back to that reviewing stand where Eternal Joy is queen. Do not forget the horary wisdom of the Ancient Hebrew Preacher: “The eye is never satisfied by what they it sees; nor the ears by what they hear” (1.8). With that in mind, try to transfer your holdings from the visible market into the invisible one. The reason? Those who trade in their own sensualities only muck up their own account and, in the process, muddy up God’s final account. To say the changes we face will be revolutionary, however, is not enough. Before we can control or channel them we need a fresh way to identify and analyze them. Without this we are hopelessly lost. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
One powerful new approach might be called social “wavefront” analysis. It looks at history as a succession of rolling waves of change and asks where the leading edge of each wave is carrying us. It focuses our attention not so much on the continuities of history (important as they are) as on the discontinuities—the innovations and breakpoints. It identifies key change patterns as they emerge, so that we can influence them. Beginning with the very simple idea that the rise of agriculture was the first turning point in human social development, and that the industrial revolution was the second great breakthrough, it views each of these not as a discrete, one-time event but as a wave of change moving at a certain velocity. Before the First Wave of change, most humans lived in small, often migratory groups and fed themselves by foraging, fishing, hunting, or herding. At some point, roughly ten millennia ago, the agricultural revolution began, and it crept slowly across the planet spreading villages, settlements, cultivated land, and a new way of life. This First Wave of change had no yet exhausted itself by the end of the seventeenth century, when the industrial revolution broke over Europe and unleashed the second great wave of planetary change. This new process—industrialization—began moving much more rapidly across nations and continents. Thus two separate and distinct change processes were rolling across the Earth simultaneously, at different speeds. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Today the First Wave has virtually subsided. Only a few tiny tribal populations, in South America or Papua New Guinea, for example, remain to be reached by agriculture. However, the force of this great First Wave has basically been spent. Meanwhile, the Second Wave, having revolutionized life in Europe, North America, and some other parts of the globe in a few short centuries, continues to spread, as many countries, until now basically agricultural, scramble to build steel mills, auto plants, textile factories, railroad, and food processing plants. The momentum of industrialization is still felt. The Second Wave has not entirely spent its force. However, even as this process continues, another, even more important, has begun. For as the tide of industrialism peaked in the decades after World War In, a little-understood Third Wave began to surge across the Earth, transforming everything it touched. Many countries, therefore, are feeling the simultaneous impact of two, even three, quite different waves of change, all moving at different rates of speed and with different degrees of force behind them. For our purposes, we shall consider the First Wave era to have begun sometime around 8000 B.C. and to have dominated the Earth unchallenged until sometime around A.D. 1650-1750. From this moment on, the First Wave lost momentum as the Second Wave picked up steam. Industrial civilization, the product of the Second Wave, then dominated the planet in its turn until it, too, created. This latest historical turning point arrived in the United States during the decade beginning around 1955—the decade that saw white-collar and service workers outnumber blue-collar workers for the first time. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
That same decade, which started in 1955 saw widespread introduction of the computer, commercial jet travel, oral contraceptives, and many other high-impact innovations. It was precisely during this decade that the Third Wave began to gather its force in the United States of America. Since then it has arrived—at slightly different dates—in most of the other industrial nations, including Britain, France, Sweden, Germany, Russian, and Japan. Today all the high-technology nations are reeling from the collision between the Third Wave and the obsolete, encrusted economies and institutions of the Second. Understanding this is the secret to making sense of much of the political and social conflict we see around us. A tool that can help us cope with these changes is psychology. What is true of psychology is also true of the other academic disciplines, each of which provides a perspective from which we can study nature and our place in it. These range from the scientific fields that study the most elementary building blocks of nature up to philosophy and theology, which address some of life’s global questions. Which perspective is pertinent depends on what you want to talk about. Take romantic love, for example. A physiologist might describe love as a state of arousal. A social psychologist would examine how various characteristics and conditions—good looks, similarity of partners, sheer repeated exposure to one another—enhance the emotion of love. A poet would express the sublime experience that love can sometimes be. A theologian might describe love as the God-given goal of human relationship. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
Since love can often be described simultaneously at various levels, we need not assume that one level is causing the other—by supposing for example, that a brain state is causing the emotion of love or that the emotion is causing the brain state. The emotional and physiological views are simply two complementary perspectives. There is a Partial Hierarchy of Disciplines. The disciplines range from basic sciences that study nature’s building blocks up to more integrative disciplines that study whole complex systems. Successful explanation of human functioning at one level need not invalidate explanation at other levels. At the Top of the scale at the disciplines that are considered Integrative Explanation and at the bottom are Elemental Explanation. Those that fall lower and in between the two extremes are a specific degree combination of the two explanations. At starts off with: Theology, and as we work our way down the scale, we see Literature and Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, and at the very bottom Physics. The hierarchy on the scale does not make one explanation more valuable than another. Nature is, to be sure, all of a piece. For convenience, we necessarily view it as multilayered, but it is actually a seamless unity. Thus the different ways of looking at a phenomenon like romantic love (or belief or consciousness) can sometimes be correlated, enabling us to build bridges between different perspectives. Attempts at building bridges between religion and the human sciences have sometimes proceeded smoothly. A religious explanation of the incest taboo (in terms of divine will or a moral absolute) is nicely complemented by biological explanation (in terms of the genetic penalty that offsprings pay for inbreeding) and sociological explanation (in terms of preserving the marital and family units). #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Other times the bridge-building efforts extending from both sides see not to connect in the middle, as when a conviction that God performs miracles in answer to prayers is met with scientific skepticism and psychological explanation of how people form illusory beliefs. To say that religious and scientific levels of explanation can be complementary does not mean there is never conflict or that any unsupported idea is to be welcomes as truth. It just means that different types of explanation may actually fit coherently together. In God’s World, all truth is one. So we arrive at a simple but basic point that resolves a good deal of fruitless debate over whether the religious or the psychological account of human nature is preferable: different levels of explanation can be complementary. The methods of psychology are appropriate, and appropriate only, for their own purposes. Psychological explanation has provided satisfying answers to many important questions regarding why people think, feel, and act as they do. However, it does not even pretend to answer life’s ultimate questions. Let us therefore celebrate and use psychology for what it offers us, remembering that it is but one aspect of the larger whole. From the admission that God exists and is the author of Nature, it by no means follows that miracles must, or even can, occur. God Himself might be a being of such a kind that it was contrary to His character to work miracles. Or again, He might have made Nature the sort of thing that cannot be added to, subtracted from, or modified. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Accordingly, the case against Miracles relies on two different grounds. You either think that the character of God excludes them or that the character of Nature excludes them. We will begin with the second which is the more popular ground. The first Red Herring is this. Any say you may hear a human (and not necessarily a disbeliever in God) say of some alleged miracle, “No. Of course I do not believe that. We know it is contrary to the laws of Nature. People could believe it in olden times because they did not know that laws of Nature. We know now that it is a scientific impossibility.” By the “laws of Nature” such a human means, I think, the observed course of Nature. If one means anything more than that one is not the plain human I take one for but a philosophic Naturalist and will be dealt with in later discussions. The human I have in this view believes that mere experience (and specially those artificially contrived experiences which we call Experiments) can tell us what regularly happens in Nature. And one thinks that what we have discovered excludes the possibility of Miracle. This is a confusion of mind. Granted that miracles can occur, it is, of course, for experience to day whether one has done so on any given occasion. However, mere experience, even if prolonged for a million years, cannot tell us whether the thing is possible. Experiment finds out what regularly happens in Nature: the norm or rule to which she works. Those who believe in miracles are not denying that there is such a norm or rule: they are only saying that it can be suspended. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
A miracle is by definition an exception. How can the discovery of the rule tell you whether, granted a sufficient cause, the rule can be suspended? If we said that the rule was A, then experience might refute us by discovering the it was B. If we said that there was no rule, then experience might refute us by observing that there is. However, we are saying neither of these things. We agree that there is a rule and that the rule is B. What has that got to do with the question whether the rule can be suspended? You replay, “But experience shows that it never has.” We reply, “Even if that were so, this would not prove that it never can. However, does experience show that it never has? The World is full of stories of people who say they have experienced miracles. Perhaps the stories are false: perhaps they are true. However, before you can decide on that historical question, you must first discover whether the things is possible, and if possible, how probable.” The idea that the progress of science has somehow altered this question is closely bound up with the idea that people in ancient time believed in them because they did not know the laws of Nature. Thus you will hear people say, “The early Christians believed that Christ was the son of a virgin, but we know that this is a scientific impossibility.” Such people seem to have an idea that belief in miracles arose at a period when humans were so ignorant of the cause of nature that they did not perceive a miracle to be contrary to it. A moment’s thought shows this to be nonsense: and the story of the Virgin Birth is a particularly striking example. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
