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The Person Who Desires Eternal Glory is Not Distracted by the Glitter of Time!

Life is full of problems; it is how we deal with them that defines us. Everyone was blessed with the gift of being able to discern what is right and what is wrong. This blessing is called conscience. A person’s conscience is the defense against situations that are spiritually harmful. “For behold, my brethren, it is given unto you to judge, that ye may know good from evil; and the way to judge is as plain, that ye may know with a perfect knowledge, as the daylight is from the dark night. For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every human, that one may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do god, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God. But whatsoever thing persuadeth humans to do evil, and believe not in Christ, and deny Him, and serve not God, then ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of the devil; for after this manner doth the devil work, for he persuadeth no man to do good, no, not one; neither do his angels; neither do they who subject themselves unto him. And now, my brethren, seeing that ye know the light by which ye may judge, which light is the light of Christ, see that ye do no judge wrongfully; for with that same judgment which ye judge ye shall also be judged. Wherefore, I beseech of you, brethren, that ye should search diligently in the light of Christ that ye may know good from evil; and if ye will lay hold upon every good thing, and condemn it not, ye certainly will be a child of Christ,” reports Moroni 7.15-19. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The glory of a good human? Asked Paul in Second Corinthians (1.12). A good conscience. Righteous decisions and obedience to the commandments bring peace of conscience. When we sin, we feel remorse or guilt, just as we feel physical pain when we are wounded. This is the natural response of our conscience to sin, and it can lead us to repent. Repentance and forgiveness renew our peace of conscience. On the other hand, if we ignore our conscience and do not repent, out conscience will be impaired as if it has been “seared with a hot iron,” reports 1 Timothy 4.2. Have a good conscience, and it will show. The good conscience can carry a heavy load; again, from Paul in the same letter to the Corinthians (7.4); even when things go wrong, it has a smile on its face. The bad conscience frowns, frets, fidgets. How sweet it is when your heard hits the pillow at night, expostulated John in his First Letter (3.12), and your conscience is not nagging you to death! We are to learn to follow our conscience. This is an important part of exercising our agency. The more we follow our conscience, the stronger it will become. A sensitive conscience is a sign of a healthy spirit. Unless they are doing good things, good people do not feel happy. Bad people never have a good day, never have a moment’s rest. That is because, as the prophet Isaiah suggested (48.22), “There is no peace for the once and future pious, says the Lord.” According to the prophet Micah (3.11), the impious are always chatting us up. “Who says we are not peaceful?” “Is the sky falling?” “Who would dare lay a finger on us?” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Do not believe them! The gorge of God will rise suddenly, swallow them up, grind them down, then spit them out. Do not worry! urges the Psalmists (146.4). They will feel the Hellhound’s breath soon enough. To boast in the Lord is one thing, but to boast when one is toast, that is quite another. For to boast in the Lord is, at least according o Galatians (6.14), to toast the cross of the Lord. Fleeting is the sort of glory that is given and taken by Humanity. Melancholy is the constant companion of Worldly Glory. The glory of the Good lies in their conscience; it is not something that burbles from their mouths. The person who desires Eternal Glory is not distracted by the glitter of time. For many, relief and happiness can come by understanding the relationship between peace of conscience and peace of mind and by living the principles upon which both the blessing are founded. God wants each of His children to enjoy the transcendent blessing of peace of conscience. A tranquil conscience invites freedom from anguish, sorrow, guilt, shame, and self-condemnation. It provides a foundation of happiness. It is a condition of immense worth, yet there are few on Earth that enjoy it. Why? Most often because the principles upon which peace of conscience is founded are either not understood or no adequately followed. My life has been so richly endowed from peace of conscience that I would share insight on how it can be obtained. Peace of conscience is he essential ingredient to your peace of mind. Without peace of conscience, you can have no real peace of mind. Peace of conscience related to your inner self and is controlled by what you personally do. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Peace of conscience can come only from God through a righteous, obedient life. It cannot exist otherwise. On the other hand, peace of mind is most often affected by external forces such as concern for a wayward child, economic pressures, real or imagined offenses, deteriorating World conditions, or more to do than sufficient time to do it. An unsettled mind is temporary, transitory. Peace of mind is restored by resolving the external forces that disturb it. No so with a troubled conscience, for it is unrelenting, ever present, a constant reminder of the need to correct your past mistakes, to resolve an offense to another, or to repent of transgression. If you still feel you must have some silver and gold on this Earth, then you have missed the point. You should rather have Jesus than silver and gold. To embrace eternity, you must rid yourself of all temporality. When tranquillity is puddling in your heart, who cares whether praise or blame is raining on your soul? If your conscience is clean, then you can rest easy. Praise will no make you better; blame will not make your worse. This is what you are, and God is the witness to that. If you are your own interior gardener, you will no care a fig what the World says about your virtuous vines. “When they look at you, they see your face; but when God looks at you, He sees your heart”; or so wrote the author of First Kings, or First Samuel, as it is called in the Latin Bible (16.7). A human judge looks a fact, but the Divine Judge weighs intensions. Do good always and always focus on where you are in the spiritual scheme of things—that is the sign of great purity and inner confidence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Anyone who does not require Worldly validation for one’s own existence has already committed oneself wholly to God. Much the same sentiment Paul wrote in his Second Letter to the Corinthians. “The person to be commended is not the wone who has nominated oneself, but the one God had His eye on for some time” (10.18). What should the status of internal humans be? To walk with God on the inward path, as the prophet Micah would say (6.8), and not to be waylaid on the outward path by some brusque, bruising affection. Anecdote and research on prayer’s clinical effectiveness has become big news of late. Physicians and scientists have discovered the healing power of prayer. Although researchers acknowledge that petitionary prayer is not 100 percent effective (imagine if it were), it welcomes the conclusion of the Georgetown University internist and prayer researcher Dale Matthews: “Prayer is good for you.” The medical effects of faith on health are not a matter of faith, but science.” Is prayer good for you? No one denies that prayer by those who believe in prayer’s healing power might indeed calm the soul and relieve stress and thereby lead to reduce hypertension, fewer headaches, and strengthened immune function. A sugar pill might do as much for those who believe in it. Such is the power of positive belief—a fact of life that guarantees some success for the devotees of alternative-medicine, regardless of whether their specific recommendations have any intrinsic healing power. Moreover, no one denies the accumulating evidence that, for a variety of reasons, an active religious faith predicts health and longevity. In these times of Worldwide turmoil, more and more persons of faith are turning to the Lord for blessings of comfort and healing. We use nutrition, exercise, and other practices to preserve health, and we can enlist the help of healing practitioners, such as physicians and surgeons, to restore help. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Modern advocates of prayer’s power have something more in mind than a placebo effect. Prayers of intercession and petition can heal others, they believe. If so, say the skeptics, put up of shut up: put your intuitions about the prayer to the test. Do prayers for healing procedure cures? Faster recovery? Decreased mortality? In 1872, an anonymous British citizen proposed an experiment that might answer these questions. Choose “one single ward or hospital for three to five years of sustained prayer by “the whole body of the faithful.” Will the healing and morality rates there beat those in comparable hospital elsewhere? If they do, so much the better for our belief in intercessory prayer and our associated understanding of God. If they do not, so much the worse for our beliefs. Although the experiment was not conducted, the very idea triggered a national “prayer-gauge controversy” that raged in Britain during 1872-73: Should researchers test the efficacy of prayer as they would test any proposed medical remedy? In the spirit of those Christian founders of modern science, should Christians approach even their cherished beliefs with such humility that they are willing to check them against the realities of God’s creation? Or it the very idea of testing prayer—and God—outrageous? If experimenting with prayer offends you, said the scientist Francis Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin), then why not scientifically examine the efficacy of spontaneous prayers? Dr. Galton, who loved to quantify everything from intelligence to female beauty, collected mortality data on groups of people who were the objects of much prayer—kings, clergy, missionaries—and found that they lobed no longer than others. Moreover, the proportion of stillbirths suffered by praying and nonpraying expectant parents appeared similar. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