When Saint Joseph discovered that his fiancée was going to have a baby, he not unnaturally decided to repudiate her. Why? because he knew just as well as any modern gynaecologist that in the ordinary course of nature women do not have babies unless they have lain with men. No doubt the modern gynaecologist knows several things about birth and begetting which Saint Joseph did not know. However, those things do not concern the main point—that a virgin birth is contrary to the course of nature. And Saint Joseph obviously knew that. In any sense in which it is true to say now, “The thing is scientifically impossible,” he would have said the same: the thing always was, and was always known to be, impossible unless the regular processes of nature were, in this particular case, being over-ruled or supplemented by something from beyond nature. When Saint Joseph finally accepted the view that his fiancée’s pregnancy was not due to unchastity but to a miracle, he accepted the miracle as something contrary to the known order of nature. All records of miracles teach the same thing. In such stories the miracles excite fear and wonder (that is what the very word miracle implies) among the spectators, and are taken as evidence of supernatural power. If they were not known to be contrary to the laws of nature how could they suggest the presence of the supernatural? How could they be surprising unless they were seen to be exceptions to the rules? And how can anything be seen to be an exception till the rules are know? If there were ever humans who did not know the laws of nature at all, they would have no idea of a miracle and feel no particular interest in one if it were performed before them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary. Belief in miracles, far from depending on an ignorance of the laws of nature, is only possible in so far as those laws are known. We must now add that you will equally perceive no miracles until you believe that nature works adducing to regular laws. If you have not yet noticed that the sun always rises in the East you will see nothing miraculous about his rising one morning in the West. If the miracles were offered us as event that normally occurred, then the process of science, whose business is to tell us what normally occurs, would render belief in them gradually harder and finally impossible. The progress of science has in just this way (and greatly to our benefit) made all sorts of things incredible which our ancestors believed; human-eating ants and gryphons in Scythia, humans with one single gigantic foot, magnetic islands that draw all ships towards them, mermaids and fire-breathing dragons. However, those things were never put forward as supernatural interruptions of the course of nature. They were put forward as items within her ordinary course—in fact as “science.” Later and better science has therefore rightly removed them. Miracles are in a wholly different position. If there were fire-breathing dragons our big-game hunters would find them: but no one ever pretended that the Virgin Birth or Christ’s walking on the water could be reckoned on to recur. When a thing professes from the very outset to be a unique invasion of Nature by something from outside, increasing knowledge of Nature can never make it either more or less credible that it was at the beginning. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
In this sense it is mere confusion of thought to suppose that advancing science has made it harder for us to accept miracles. We always knew they were contrary to the natural course of events; we know still that if there is something beyond Nature, they are possible. Those are the bare bones of the question; time and progress and science and civilization have not altered them in the least. The grounds for belief and disbelief are the same today as they were two thousand—or ten thousand—years ago. If Saint Joseph had lacked faith to trust God or humility to perceive the holiness of one’s spouse, one could have disbelieved in the miraculous origin of her Son as easily as any modern human; and any modern human who believes in God can accept the miracles as easily as Saint Joseph did. You and I my not agree, no matter what I say, as to whether miracles happen or not. However, at least let us not talk nonsense. Let us not allow vague rhetoric about the march of science to fool us into supposing that the most complicated account of birth, in terms of genes and spermatozoa, leaves us any more convinced than we were before that nature does not send babies to young women who “know not a man.” The second Red Herring is this. Many people say, “They could believe in miracles in olden times because they had a false conception of the Universe. They thought the Earth was the largest thing in it and Man the most important creature. It therefore seemed reasonable to suppose that the Creator was specially interested in Man and might even interrupt the course of Nature for his benefit. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
“However, now that we know the real immensity of the Universe—now that we perceive our own planet and even the whole Solar System to be only a speck—it becomes ludicrous to believe in them any longer. We have discovered our insignificance and can no longer suppose that God is so drastically concerned in our petty affairs.” Whatever its value my be as an argument, it ay be stated at once that this view is quite wrong about facts. The immensity of the Universe is not a recent discovery. More than seventeen hundred years ago Ptolemy taught that in relation to the distance of the fixed stars the whole Earth must be regarded as a point with no magnitude. His astronomical system was universally accepted in the Dark and Middle Ages. The insignificance of Earth was as much a commonplace to Boethius, King Alfred, Dante, and Chaucer as it is to Mr. H. G. Wells, or Professor Haldane. Statements to the contrary in modern books are due to ignorance. The real question is quite different from what we commonly suppose. The real question is why the spatial insignificance of Earth, after being asserted by Christian philosophers, sung by Christian poets, and commented on by Christian moralist for some fifteen centuries, without the slightest suspicion that it conflicted with their theology, should suddenly in quite modern times have been set up as a stock argument against Christianity and enjoyed, in that capacity, a brilliant career. I will offer a guess at the answer to this question presently. For the moment, let us consider he strength of this stock argument. When the doctor at post-mortem looks at the dead human’s organs and diagnoses poison one has a clear idea of the different state in which the organs would have been if the human had died a natural death. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
If from the vastness of the Universe and the smallness of Earth we diagnose that Christianity is false we ought to have a clear idea of the sort of Universe we should have expected if it were true. However, have we? Whatever space may really be, it is certain that our perceptions make it appear three dimensional; and to a three-dimensional space no boundaries are conceivable. By the very forms of our perceptions therefore we must feel as if we lived somewhere in infinite space: and whatever size the Earth happens to be, it must of course be very small in comparison with infinite. And this infinite space must either be empty or contain bodies. If it were empty, if it contained noting but our own Sun, then that vast vacancy would certainly be used as an argument against the very existence of God. Why, it would be asked, should He create one speck and leave all the rest of space to nonentity? If, on the other hand, we find (as we actually do) countless bodies floating in space, they must be either habitable or uninhabitable. Now the odd thing is that both alternatives are equally used as objections to Christianity. If the Universe is teeming with life other than ours, then this, we are told, makes it quite ridiculous to believe that God should be so concerned with the human race as to “come down from Heaven” and be made man for its redemption. If, on the other hand, our planet is really unique in harbouring organic life, then this is thought to prove that life is only an accidental by-product in the Universe and so again to disprove our religion. We treat God as the policeman in the story treated the suspect; whatever he does “will be used in evidence against Him.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
This kind of objection to the Christian faith is not really based on the observed nature of the actual Universe at all. You can make it without waiting to find out what the Universe is like, for it will fit any kind of Universe we choose to imagine. The doctor here can diagnose poison without looking at the corpse for one has a theory of poison which one will maintain whatever the state of the organs turns out to be. The reason why we cannot even imagine a Universe so built as to exclude these objections is, perhaps, as follows. Man is a finite creature who has sense enough to know that he is finite: therefore, on any conceivable view, he finds himself dwarfed by reality as a whole. He is also a derivative being: the cause of his existence lies not in himself but (immediately) in his parents and (ultimately0 either in the character of Nature as a whole or (if there is a God) in God. However, there must be something, whether it be God or the totality of Nature, which exists in its own right or goes on “of its own accord”; not as the product of causes beyond itself, but simply because it does. In the face of that something, whichever it turns out to be, man must feel his own derived existence to be unimportant, irrelevant, almost accidental. There is no question of religious people fancying that all exists for man and scientific people discovering that is does not. Whether the ultimate and inexplicable being—that which simply is—turns out to be God or “the whole show,” of course it does not exist for us. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
On either view we are faced with something which existed before the human race appeared and will exist after the Earth has become uninhabitable; which is utterly independent of us though we are totally dependent on it; and which, through vast ranges of its being, has no relevance to our own hopes and fears. For no human was, I suppose, ever so mad as to think that man, or all creation, filled the Divine Mind; if we are a smaller thing to God. It is profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and ever the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion. Many a human, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realise for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to humans, and who perhaps abandons one’s religion on that account, may at that moment be having one’s first genuinely religious experience. Christianity does not involve the belief that God loves humans and for their sake became man and died. I have not yet succeeded in seeing how what we know (and have known since the days of Ptolemy) about the size of the Universe affects the credibility of this doctrine one way or the other. The sceptic asks how we can believe that God so “came down” to this one tiny planet. If we knew that there are rational creatures on any of the other bodies that float is space; that they have, like us, fallen and need redemption; that their redemption must be in the same mode as ours; and that redemption in this mode has been withheld from them, the questions would be embarrassing. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
The Universe may be full of happy lives that never needed redemption. It may be full of lives that have been redeemed in the very same mode as our own. It may be full of things quite other than life in which God is interested though we are not. If it is maintained that anything so small as the Earth must, in any event, be too unimportant to merit the love of the Creator, we reply that no Christian ever supposed we did merit it. Christ did not die for human because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because He is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely. And what, after all, does the size of a World or a creature tell us about its “importance” or value? There is no doubt that we feel the incongruity of supposing, say, that the planet Earth might be more important than the Great Nebula in Andromeda. On the other hand, we are all equally certain that only a lunatic would think a man six-feet high necessarily more important than a man five-feet high, or a horse necessarily more important than a man, or a man’s legs than his brain. In other words this supposed ratio of size to importance feels plausible only when one of the sizes to importance feels plausible only when one of the sizes involved is very great. And that betrays the true basic of this type of thought. When a relation is perceived by Reason, it is perceived to hold good universally. If our Reason told us that size was proportional to importance, then small differences in size would be accompanied by small differences in importance just as surely as great differences in size were accompanied by great differences in importance. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Your six-foot man would have to be slightly more valuable than the man of five feet, and your leg slightly more important than your brain—which every knows to be nonsense. The conclusion is inevitable: the importance we attach to great differences of size is an affair not of reason but of emotion—of that peculiar emotion which superiorities in seize begin to produce in us only after a certain point of absolute size has been reached. We are inveterate poets. When a quantity is very great we cease to regard it as a mere quantity. Our imaginations awake. Instead of mere quantity, we now have a quality—the Sublime. However, for this, the merely arithmetical greatness of the Galaxy would be no mor impressive than the figures in an account book. To a mind which did not share our emotions and lacked our imaginative energies, the argument against Christianity from the size of the Universe would be simply unintelligible. It is there for from ourselves that the material Universe derives its power to overawe us. Humans of sensibility look up on the night sky with awe: brutal and stupid humans do not. When the silence of the eternal spaces terrified Pascal, it was Pascal’s own greatness that enabled them to do so; to be frightened by the bigness of the nebulae is, almost literally, to be frightened at our own shadow. For light years and geological periods are mere arithmetic until the shadow of human, the poet, the maker of myths, falls upon them. As a Christian I do not say we are wrong to tremble at that shadow, for I believe it to be the shadow of an image of God. However, if the vastness of Nature ever threatens to overcrowd our spirits, we must remember that it is only Nature spiritualized by human imaginations. #RandolphHaris 22 of 25
This suggest a possible answer to the question raised recently—why is the size of the Universe, known for centuries, should first in modern times become an argument against Christianity? Has it perhaps done so because in modern times the imagination has become more sensitive to bigness? From this point of view the argument from size might almost be regarded as a by-product of the Romantic Movement in poetry. In addition to the absolute increase of imaginative vitality on this topic, there has pretty certainly been a decline on others. Any reader of old poetry can see that brightness appealed to ancient and medieval humans more than bigness, and more than it does to us. Medieval thinkers believed that the stars must be somehow superior to the Earth because they looked bright and it did not. Moderns think that the Galaxy ought to be more important than the Earth because it is bigger. Both states of mind can produce good poetry. Both can supply mental pictures which rouse very respectable emotions—emotions of awe, humility, or exhilaration. However, taken as serious philosophical argument both are ridiculous. The atheist’s argument from size is, in fact, an instance of just that picture-thinking to which, as we shall later discover, the Christian is no committee. It is the particular mode in which picture-thinking appears in the twenty-first century: for what we fondly call “primitive” errors do not pass away. They merely change their form. The glimpse in its most elementary form does not come only to specially gifted persons. It belongs to the portrait of every human being as natural and no a mysterious part of one’s life-experience. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
It is simply a part of the feeling for Nature, to whose systems one belongs, and for the Sun which is Nature’s supreme expression. The Sun’s glory, beauty, power, and benignity arouse reverence. Old World faiths mostly recognized this and made prayers obligatory at dawn and twilight. The point which has yet to be made is that these glimpses are no supernatural superhuman and solely religious experiences. When scientific psychology has advanced to the point where it really understands the human being in all one’s height and depth, and not merely one’s surface, it will see this. Although one is normally quite unconscious of this connection with the Overself, once at least in a lifetime there is a flash which visits one and break the unconsciousness. One has a glimpse of one’s highest possibility. However, the clearness of intensity of this glimpse depends upon one’s receptivity. They may amount to little or much. Many people without pretensions to mystical knowledge or belief have had this experience, this glimpse of timeless loveliness, through Nature, art, music or even for no apparent reason at all. And I though over again my small adventures as with a shore-wind I drifted out in my yacht, and thought I was in danger, my fears, those small ones that I thought so big for all the vital things I have to get and to reach. And yet, there is only one great thing; to live to see in hunts and on journeys the great day that dawns, and the light that fills the World. Our God and God of our fathers, accept our rest. Sanctify us through Thy commandments, and please grant our portion in Thy Torah. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
Can the true reason we fear the unknown, be that we know ourselves too well? Please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and please make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please grant that Thy holy Sabbath be our joyous heritage, and may America who sanctifies Thy name, rest thereon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest the Sabbath. May they who observe the Sabbath and call it a delight, rejoice in Thy kingdom. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the most desirable of days, in remembrance of creation. May human beings begin to think of and dwell upon he One Infinite Life-Power, filling all space and pervading the entire Universe, existing everywhere, containing and permeating all creatures, all humanity, including one’s self. Accept and stress God’s existence. Next, call on God’s help, then concentrate on the truth of His recuperative power, which develops and sustains every cell of the body from birth, heals its wounds and knits its bones. Imagine God’s power to be flowing into you as White Light. Mentally draw the current into the body, through the forehead, the palms, and the solar plexus. Lastly, bring it to the part of the body that needs healing and concentrate it there. Think of the whole body as being manifestation of Creative Intelligence and as a projection of the higher self. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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And the Loves that May Hurt the Least are Not the Best Loves!
To those who fail to heed their own words–be warned–you never know who is listening. Loved people are loving people. Reality is a nuisance to whose who want to make it up as they go along. When you make a World tolerable for yourself, you make a World tolerable for others. One should cloak oneself in the love of God. One gets out of the spiritual life only what one puts into it, but sometimes one gets rather more, like inner consolation. Jesus is in dialog with the willing soul; even with the unwilling soul He is always trying to start a conversation. All the good soul needs to survive imprisonment in the body is food and light; that is to say, Sacrament and Scripture. We are to practice things like humanity of Christ, prayer, knowledge of self, fulfillment of obligations, the practice of virtue, the avoidance of vice, retirement from the World, devotional reading of the Scriptures, and a prickly restlessness with intellectuality for its own sake. When you receive Sacrament, Spiritual Grace is conferred, and Virtue dimmed is restored to its original beauty. Once covered with soot and sin, the pallid soul will soon blush into a full palette of colours. I am free, I am bound to nobody’s word, except to those inspired by God; if I oppose these in the least degree, I beseech God to forgive me my audacity of judgment, as I have been moved not so much by longing for some opinion of my own as by love for the freedom of science. What is the relation between faith and science? Many people—Christians and non-Christians alike—answer, “Conflict.” Reason must be assisted by observation and experiment in matters of science, and by spiritual revelation in matters of faith. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
As God’s creatures, we are dependent upon God’s sustaining power, moment by moment. Our dependence upon and allegiance to God frees us from bondage to anybody’s word, except to what we find in God’s books. We are freed even to investigate that most marvelous wonder of nature—human nature. What the Christian Bible urges upon us is a complete transformation in our relations to God and our fellow creatures, and to the World that God has made. This transformation means a liberation from old superstitious bonds and from any kind of idolatry, including the idols of common opinion and official doctrines. We who have been touched by the Spirit may respect human authorities in church, state, or science, but we will not be so deeply impressed by them that we give up our independence. Our liberation implies also a new obedience by which we must be willing to submit all our prejudices and all our prior criteria of reasonableness to test of divine revelation, including the reality of the Universe around us. Even to ordinary persons moments can come which can pass very easily into glimpses. However, their importance is not recognized and so the opportunities are missed. It is pitiful and pathetic that anyone should be so close to the diviner self and not take advantage of the propinquity by a pause of activity and a surrender to the delicate feeling which would develop of itself into a glimpse. It is pathetic, because these moments are in the nature of clues leading to the inward way; pitiful, because such people are living in a kind of blind alley and must one day retrace their steps. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
This kind of thing is supposed to lie outside common experience, but the fact is that it comes more often through Nature, art, or music than most people suspect. There is a moment in most human’s lives when they are close to an understanding of the World’s real nature. The concepts of justice and goodness are linked with distinct principles and the question of congruence is whether these two families of criteria fit together. More precisely, each concept with its associated principles defines a point of view from which institutions, actions, and plans of life can be assessed. A sense of justice is an effective desire to apply and to acts from the principles of justice and so from the point of view of justice. This what is to be established is that it is rational (as defined by the thin theory of the good) for those in a well-ordered society to affirm their sense of justice as regulative of their plan of life. It remains to be shown that this disposition to take up and to be guided by the standpoint of justice accords with the individual’s good. Whether these two points of view are congruent is likely to be a crucial factor in determining stability. However, congruence is not a foregone conclusion even in a well-ordered society. We must verify it. Of course, the rationality of choosing the principles of justice in the original position is not in question. The argument for this decision has already been made; and if it is sound, just institutions are collectively rational and to everyone’s advantage from a suitably general perspective. It is also rational for each to urge others to support these arrangements and to fulfill their duties and obligations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The problem is whether the regulative desire to adopt the standpoint of justice belongs to a person’s own good when viewed in the light of the thin theory with no restriction on information. We should like to know that this desire is indeed rational; being rational for one, it is rational for all, and therefore no tendencies to instability exist. More precisely, consider any given person in a well-ordered society. One knows, I assume, that institutions are just and that others have (and will continue to have) a sense of justice similar to one’s, and therefore that they comply (and will continue to comply) with these arrangements. We want to show that on these suppositions it is rational for someone, as defined by the thin theory, to affirm one’s sense of justice. The plan of life which does this is one’s best reply to the similar plans of one’s associates; and being rational for anyone, it is rational for all. It is important not to confuse this problem with that of justifying being a just human to an egoist. An egoist is someone committed to the point of view of one’s own interests. One’s final ends are related to oneself: one’s wealth and position, one’s pleasures and social prestige, and so on. Such a human may act justly, that is, do things that a just human would do; but so long s one remains an egoist, one cannot do them for the just human’s reasons. Having these reasons is inconsistent with being an egoist. It merely happens that on some occasions the point of view of justice and that of one’s own interests lead to the same course of action. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Therefore I am not trying to show that in a well-ordered society an egoist would act from a sense of justice, nor even that one would act justly because so acting would best advance one’s ends. Nor, again, are we to argue that an egoist, finding oneself in a just society, would be well advised, given one’s aims, to transform oneself into a just human. Rather, we are concerned with the goodness of the settled desire to take up the standpoint of justice. I assume that the members of a well-ordered society already have this desire. The question is whether this regulative sentiment is consistent with their good. We are not examining the justice or the moral worth of actions from certain points of view; we are assessing the goodness of the desire to adopt a particular point of view, that of justice itself. And we must evaluate this desire not from the egoist’s standpoint, whatever this might be, but in the light of the thin theory of the good. Human actions spring from existing desires and these can be changed only gradually. We cannot just decide at a given moment to alter our system of ends. We act know as the sort of person we are and from the wants we have now, and not as the sort of person we might have been or from desires we would have had if earlier we had only chosen differently. Regulative aims are especially subject to this constraint. Thus we decide well in advance whether to affirm our sense of justice by trying to assess our situation over a frilly extensive future. We cannot have things bot ways. We cannot preserve a sense of justice and all that this implies while at the same time holding ourselves ready to act unjustly should not doing so promise some personal advantage. A just person is not prepared to do certain things, and if one is tempted too easily, one was prepared after all. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Our question concerns then only those with a certain psychology and system of desires. It would obviously be demanding too much to require that stability should not depend upon definite restrictions in this respect. Now on one interpretation the question has an obvious answer. Supposing that someone has an effective sense of justice, one will then have a regulative desire to comply with the corresponding principles. The criteria of rational choice must take this desire into account. If a person wants with deliberative rationality to act from the standpoint of justice above all else, it is rational for one so to act. Therefore in this form the question is trivial: being the sorts of persons they are, the members of a well-ordered society desire more than anything to act justly and fulfilling this desire is part of their good. To do justly means acting honourably with God and other people. We act honourably with others by loving mercy. As followers of Jesus Christ, we strive—and are encouraged to strive—to do better and be better. Without the blessings that come from Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, we can never do enough or be enough by ourselves. The good news, though, is that because of and through Jesus Christ we can become enough. All people will be saved from physical death by the grace of God, through the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And if we turn our hearts to God, salvation from spiritual death is available to all through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, by obedience to the laws and ordinance of the Gospel. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