And there things stood until a century or so later, when several American researchers actually experimented with prayer. Although not the first effort—others are recounted by Larry Dossey in healing Words: The Power of Prayers and the Practice of Medicine—the one that did the most to revive interest in such experiments was the physician Randolph Byrd’s 1988 report titled “Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population.” Mr. Byrd randomly assigned 393 patients admitted to San Francisco General Hospital’s coronary-care unit to either a prayer or no-prayer condition. The first names of prayer-group patients, along with diagnosis, condition, and occasional updates, were given three to seven “born again” intercessors. In the tradition of double-blind drug studies, neither patients nor staff knew which patients were receiving prayers. The results? For six of twenty-six outcome measures, such as the need for diuretics, antibiotics, and ventilation therapy, the prayed-for patients did better. The widely publicized conclusion? Prayer words. That is good but hardly surprising news to most Americans, 87 percent of whom in survey for Newsweek said that “God answers prayers” and 82 percent of whom said that when praying they “ask for health of success for a child or family member.” In a Gallup survey, three in ten Americans reported having experienced a “remarkable healing,” of whom 30 percent credited their own or others’ prayers. Not so fast, said the skeptics. For twenty of the twenty-six measures, such as length of hospital stay and mortality, there was no difference between Byrd’s prayer and no-prayer groups. Try enough prayer experiments and take enough measures and you can be sure that some positive outcomes—just by chance—will be associated with prayer. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

All these are a prelude to two new prayer experiments—one small, one huge—funded by the John Templeton Foundation. In the smaller experiment, Dale Matthews, in cooperation with S.M. Marlow and Francis MacNutt, assigned forty patients at the Arthritis Treatment Center in Clearwater, Florida, to one of two groups—a control group receiving no treatment, and a group that received healing prayer with the laying on of hands over four days. Half of the patients in this latter group were additionally assigned to receive six months of long-distance intercessory prayers. Patients in both the control group and the two prayer groups were examined periodically over the next year, rating their own pain and being rated by clinicians who were blind to the patients’ experimental group. What effect, if any, would you predict when Matthews compared the arthritic conditions of the control group and the two prayer conditions? Before we disclose the results, consider also the mother of all prayer experiments, one whose size and credibility destines it for discussion and debate for years to come. Our hunch is that this just-completed experiment will trigger—as did the British prayer-test controversy about 150 years ago—much theological and pastoral reflection. At issue will be what people of faith should take to be the essence of prayer and of God’s relationship to the natural World. We call it the Harvard Prayer Experiment, because the primary investigator, the cardiologist Herbert Benson, is a professor affiliated with Harvard Medical School (as well as the author of many popular books on the healing powers of meditation and relaxation, most recently Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief). #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Although enormous, the experiment—a greatly expanded and more tightly controlled replication of the small Byrd study—is elegantly simple. Each of three conditions engaged several hundred patients at five leading medical centers who are about to undergo coronary bypass surgery. (All consented to participation.) Teams of intercessors—people of faith who, one presumes, hoped to show the power of prayer while supporting the seriously ill patients—prayed for individuals in two or three groups of bypass patients. Patients in two groups were either prayed for by the volunteer intercessors or not, but did not know which condition they were in. A third patient group knew it was being prayed for. We know that the prayer of faith, uttered alone or in our homes or places of worship, can be effective to heal the sick. Many scriptures refer to the power of faith in the healing of an individual. The Apostle James taught that we should “pray one for another, that ye may be healed,” adding, “the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much,” report James 5.16. When the woman who touched Jesus was healed, He told her, “Thy faith hath made thee whole,” reports Matthew 9.22. Similarly, the Book of Mormon teaches that Lord “worketh by power, according to the faith of the children of men,” reports Moroni 10.7. A recent nationwide survey found that nearly 80 percent of Americans believe that miracles still occur today as [they did] in ancient times. 