We can be redeemed from sin to stand clean and pure before God. Once we acquire a sense of justice that is truly final and effective, as the precedence of justice requires, we are confirmed in a plan of life that, insofar as we are rational, leads us to preserve and to encourage this sentiment. Since this fact is public knowledge, instability of the first kind does not exist, and hence neither does that of the second. The real problem of congruence is what happens if we imagine someone to give weight to one’s sense of justice only to the extent that it satisfies other descriptions which connect it with reasons specified by the thin theory of the good. We should not rely on the doctrine of the pure conscientious act. Suppose, then, that the desire to act justly is not a final desire like that to avoid pain, misery, or apathy, or the desire to fulfill the inclusive interests. The theory of justice supplies other descriptions of what the sense of justice is a desire for; and we must use these to show that a person following the thin theory of the good would indeed confirm this sentiment as regulative of one’s plan of life. For the grounds of congruence to be established, as the contract doctrine requires, the principles of justice are public: they characterize the commonly recognized moral convictions shared by the members of a well-ordered society. We are not concerned with someone who is questioning these principles. By hypothesis, one concedes as everyone else does that they are best choice from the standpoint of the original position. (Of course, this can always be doubted but it raises an entirely different matter.) #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Now since others are assumed to have (and continue to have) an effective sense of justice, our hypothetical individual is considering in effect a policy of pretending to have certain moral sentiments, all the while being ready to act as a free-rider whenever the opportunity arises to further one’s personal interest. Since the conception of justice is public, one is debating whether to set out on a systematic course of deception and hypocrisy, professing without belief, as it suits one’s purpose, the accepted moral views. That deception and hypocrisy are wrongs does not, I assume, bother one; but one will have to reckon with the psychological cost of taking precautions and maintaining one’s pose, and the loss of spontaneity and naturalness that results. In most societies as things are, such pretensions may no have a high price, since the injustice of institutions and the often squalid behaviour of others renders one’s own deceits easier to endure; but in a well-ordered society there is not this comfort. These remarks are supported by the fact that there is a connection between acting justly and natural attitudes. Given the content of the principles of justice and the laws of moral psychology, wanting to be fair with our friends and wanting to give justice to those we care for is as much a part of these affections as the desire to be with them and to feel sad at their loss. Assuming therefore that one needs these attachments, the policy contemplated is presumably that of acting justly only towards those whom we are bound by tires of affection and fellow feeling, and of respecting ways of life to which we are devoted. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
However, in a well-ordered society these bonds extend widely, and include ties to intuitional forms, assuming here that all three psychological laws are fully effective. In addition, we cannot in general select who is to be injured by our unfairness. For example, if we cheat on paying our taxes, or if we find some way to avoid doing our fair share for the community, everyone is hurt, our friends and associates along with the est. To be sure, we might consider covertly passing on part of our gains to those we especially like, but this becomes a dubious and involved affair. Thus in a well-ordered society where effective bonds are extensive both to persons and to social forms, and we cannot select who is to lose by our defections, there are strong grounds for preserving one’s sense of justice. Doing this protects in a natural and simple way the institutions and persons we care for and leads us to welcome new and broader social tires. Another basic consideration is this: it follows from the Aristotelian Principle (and its companion effect) that participating in the life of a well-ordered society is a great good. This conclusion depends upon the meaning of the principles of justice and their precedence in everyone’s plans as well as upon the psychological features of our nature. It is the details of the contract view which establish this connection. Because such a society is a social union of social unions, it realizes to a preeminent degree the various forms of human activity; and given the social nature of humankind, the fact that our potentialities and inclinations far surpass what can be expressed in any one life, we depend upon the cooperative endeavours of others not only for the means of well-being but to bring to fruition our latent powers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
And with a certain success all around, each enjoys the greater richness and diversity of the collective activity. Yet to share fully in this life we must acknowledge the principles of its regulative conception, and this means that we must affirm our sentiment of justice. To appreciate something as ours, we must have a certain allegiance to it. What binds society’s efforts into one social union is the mutual recognition and acceptance of the principles of justice; it is this general affirmation which extends the ties of identification over the whole community and permits the Aristotelian Principles to have its wider effect. Individual and group accomplishments are no longer seen as just so many separate personal goods. Whereas not to confirm our sense of justice is to limit ourselves to a narrow view. Finally, there is the reason connected with the Kantian interpretation: acting justly is something we want to do as free and equal rational beings. The desire to act justly and the desire to express our nature as free moral persons turn out to specify what is practically speaking the same desire. When someone has true beliefs and a correct understanding of the theory of justice, these two desires move one in the same way. They are both dispositions to act from precisely the same principle: namely, those that would be chosen in the original position. Of course, this contention is based on a theory of justice. If his theory is unsound, the practical identity fails. However, since we are concerned only with the special case of a well-ordered society as characterized by the theory, we are entitled to assume that its members have a lucid grasp of the public conception of justice upon which their relations are founded. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Let us supposed that these are the chief reasons (or typical thereof) which the thin account of the good allows for maintaining one’s sense of justice. The question now arises whether they are decisive. Here we confront the familiar difficulty of a balance of motives which in many ways is similar to a balance of first principles. Sometimes the answer is found by comparing one balance of reasons with another, for surely if the first balance clearly favours one course of action then the second will also, should its reasons supporting this alternative be stronger and its reasons supporting the other alternatives be weaker. However, arguing from such comparisons presupposes some configurations of reasons which evidently go one way rather than another to serve as a bench mark. Failing these, we cannot get beyond conditional comparisons: if the first balance favours a certain choice, then the second does also. Now at this point it is obvious that the content of the principles of justice is a crucial element in the decision. Whether it is for a person’s good that one have a regulative sense of justice depends upon what justice requires of him. The congruence of the right and the good is determined by the standards by which each concept is specified. Utilitarianism is more strict than common sense in demanding the sacrifice of the agent’s private interests when this is necessary for the greater happiness of all. It is also more exacting than the contract theory, for while beneficent acts going beyond our natural duties are good actions and evoke our esteem, they are not required as a matter of right. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Utilitarianism may seem to be a more exalted ideal, but the other side of it is that it may authorize the lesser welfare and liberty of some for the sake of a greater happiness of others who ma already be more fortunate. A rational person, in framing one’s plan, would hesitate to give precedence to so stringent a principle. It is likely both to exceed one’s capacity for sympathy and to be hazardous to one’s freedom. Thus however improbable the congruence of the right and the good in justice as fairness, it is surely more probable than on the utilitarian view. The conditional balance of reasons favours the contract doctrines. A somewhat different point is suggested by the following doubt: namely, that while the decision to preserve our sentiment of justice might be rational, we may in end suffer a very great loss or even be ruined by it. As we have seen, a just person is not prepare to do certain things, and so in the face of evil circumstances one may decide to chance death rather than to act unjustly. Yet although it is true enough that for the sake of justice a human may lose one’s life where another would live to a later day, the just human does all things considered one most want; in this sense one is not defeated by ill fortune the possibility of which one foresaw. The question is on a par with the hazards of love; indeed, it is simply a special case. Those who love one another, or who acquire strong attachments to persons and to forms of life, at the same time become liable to ruin: their love makes them hostages to misfortune and the injustice of others. Friends and lovers take great chances to help each other; and members of families willing to do the same. Their being so disposed belongs to their attachments as much as any other inclination. Once we love we are vulnerable: there is no such thing as loving while being ready to consider water to love, just like that. And the loves that may hurt the least are not the best loves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
When we love we accept the danger of injury and loss. In view of our general knowledge of the likely course of life, we do not think these risks so great as to cause us to cease loving. Should evils occur, they are the object of our aversions, and we resist those whose machinations bring them about. If we are loving we do not regret our love. Now if these things are true of love as the World is, or very often is, then a fortiori they would appear to be true of loves in a well-ordered society, and so of the sense of justice too. For in a society where others are just our loves expose us mainly to the accidents of nature and the contingency of circumstances. And similarly for the sentiment of justice which is connected to these affections. Taking as a bench mark the balance of reasons that leads us to affirm our loves as things are, it seems that we should be ready once we become of age to maintain our sense of justice in the more favourable conditions of a just society. One special feature of the desires to express our nature as moral persons strengthens this conclusion. With other inclinations of the self, there is a choice of degree and scope. Our policy of deception and hypocrisy need not be completely systematic; our affective ties to institutions and to other persons can be more or less strong, and our participation in the wider life of society more or less full. There is a continuum of possibilities and not an all or nothing decision, although for simplicity I have spoken pretty much in these terms. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
However, the desire to express our nature as a free and equal rational being can be fulfilled only by acting on the principles of right and justice as having first priority. This is a consequence of the condition of finality: since these principles are regulative, the desire to act upon them is satisfied only to the extent that it is likewise regulative with respect to other desires. It is acting from this precedence that expresses our freedom from contingency and happenstance. Therefore in order to realize our nature we have no alternative but to plan to preserve our sense of justice as governing our other aims. If it is compromised and balanced against other ends as but one desire among the rest, this sentiment cannot be fulfilled. It is desire to conduct oneself in a certain way above all else, a striving that contains within itself its own priority. Other aims can be achieved by a plan that allows a place for each, since their satisfaction is possible independent of their place in the ordering. However, this is not the case with the sense of right and justice; and therefore acting wrongly is always liable to arouse feelings of guilt and shame, the emotions aroused by the defeat of our regulative moral sentiments. Of course, this does not mean that the realization of our nature as a free and rational being is itself an all or nothing affair. To the contrary, how far we succeed in expressing our nature depends upon how consistently we act from our sense of justice as finally regulative. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
What we cannot do is express our nature by following a plan that views the sense of justice as but one desire to be weighed against others. For this sentiment reveals what the person is, and to compromise it is not to achieve for the self free reign but to give way to the contingences and accidents of the World. One last question must be mentioned. Suppose that even in a well-ordered society there are some persons for whom the affirmation of their sense of justice is not a good. Given their aims and wants and the peculiarities of their nature, the thin account of the good does not define reasons sufficient for them to maintain this regulative sentiment. It has been argued that to these persons one cannot truthfully recommend justice as a virtue. And this is surely correct, assuming such a recommendation to imply that rational grounds (identified by the thin theory) counsel this course for them as individuals. However, then the further question remains whether those who do affirm their sense of justice are treating these persons unjustly in requiring them to comply with just institutions. Now unhappily we are not yet in a position to answer this query properly, since it presupposes a theory of punishment and I have said very little about this part of the theory of justice. I have assumed strict compliance with any conception that would be chosen and then considered which one on the list presented would be adopted. However, we may reason much as we did in the case of civil disobedience, another part of partial compliance theory. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Thus granting that adherence to whatever conception is acknowledged will be imperfect if left completely voluntary, under what conditions would the persons in the original position agree that stabilizing penal devices can be employed Would they insist that a person can be required to do only what is to one’s advantage as defined by the thin theory? It seems clear, in the light of the contract doctrine as a whole, that they would not. For this restriction amounts in effect to general egoism which, as we have seen, would be rejected. Moreover, the principles of right and justice are collectively rational; and it is in the interest of each that everyone else should comply with just arrangements. It is also the case that the general affirmation of the sense of justice is a great social asset, establishing the basis for mutual trust and confidence from which all normally benefit. Thus in agreeing to penalties that stabilize a scheme of cooperation the parties accept the same kind of constraint on self-interest that they acknowledge in choosing the principle of justice in the first place. Having agreed to these principles in view of the reasons already surveyed, it is rational to authorize the measures need to maintain just institutions, assuming that the constraints of equal liberty and the rule of law are duly recognized. Those who find that being disposed to act justly is not a good for them cannot deny these contentions. It is, of course, true that in their case just arrangements do not fully answer to their nature, and therefore, other things equal, they will be less happy than they would be if they could affirm their sense of justice. However, here one can only say: their nature is their misfortune. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
The main point then is that to justify a conception of justice we do not have to contend that everyone, whatever one’s capacities and desires, has a sufficient reason (as defined by the thin theory) to preserve one’s sense of justice. For our good depends upon the sorts of persons we are, the kinds of wants and aspirations we have and are capable of. It can even happen that there are many who do not find a sense of justice for their good; but if so, the forces making for stability are weaker. Under such conditions penal devices will play a much larger role in the social system. The greater the lack of congruence, the greater the likelihood, other things equal, of instability with its attendant evils. Yet none of this nullifies the collective rationality of the principles of justice; it is still to the advantage of each that everyone else should honour them. At least this holds true so long as the conception of justice is not so unstable that some other conception would be preferable. However, what I have tried to show is that the contract doctrine is superior to its rivals on this score, and therefore that the choice of principles in the original position need not be reconsidered. In fact, granted a reasonable interpretation of human sociability (provided by the account of how a sense of justice is acquired and by the idea of social union), justice as fairness appears to be a sufficiently stable conception. The hazards of the generalized prisoner’s dilemma are removed by the match between the right and good. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Of course, under normal conditions public knowledge and confidence are always imperfect. So even in a just society it is reasonable to admit certain constraining arrangements to insure compliance, but their main purpose is to underwrite citizens’ trust in other another. These mechanisms will seldom be invoked and will comprise but a minor part of the social scheme. Congruence allows us to complete the sequence of applications of the definition of goodness. We can say first that, in a well-ordered society, being a good person (and in particular having an effective sense of justice) is indeed a good for that person; and second that this form of society is a good society. The first assertation follows from congruence; the second holds since a well-ordered society has the properties that it is rational to want in a society from the two relevant points of view. Thus a well-ordered society satisfies the principles of justice which are collectively rational from the perspective of the original position; and from the standpoint of the individual, the desire to affirm the public conception of justice as regulative of one’s plan of life accords with the principles of rational choice. These conclusions support the values of community, and in reaching them my account of justice as fairness is completed. Humankind has a moral nature. Justifying grounds do not lie ready to hand: they need to be discovered and suitably expressed, sometimes by lucky guesses, somethings by noting the requirements of theory. For publicity allows that all can justify their conduct to everyone else (when their conduct is reasonable and in according with the laws of God) without self-defeating or other disturbing consequences. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Moral elements of the original position in the form of general conditions and the veil of ignorance and the like are important to employ because they allow us to see more clearly how justice requires us to go beyond a concern for our own interest. Only if humans have a sense of justice and do therefore respect one another, will the principles of justice be effective; the notion of respect or of inherent worth of persons is not a suitable basis for arriving at these principles. It is precisely these ideas that call for interpretation. The situation is analogous to that of benevolence: without the principles of right and justice, the aims of benevolent and the requirements of respect are both undefined; they presuppose these principles already independently derived. Once the conception of justice is on hand, however, the ideas of respect and of human dignity can be given a more definite meaning. Among other things, respect for persons is shown by treating them in ways that they can see to be justified. However, more than this, it is manifest in the content of the principles to which we appeal. Thus to respect persons is to recognize that they possess an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. It is to affirm that the loss of freedom for some is not made right by a greater welfare enjoyed by others. The lexical priorities of justice represent the value of persons that is beyond all price. Justice is the first virtue of social institutions. The feelings connecting with the primacy of justice allows us to understand that justice as fairness is the outcome of a rational society because it articulates the principles in the United States Constitution. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
The theory of justice is a viable systematic doctrine and the idea of maximizing the good does not hold sway by default. Thus what we are doing is to combine into one conception the totality of conditions that we are ready upon due reflection to recognize as reasonable in our conduct with regard to one another. One we grasp this conception, we can at any time look at the social World from the required point of view. It suffices to reason in certain ways and to follow the conclusions reached. This standpoint is also objective and expresses our autonomy. Without conflating all persons into one but recognizing them as distinct and separate, it enables us to be impartial, even between persons who are not contemporaries but who belong to many generations. Thus to see our place in society from the perspective of this position is to see it sub specie aeternitatis: it is to regard the human situation not only from all social but also from all temporal points of view. The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the World, not the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the World. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as one lives by the, each from one’s own standpoint. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
To the ancients, as well as to many contemporary seekers, the World is alive with spirit. The surrounding landscape is infused with creativity and meaning and each place speaks to us of the divine. If one could attain it, purify of heart would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from the point of view of justice as fairness. Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for sin and salvation from spiritual death are available to all. As we receive the Saviour’s cleansing, healing, and strengthening power, we not only walk justly and humbly with God, we also learn to love mercy the way that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Every day is a God, each day is a God ad holiness holds forth in time. The Earth is more than real estate and if we have a wonderful sense of the divine it is because we live amid such awesome magnificence. God is in the arched sky; He looks out from every stary. God is spread out like a legible language upon the beautiful face of the unsleeping ocean. God is the poetry of Nature; He is that which uplifts the spirit within us. Earth is a bountiful community of living beings of which we are only one part. And each living being has an inner presence and dignity apart from any value we humans may place upon it. While certain places always have been recognized for the powerful presence of their unique localities or landforms, these places are not isolated entities. All the physical things that make up our daily life share a common spiritual reality—as such they are all to be revered and respect. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Lord, the air smells good today, straight from the mysteries within the inner courts of God. A grace like new clothes thrown across the garden, free medicine for everybody. The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise, the first blue violets kneeling. Whatever came from Being is caught up n being, drunkenly forgetting that way back. Thou didst establish the Sabbath and didst accept it offerings, prescribing the order of its service. They that delight in the Sabbath have a glorious heritage; they who partake of it, merit life’s highest joy, and they that love its observance have thus chosen true distinction. At Sinai our forefathers were commanded to keep the Sabbath; and Thou didst ordain, O Lord our God, that they bring the additional Sabbath offering as set forth in the Torah. Thou didst create the World from old completing Thy work by the seventh day. Loving us and exalting us above all tongues, Thou didst sanctify us by Thy commandments, and didst bring us near unto Thy service, O our King, calling us by Thy great and holy name. As a token of Thy love, O Lord our God, Thou didst also give us Sabbaths for rest and New Moons for forgiveness. Because we and our forefathers sinned against Thee, our city America has been laid waste, our Sanctuary is desolate, our splendour has gone into exile, and the glory has been removed from the abode of our life. Therefore we cannot fulfill our obligations in Thy chosen House, the great and holy Temple, which was called by Thy name, because of the destruction that has become upon Thy Sanctuary. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Seek the Virtuous Citizen Who Will Use the Social Contract to Make Virtue Reign!