33 percent of those surveyed said they had experiences or witnesses a divine healing. “God manifesteth Himself unto all those who believe in Him, by the power of the Holy Ghost; yea, unto every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, working mighty miracles…among the children of men according to their faith,” reports 2 Nephi 26.13. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The techno-rebels argue that either we control technology or it controls us—and that “we” can no longer simply be the usual tiny elite of scientists, engineers, politicians, and businessmen. Whatever the merits of the antinuclear campaigns that have erupted in Germany, France, Sweden, Japan, and the United States of America, the battle against Concorde, or the rising demands for regulation of genetic research, all reflect a widespread passionate demand for the democratization of technological decision-making. The techno-rebels contend that technology need not be big, costly, or complex in order to be “sophisticated.” The heavy-handed technologies of the Second Wave seemed more efficient than they actually were because corporations and socialist enterprises externalized—transferred to society as a whole—the enormous costs of cleaning up pollution, of caring for the unemployed, of dealing with work-alienation. When these are seen as costs of production, many seemingly efficient machines turn out to be quite the opposite. Thus the techno-rebels favour the design of a whole range of “appropriate technologies” intended to provide humane jobs, to avoid pollution, to spare the environment, and to produce for personal or local use rather than for national and global markets alone. The techno-rebellion has sparked thousands of experiments all over the World, with just such small-scale technologies, in fields ranging from fish farming and food processing to energy production, waste recycling, inexpensive construction, and simple transport. While many of these experiments are naïve and hark back to a mythical past, others are more practical. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Some reach out for the latest materials and scientific tools and combine them in new ways with old techniques. Jean Gimpel, for example, this historian of medieval technology, has built elegant models of simple tools that might prove useful in non-industrial countries. Some of these combine new materials with old methods. A surge of interest in the airship provides another example—use of a by-passed technology that can now be made with advanced fabrics or materials that give it much greater payload capacity. Airships are ecologically sound and could be used for slow but cheap and safe transport in regions where there are no roads—Brazil, perhaps, or Nigeria. Experiments with appropriate or alternative technologies, especially in the energy field, suggests that some simple, small-scale technologies can be as “sophisticated” as complex, large-scale technologies when the full range of side effects it taken into account and when the machine is properly matched to the task. The techno-rebels are also disturbed by the radical imbalance of science and technology on the face of the planet, with only 3 percent of the World’s scientists in countries containing 75 percent of the global population. They favour devoting more technological attention to the needs of the World’s poor, and a more equitable sharing of the resources of outer space and the oceans. They recognize that not only are the oceans and skies part of the common heritage the race, but the advanced technologies itself could not exist without the historic contributions of many peoples, from the Indians and Arabs to the ancient Chinese. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Finally, they argue that in moving into the Third Wave we must advance, step by step, from the resource-wasteful, pollution-producing system of production used during the Second Wave era toward a more “metabolic” system that eliminates waste and pollution by making sure that the output and by-product of each industry becomes an input for the next. The goal is a system under which no output is produced that is not an input for another production process downstream. Such a system is no only more efficient in a production sense, it minimizes, or indeed eliminates, damage to the biosphere. Taken as a whole, this techno-rebel program provides the basis for humanizing the technological thrust. The techno-rebels are, whether they recognize it or not, agents of the Third Wave. They will not vanish but multiply in the years ahead. For they are as much a part of the advance to a new stage of civilization as our missions to Venus, our amazing computers, our biological discoveries, or our explorations of the oceanic depths. Out of their conflict with the First Wave fantasizers and the Second Wave advocates of technology uber alles will come sensible technologies matched to the new, sustainable energy system toward which we are beginning to reach. Plugging the new technologies into this new energy base will raise to a wholly new level our entire civilization. At its heart we will find a fusion of sophisticated, science-based “high-stream” industries, operating within much tightened ecological and social control, with equally sophisticated “low-stream” industries that operate on a smaller, more human scale, both based on principles radically different from those which governed the Second Wave techno-sphere. Together, these two layers of industry will form today’s “commanding heights.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