We all wear masks, illusions of what we want people to see. But when we hide our true selves from the people we love, what price do we pay for that deception? In America if someone’s wife looks like a new woman, she probably is, so do not ask personal questions or talk about family. Noble acts and momentous events happen in the same way and produce the same impression as the ordinary facts. Significant intuitionist elements enter into determining the good, and in a teleological theory these are bound to affect the right. The classical utilitarian tries to avoid this consequence by the doctrine of hedonism, but to no avail. We cannot, however, stop here; we must find a constructive solution to the problem of choice which hedonism seeks to answer. Thus we are faced once again with the questions: if there is no single end that determines the appropriate pattern of aims, how is a rational plan of life actually to be identified? Now the answer to this question has already been given: a rational plan is one that would be chosen with deliberative rationality as defined by the full theory of the good. It remains to make sure that, within the context of a contract doctrine, this answer is perfectly satisfactory and that the problems which beset hedonism do not arise. A moral personality is characterized by two capacities: one for a conception of the good, the other for a sense of justice. When realized, the first is expressed by a rational plan of life, the second by a regulative desire to act upon certain principles of right. Thus a moral person is a subject with ends one has chosen, and one’s fundamental preference is for conditions that enable one to frame a mode of life that expressed one’s nature as a free and equal rational being as fully as circumstances permit. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Now the unity of the person is manifest in the coherence of one’s plan, this unity being founded on the higher-order desire to follow, in ways consistent with one’s sense of right and justice, the principles of rational choice. Of course, a person shapes one’s aims not all at once but only gradually; but in ways that justice allows, one is able to formulate and to follow a plan of life and thereby to fashion one’s own unity. The distinctive feature of a dominant-end conception is how it supposed the self’s unity is achieved. Thus in a hedonism the self becomes one by trying to maximize the sum of pleasurable experiences within its psychic boundaries. A rational self must establish its unity in this manner. Since pleasure is the dominant end, the individual is indifferent to all aspects of oneself, viewing one’s natural assets of mind and body, and even one’s natural inclinations and attachments, as so many materials for obtaining pleasant experiences. Moreover, it is not by aiming at pleasure as one’s pleasure but simply as pleasure that gives unity to the self. Whether it is one’s pleasure or that of others as well which is to be advanced raises a further matter that can be put aside so long as we are dealing with one person’s good. However, once we consider the problem of social choice, the utilitarian principle in its hedonistic form is perfectly natural. For if any one individual must order one’s deliberations by seeking the dominant end of pleasure and can secure one’s rational personhood in no other way, then it seems that a number of persons in their joint efforts should strive to order their collective actions by maximizing the pleasurable experiences of the group. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Thus just as one saint when alone is to work for the glory of God, so the members of an association of saints are to cooperate together to do whatever is necessary for the same end. The difference between the individual and the social case is that the resources of the self, its mental and physical capacities and its emotional sensibilities and desires, are placed in a different context. In both instances these materials are in the service of the dominant end. However, depending on the other agencies available to cooperate with them, it is the pleasure of the self or of the social group that is to be maximized. Further, if the same sorts of considerations that lead to hedonism as a theory of first-person choice are applied to the theory of right, the principle of utility seems quite plausible. For let us suppose first that happiness (defined in terms of agreeable feeling) is the sole good. Then, as even intuitionists concede, it is at least a prima facie principle of right to maximize happiness. If this principle is not alone regulative, there must be some other criterion such as distribution which is to be assigned some weight. However, by reference to what dominant end of social conduct are these standards to be balanced? Since this end must exist if judgments of right are to be reasoned and not arbitrary, the principle of utility appears to specify the required goal. No other principle has the features necessary to define the ultimate end of right conduct. I believe that it is essentially this reasoning that underlies Mill’s so-called proof of utility. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Mill’s seems to believe that if he can establish that happiness is the sole good, he has shown that the principle of utility is the criterion of right. What we are given is an argument to the effect that happiness alone is good. Now nothing so far follows about the conception of right, but we can set out all the premises in the light of which Mill thought his argument a proof. Now in justice as fairness a complete reversal of perspective is brought about by the priority of right and the Kantian interpretation. To see this we have only to recall the features of the original position and the nature of the principles that are chosen. The parties regard moral personality and not the capacity for pleasure and pain as the fundamental aspect of the self. They do not know what final aims persons have, and all dominant-end conceptions are rejected. Thus it would not occur to them to acknowledge the principle of utility in its hedonistic form. There is no more reason for the parties to agree to this criterion than to maximize any other particular objective. They think of themselves as beings who can and do choose their final ends (always plural in number). Just as one person is to decide upon one’s plan of life in the light of full information (no restrictions being imposed in this case), so a plurality of persons are to settle the terms of their cooperation in a situation that gives all fair representation as moral beings. The parties’ aim in the original position is to establish just and favourable conditions for each to fashion one’s own unity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Their fundamental interest in liberty and in the means to make fair use of it is the expression of their seeing themselves as primarily moral persons with an equal right to choose their mode of life. Thus they acknowledge the two principles of justice to be ranked in serial order as circumstances permit. We must now connect these remarks with the problem of the indeterminacy of choice with which we began. The main idea is that given the priority of right, the choice of our conception of the good is framed within definite limits. The principles of justice and their realization in social form define the bounds within which our deliberations take place. The essential unity of the self is already provided by the conception of right. Moreover, in a well-ordered society this unity is the same for all; everyone’s conception of the good as given by one’s rational plan is a subplan of the larger comprehensive plan that regulates the community as a social union of social unions. The many associations of varying sizes and aims, being adjusted to one another by the public conception of justice, simplify decision by offering definite ideals and forms of life that have been developed and tested by innumerable individuals, sometimes for generations. Thus in drawing up our plan of life we do not start de novo; we are not required to chose from countless possibilities without given structure of fixed contours. So while there is no algorithm for settling upon our good, no first-person procedure of choice, the priority of right and justice securely constrains these deliberations so that they become more manageable. Since the basic rights and liberties are already firmly established, our choices cannot distort our claims upon one another. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Now given the precedence of right and justice, the indeterminacy of the conception of the good is much less troublesome. In fact, the considerations that lead a theological theory to embrace the notion of a dominant end lose their force. First of all, the purely preferential elements in choice, while not eliminated, are nevertheless confined within the constraints of right already on hand. Since human’s claims on one another are not affected, the indeterminacy is relatively innocuous. Moreover, within the limits allowed by the principles of right, there need be no standard of correctness beyond that of deliberative rationality. If a person’s plan of life meets this criterion, and if one succeeds in carrying it out, and in doing so finds it worthwhile, there are no grounds for saying that it would have been better if one had done something else. We should not simply assume that our rational good is uniquely determined. From the standpoint of the theory of justice, this assumption is unnecessary. Secondly, we are not required to go beyond deliberative rationality in order to define a clear and workable conception of right. The principles of justice have a definite content and the argument supporting them uses only the thin account of the good and its list of primary goods. Once the conception of justice is established, the priority of rights guarantees the precedence of its principles. Thus the two considerations that make dominant-end conceptions attractive for teleological theories are both absent in the contract doctrine. Such is the effect of the reversal of justice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Earlier when introducing the Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness, I mentioned that there is a sense in which the unanimity condition on the principles of justice is suited to express even the nature of a single self. Offhand this suggestion seems to be paradoxical. How can the requirement of unanimity fail to be a constraint? One reason is that the veil of ignorance insures that everyone should reason in the same way and so the condition is satisfied as a matter of course. However, a deeper explanation lies in the fact that the contract doctrines has a structure opposite to that of a utilitarian theory. In the latter each person draws up one’s rational plan without hinderance under full information, and society then proceeds to maximize the aggregate fulfillment of the plans that results. In justice as fairness, on the other hand, all agree ahead of time upon the principles by which their claims on one another are to be settled. These principles are then given absolute precedence so that they regulate social institution without question and each frames one’s plans in conformity with them. Plans that happen to be out of line must be revised. Thus the prior collective agreement sets up from the first certain fundamental structural features common to everyone’s plan. The nature of the self as a free and equal more person is the same for all, and the similarity in basic form of rational plans expresses this fact. Moreover, as shown by the notion of society as a social union of social unions, the members of a community participate in one another’s nature: we appreciate what others do as things we might have done but which they do for us, and what we do is similarly done for them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Since the self is realized in the activities of many selves, relations of justice that conform to principles which would be assented to by all are best fitted to express the nature of each. Eventually then the requirements of a unanimous agreement connects up with the idea of human beings who as member of a social union seek the values of community. It may be thought that once the principles of justice are given precedence, then there is a dominant end that organizes our life after all. Yet this idea is based on a misunderstanding. To be sure the principles of justice are lexically prior to that of efficiency, and the first principle has precedence over the second. It follows that an ideal conception of the social order is set up which is to regulate the direction of change and the efforts of reform. However, it is the principles of individual duty and obligation that define the claim of this ideal upon persons and these do not make it all controlling. Furthermore, I have all along assumed that the proposed dominant end belongs to a teleological theory in which by definition the good is specified independently from the right. The role of this end is in part to make the conception of right reasonably precise. In justice as fairness there can be no dominant end in this sense, nor as we have seen is one needed for this purpose. Finally, the dominant end of a teleological theory is so defined that we can never finally achieve it and therefore the injunction to advance it always applies. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Recall here the earlier remarks as to why the principle of utility is not really suitable for a lexical ordering: the later criteria will never come into play, except in special cases to break ties. The principles of justice, on the other hand, represent more or less definite social aims and restrictions. Once we realize a certain structure of institutions, we are at liberty to determine and to pursue our good within the limits which its arrangements allow. In view of these reflections, the contrast between a teleological theory and the contact doctrine may be expressed in the following intuitive way: the former defines the good locally, for example, as a more or less homogeneous quality or attribute of experience, and regards it as an extensive magnitude which is to be maximized over some totality; whereas the latter moves in the opposite fashion by identifying a sequence of increasingly specific structural forms of right conduct each set within the preceding one, and in this manner working from a general framework for the whole to sharper and sharper determination of its parts. Hedonistic utilitarianism is the classical instance of the first procedure and illustrates it with compelling simplicity. Justice as fairness exemplifies the second possibility. Thus the four-stage sequence formulates an order of agreements and enactments designed to build up in several steps a hierarchical structure of principles, standards, and rules, which when consistently applied and adhered to, lead to a definite constitution for social action. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Now this sequence does not aim at the complete specification of conduct. Rather the idea is to approximate the boundaries, however vague, within which individuals and associations are at liberty to advance their aims and deliberative rationality has free play. Ideally the approximation should converge in the sense that with further steps the cases left unaccounted for become of less and less importance. The notion guiding the entire construction is that of the original positions and its Kantian interpretation: this notion contains within itself the elements that select which information is relevant at each stage, and generate a sequence of adjustments appropriate to the contingent conditions of the existing society. Recalling one phrase or sentence, readers often project their own wishes and anxieties into the text before them and find in it what they had placed there. One must study society through humans, and humans through society: those who will treat politic and ethics separately will never understand either. Humans are naturally good and it is by their institutions alone that they become evil. The modern World rests on contradictions that already emerged. Many Americas believe themselves to be free. They are greatly mistake; they are only free during the election of the members of Congress. Once they are elected, the populace is enslaved; it is nothing. The use of the American people makes of that freedom in the brief moments of its liberty certainly warrants its losing it. The best of good societies will always be a republic unfettered by a hereditary aristocracy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Ceaselessly occupied with Rome and Athens; living, so to speak, with their great men, myself born a Citizen of a Republic, and son of a father whose patriotism was his strongest passion, I took fire from his example; I thought myself Greek or Roman; I became the personage whose life I was reading. A beneficent God has created this World with its laws and then withdrawn from it to leave virtuous humans to discover its moral rules and live according to its dictates. We must respond to the Christian theology, its moral energy, its gospel of usefulness and simplicity, its call for self-discipline and virtue, and its austerity. To be celebrated are the virtues of candour, maturity, simplicity, self-restraint, good health, reason warmed by love and love ennobled by reason. We must be kind to the young and old. It is kindness with a purpose. Children have to be educated in obedience to the Stoical doctrine that humans must live in accord with nature. The consequences of applying this maximum to the training of the young are far-reaching: the child may be father to the man, but he is the child first. The educator must closely consult the child’s capacities and use them to help one grow. Rote learning and forced reading may be nonsensical: they may only produce a child who is a parrot, not a human. However, it is better than nothing and may be the way to awaken the capacity of the human being. Only the educator who enters empathetically into the nature of the growing child’s development and the range of one’s experience can lastingly enrich one. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
The immoral society of today is making immoral humans, incapable of reforming a culture in whose corruption they cannot help but connive. Hence they are compelled to perpetuate that which they should destroy. The one way to break this impasse is to create a new human who can, in turn, create a new society. It is an essential precondition for this work that the young must be rapidly remove from corrupting influences. If humans are born free and everywhere in chains, who but God can do the work of liberation? Once the community of sanity has been formed, it will govern itself calmly, wisely, and generously. The key element in the citizen’s activity is one’s participation in decision-making, and as a sound citizens one will cast one’s vote by listening not to one’s own selfish interests, but to one’s perception of the public weal. Of course, with the best of intentions, one may confound the two. However, then the decision of the majority—not just any majority, but the intelligent, sensible, uncorrupted majority will recall the straying minority to its duty, to it true, larger interest. The closer private will, approximate the general will, the more likely can that will realize itself in actions. We must seek the virtuous citizen, who will use the Social Contract to make virtue reign. The question for the individual has always been: Why, and whom, should I obey? It is not simply a political question or, rather, the political question is a familial question writ large. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The question of whom should one obey is a question the child may never consciously ask, but it is lodged somewhere in one’s mind. It is a question that the slave, or the subject wholly habituated to unconditional obedience, may never seriously canvass, but it will occur to one in rebellious moments. Freedom must be given as much scope that seems reasonable. Then we can attempt to establish the respective rights of the sovereign and the citizen. However, this tension is not as a relation to be mapped, but as a paradox to be resolved. By employing the Social Contract, humans surrender all their rights without becoming slaves. To find a form of association which defends and protects with the whole common power the person and property of each associate, and in which each, uniting oneself to all, yet obeys oneself alone, and remains as free as before. We must recognize one principle that humans are good. And they can afford to exchange their natural for their civic freedom, to translate their original goodness into social action. I do not condemn all organized society, and I believe that there is one society, one yet to be constructed, that is infinitely preferable to pre-political conditions. Humans can surrender their natural freedom because, while they become subjects, they remain masters. In the god community one essentially obeys oneself. The Social Contract is certainly not without its difficulties. However, the state is never the master, always the servant. For the body to which the individual yields one’s natural rights is not the government but society—a community of beings like oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Force does not create rights. However, the government holds the monopoly of force, and therefore is always an agent of the citizens to protect it. Although freedom is advocated, the United States of America is a country that was founded on the belief of God, and God is also a part of our government. And while we do preach religious freedom, must like restaurants do not always require people to tip, it is suggested that humans—all humans must have some religious beliefs that will make, and keep, them moral beings. This means that the sovereign of the good society must devise a purely civil profession of faith, the articles of which it belongs to the sovereign to establish, not exactly as dogmas of religion, but as sentiments of sociability, without which it is impossible to be a good citizen or faithful subject. The strict and rigid doctrines should be simple and few in number, including belief in the existence of a powerful, intelligent, beneficent deity, a life to come, the good fortune of the just and the punishment of the wicked, the sacredness of the social contract and of the laws. Whoever does not believe these strict and rigid doctrines can be banished from the state, and whoever has officially subscribed to them and then acts as if one does not believe in them should be put to death. This harsh set of propositions is not a casual or accidental addition to political thinking; it lies squarely at the heart of our commitment o virtue. The dictatorship of virtue is a strenuous and, in many ways, a dangerous ideal. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Has the reestablishment of the sciences and the arts served to purify or to corrupt manner and morals? As a searing emotional upheaval—this is one of the great and finest questions ever debated. There will always be humans destined to be subjugated by the opinions of their century, their country, their society. Integrity is dearer to good humans than erudition is to the studious. What then have I to fear? The enlightenment of the assembly that listen to me? I admit it; but this is owning to the composition of the discourse and not to the sentiment of the speaker. Fairminded sovereigns have never hesitated to pass judgements against themselves in disputes whose outcomes are uncertain; and the position most advantageous for a just cause is to have to defend oneself against an upright and enlightened opponent who is judge in one’s own case. To this motive which heartens me is joined another which determines me, namely that, having upheld, according to my natural light, the side of truth, whatever my success, there is a prize which I cannot fail to receive; I will find it within the depths of my heart. It is a grand and beautiful sight to see humans emerge somehow from nothing by their own efforts; dissipate, by the light of one’s reason, the shadows in which nature has enveloped one; rise above oneself; soar by means of one’s mind into the Heavenly regions; traverse, like the sun, the vast expanse of the Universe with giant steps; and, what is even grander and more difficult, return to oneself in order to study humans and know one’s nature, one’s duties, and one’s end. All of these marvels have been revived in the past few generations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
America has relapsed into the barbarism of the first ages. Recently, many of the peoples of this part of the World, who had lived such enlightened lives, now live in a state worse than ignorance. Sone nondescript scientific jargon, even more contemptible than ignorance, has usurped the name of knowledge, and posed a nearly invincible obstacle to its return. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is a 19th century story of Lily Bart, a wealthy woman who becomes impoverished, but still belongs to New York’s high society. It is a cautionary tale to be careful with your economics and with whom you love, and also maybe not to be so trusting of your family because in the end you will end up financially ruined, and die from a broken heart by death by suicide. Your prince charming, Lawrence Selden, may not come around and realizes he love you until he finds your lifeless body cold. Simon Rosedale, one who is well-off and wants you for your beauty, may never be enough, and Gus Trenor may help you pay off your “dress maker,” but he will always want to talk under your skirt and is a married man. Sometimes it is just be to be prudent and not live too lavishly, establish your own career and maybe do not set your sites on the wrong partner. Someone who can never love you until it is too late. A revolution is needed to bring humans back to common sense. The art of writing must be joined with the art of thinking—a sequence of events that may seem strange, but which perhaps are only too natural. And the chief advantage of commerce with Muses will being to be felt, namely, that of making humans more sociable by inspiring in them the desire to please one another with works worthy of their mutual approval. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
It should not have taken the fall of the throne of Constantinople to bring Italy the debris of ancient Greece. However, if you are not careful, the failure of Congress and the President to protect the American people and their rights will bring China and the Middles East the debris of America. The Whore of Babylon, refers to both a symbolic female figure and place of evil mentioned in the Book of Revelation. “One of the seven Angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, ‘Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits on many waters. With her the kinds of the Earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries.’ Then the Angel caried me away in the Spirit into a desert. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones, and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. This title was written on her forehead: MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus. When I saw her, I was greatly astonished. Then the Angel said to me: ‘Why are you astonished? I will explain to you the mystery of the woman and the beast she rides, which you saw, once was, now is not, and will come up out of the Abyss and go to his destruction. The inhabitants of the Earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the World will be astonished when they see the beast, because he once was, not is not, and yet will come. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
“‘This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman sits. They are also seven kinds. Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; but when he does come, he must remain for a little while. The beast who once was, and now is not, is an eight kind. He belongs to the seven and is going to his destruction. The ten horns you saw are ten kinds who have not yet received a kingdom, but who one hour will receive authority as kings along with the beast. They have one purpose and will give their power and authority to the beast. They will make war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will overcome them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings—and with him will be his called, chosen and faithful follows.’ Then the Angel said to me, “The waters you saw, were the prostitute its, are peoples, multitudes, nations and languages. The beast and the ten horns you saw will hate the prostitute. They will bring her to ruin and leave her naked; they will eat her flesh and burn her with fire. For God has put it into their hearts to accomplish Hi purpose by agreeing to give the best their power to rule, until God’s words are fulfilled. The woman you saw is the great city that rules over the king of the Earth,” reports Revelation 17.1-18. I think the prostitute represent the fake news media dragging the nations of the World into a third World war, for the sake of their ratings and profits and entertainment, and them even making war against Jesus Christ, and the media taking over the government. However, when people wake up and see what a disaster the media has created, they will destroy them and God will take over. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The reason the media has never been so powerful in the past is because people were proud to be American and voted people in office they thought would do a good job, and not just because of their gender, race, culture, religion, colour, sexual orientation, or celebrity status. The American people trusted the government and they viewed their loyalty to America as sacred as religion. However, today, people want you to be ashamed to be America, they want to put Communists in office and not Patriots, they want to strip you of your rights and guns, so they can lock you in your homes and turn you into slaves, while they tax you, make you poor and give billions of your tax dollars to other nations to make them rich. These communist also want to keep your nation insecure, start race wars and riots, and turn American against Americans and take away your rights to privacy and property. However, be sure to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, One Nation, Under God, with Liberty and Justice for All! Be proud to be American. Be proud to display your American flag. Love thy Neighbour. And Praise God. The mind has its needs, as does the body. The needs of the latter are the foundations of society; the need of the former make it pleasant. While the government and the laws see to the safety and well-being of assembled people, the sciences, letters and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are burdened, stifle in them the sense of that original liberty for which they seem to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized people. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Need raised up thrones; the sciences and the arts have strengthened them. Earthly powers, love talents and protect those who cultivate them! Princes always view with pleasure the spread, among their subjects, of the tastes for pleasant arts and luxuries not resulting in the exporting of money. For, in addition to nurturing in them that pettiness of soul so appropriate to servitude, they know very well that all the needs the populace imposes on itself are so many chains which burden it. Alexander, wishing to keep the Ichthyophagi in a state of dependency, forced them to renounce fishing and to eat foods common to other peoples. And the natives of America who go totally in innocence and live off the fruit of their hunting have never been tamed. Indeed, what yoke could be imposed upon humans who need nothing? Civilized peoples, cultivate them! Happy slaves, you owe them that delicate and refined tastes on which your pride yourselves; that sweetness of character and that urbanity in mores which makes relationships among you so cordial and easy; in a word, the appearances of all the virtues without having any. By this sort of civility, all the more agreeable as it puts on fewer airs, Athens and Rome once distinguished themselves in themselves in the much vaunted days of their magnificence and splendour. By it our century and our nation will doubtlessly surpass all times and all peoples. A philosophic tone without pedantry, manners natural yet engaging, equally removed from Teutonic rusticity as from Italian pantomime. These are the fruits of the taste acquired by good schooling and perfected in social interaction. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
If outer appearances were always the likeness of the heart’s dispositions, if decency were virtue, if our maxims served as our rules, if true philosophy were inseparable from the title of philosopher, how sweet it would be to life among us! However, so many qualities are all too rarely found in combination, and virtue seldom goes forth in such great pomp. Expensive finery can betoken a wealth man, and elegance a man of taste. The healthy and robust human is recognized by other signs. It is in the rustic clothing of the fieldworker and not underneath the gilding of the courtier that one will find bodily strength and vigour of the soul. The good human is an athlete who enjoys competing in innocence. One is contemptuous of all those vile ornaments which would impair the use of one’s strength, most of al which were invented merely to conceal some deformity. Before art had fashioned our manners and taught our passions to speak an affected language, our mores were rustic but natural, and differences in behavior heralded, at first glance, difference of character. At base, human nature was no better, but humans found their safety in the ease with which they saw through each other, and that advantage, which we no longer vale, spared them many vices. You may not have the most of everything but you can make the best of everything! God cannot bless ignorance—He blesses by spiritual intelligence. What you do not know can be harmful to you. God is present in each person’s life and this may seem unbelievable to so large a number of us. Yet it is for those of undergoing the experience certitude, not theory. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
God is the ultimate healer of all our hurts! If we keep trying to get other humans to fix us and make us fully human or angelic—we will remain broken. Stop limiting yourself to getting blessed and believe you have been blessed. These glimpses into eternity are rare, but they are more common and frequent than is generally supposed. It is generally believed that hardly more than a few attain it, but as there are degrees of such an attainment one could say that in the lesser ones there are more successes than people generally know. We call upon the spirits of evolution, the miraculous force that inspires rock and dust to weave themselves into biology. You have stood by us for millions and billions of years—do not forsake us now. Empower us and awaken in us pure and dazzling creativity. You that can turn scales into feathers, sweater into blood, electricity into Cryptocurrency, caterpillars to butterflies, metamorphose our species, awaken in us the power that we need to survive the present crisis and evolve into more aeons of our solar journey. Awaken in us a sense of who we truly are: tiny ephemeral blossoms on the Tree of Life. Make the purposes and destiny of that three our own purpose and destiny. Fill each of us with love for our true Self, which includes all of the creature and plants and landscapes of the World. Fill us with a powerful urge for the wellbeing and continual unfolding of this Self. May we speak in all human councils on behalf of the terrestrial beings and plants and landscapes of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
May we shine with a pure inner passion that will spread rapidly through these leaden times. May we all awaken to our true and only nature—none other than the Nature of Gaia, this living planet Earth. We call upon the power which sustains the planets in their orbits, that wheels our Milky Way in its 200-million-year spiral, to imbue our personalities and our relationships with harmony, endurance and joy. Please fill us with a sense of immense time so that our brief, flickering lives may truly reflect the work of vast ages past and also the millions of years of evolution whose potential lies in our trebling hands. O stars, lend us your burning passion. O silence, give weight to our voice. We ask for the presence of the spirit of Gaia. Unto all generations we will declare God’s greatness, and to all eternity we will proclaim Thy holiness. Our mouth shall ever speak Thy praise, O our God, for Thou art a great and holy God and King. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy God. (the holy King). Our God and God of our fathers, may there come before Thee the remembrance of our ancestors as they appeared in Thy sacred Temple in the days of yore. How deep was their love of Thee as they brought Thee their offerings each Sabbath day. We pray Thee, please grant us of the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord that lived in their hearts. May we, in their spirit of sacrificial devotion, fulfill our duty toward the rebuilding of Thy Holy Land, the fountain of our life, that we may ever be a blessing to all the peoples and beings and lifeforms of the Earth. There is a moment in most human’s lives when they are close to an understanding of the World’s real nature. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 