However, this is only a detail of a much vaster picture. For at the same time that we are transforming the techno-sphere we are also revolutionizing the info-sphere. The term “exurb” refers to the type of upper-middle-class settlement that has taken place in outlying semirural suburbia—the area beyond the second ring of densely settled subdivisions. Fringe exurban areas have more widely separated homes, often with woods between, and the homes tend to be large and expensive. Sometimes exurbanites settle around old villages or small towns. Exurbanites, as a rule, are affluent, well-educated professionals. Sometimes these individuals work in fields such as communications, advertising, and publishing, which allow them to work at home and avoid daily commuting. The use of personal computers with WiFi and fax machines means they can remain in touch through offices in their homes. If their base is New York, they may live in Fairfield county, Connecticut, or northern New Jersey; if the office is in Philadelphia, then Bucks County, Pennsylvania; and if in San Francisco, then Marin County, California. The study of exurbia that gave these areas is name, portrays them as hyperactive, upwardly mobile stivers who have left city streets for tri-level houses. The picture is of people desperately trying to find meaning in their lives by moving out of the city. Working in highly competitive industries where the standards for judging performance are subjective and fickle, they seek solace by escaping the city. Basically, exurbanites are displaced cosmopolites living in the twenty-first century version of what two centuries ago were called romantic suburbs. They are urbane seekers of the American Dream who see to reside in rustic settings. They want to move out of the but not away from its advantages and services. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Living such a semi-country life puts a strain on the budget and creates pressure to have a standard of life one cannot afford. According to the stereotype, it also puts considerable pressures on wives, who find themselves locked into a schedule of maintaining the house and providing shuttle service for children and commuting husbands while attempting to maintain their own careers and interests. If the above sounds familiar, it may be because this general outline has served as the plot for dozens of novels, television soaps, and movies. The difficulty is that it is often taken as a scientific reflection of reality rather than inventive fiction. Solid research is scarce; but at least based on demographic characteristics, there does not seem to be support for the belief that exurbanites are significantly different from other same-status suburbanites. In fact, exurbs have a way of turning into reluctant suburbs as more and more people move into the same area, all seeking to escape the urban pace. Even harder to pin down are those places beyond the exurbs that are not oriented toward a major city. While definitionally these areas may still be within a metropolitan area, the orientation of residents may be more rural than urban. Housing in these in-between areas that are not truly rural, but probably never destined to become suburban, is sometimes of marginal quality. Some of these living in such “ruban” areas are barely getting by economically in spite of more affordable housing costs and taxes. It is not uncommon for ruban residents to commute long distance to work at below living wage jobs. They are anything but affluent suburban commuters. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Adding to the confusion over what is suburban are some outlying college towns that census has defined as metropolitan but that are not urban in character. One of these is Centre County, Pennsylvania, which is the home of Pennsylvania State University Because of its population, Centre County is metropolitan area named State College, but it is clearly neither urban nor suburban. The cunty includes a widely dispersed and mixed population having a wide range of interest and occupations. There are 165 acres for every person in the metropolitan area. The consequences are a metropolitan area that is known for is hiking trails, numerous lakes, trout streams, and mountains. In practice, even residential suburbia, to say nothing of the outer cities, has become remarkably diverse. So diverse, in fact, that just calling an area “suburban” does not really tell us much anymore. As suburbia has come to hose and employ the larges segment of the American population, the characteristics that define a “typical suburb” and “typical suburbanites” have become even more attenuated. It is said that man is created in God’s image, but what happens when we alter that image, is our reflection that other thing that changes? Pseduo-practical psychology is a system for turning thoughts into things, mental images into physical realities, and airy nothing into solid somethings—by believing in them. The psychoanalytic methods has only a limited usefulness, as its theory has only a quarter truth. If adopted and followed unrestrainedly it may do as much harm as good, or sometimes even more. It may make the patient so self-absorbed that one is deprived of the broad interest in life necessary to a healthy mind. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
It may cause one to go one seeking for childhood experiences that never existed, for the alleged roots of one’s trouble—a process over which people have sometimes wasted years. One may read extreme intimate meanings into one’s night dreams and one’s day thoughts, and thus come to absurd attitudes towards life. And finally, the patient may become so dependent on the analyst that one is a helpless creature unable to cope with the World by one’s own willed and personal response. The psychoanalyst may do useful work in bringing to the surface an earlier happening which gave a suggestion whose work upon the mind and feelings led ultimately to illness. The psychoanalysts work busily on the ego all the time, thus keeping the poor patient still imprisoned in it. However, reference to the Overself might help one really to get rid of some complexes. To how many persons has the average Freudian psychoanalyst brought true inner peace? If statistics were available, they would be disillusioning. Why is this? It is not for a lack of shrewdness, training, research, and practice on the part of the analysts. The basic answer is that both one and one’s patients are moving in a vicious circle; all their attention is being kept within the ego, that combination of animal and lesser human traits which has yet to discover its greater self. They seek escape, healing, and freedom where there is none. In that greater self alone the good, the true, the beautiful, and the healthy resides. Psychoanalytic practices may be quite right in their place for their purpose, but the technique used has no place in philosophy. We do not consider it necessary to delve into an aspirant’s childhood in order to explain one’s present mental condition. For as we believe that one’s past stretches away into numerous earlier reincarnations, it is obviously insufficient and inadequate merely to take the past of the present reincarnation alone for analysis. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Nor do we consider it of any use to try to explain one’s repressions and frustrations by attempting to interpret one’s dreams. For we consider most dreams to be merely a worthless mélange of thoughts, events, and experiences of the previous twenty-four hours. The really significant dreams are few. Dr. Freud confessed that he had never had any mystical experiences or mystical feelings. He therefore went on to dismiss all such things in purely materialistic terms, making the silly assumption that because he had never had them, therefore it was not possible for anyone else to have them. Dr. Freud thought by searching in the darkest corners of our souls, by putting the most intimate interpretation upon the most innocent thoughts and dreams, we would develop our personalities and free our souls! This distorted and pseudo-deep psychology is typical of present-day theorists who offer their last surmise as a first discovery. No human who has practiced the profound meditation which philosophic self-knowledge enjoins, will hear without a smile the Freudian psychoanalysts’ doctrine hat human nature is but a bundle of obscenity. Even Dr. Jung new better. Psychiatry takes itself too seriously and so overestimates the worth of its findings. If it could pick up a sense of humour, its results would be more accurate. It is unreasonable to conclude that because so large a part of human activity must be attributed to the impulses of pleasures of the flesh, the whole of human activity is attributed to that same source. Those analysts who do so have something to learn about the unconscious quest of every creature for its own spiritual self-realization. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The psychiatrists, being always properly qualified doctors of medicine, are expected to be more reliable in diagnoses, prognoses, and treatments than other healers. However, experience shows exceptions. Others have succeeded incurring when the official psychotherapists failed. Others have succeeded in curing when the official psychotherapists failed. Why? It is because the unofficial ones have quite often dropped the materialistic belief that causes mental disease must be so sought in the physical brain alone. The psychiatrists do not reckon with a mind having a consciousness apart from the body. In an age when we are led to believe we can be anything we want to be, what most deludes us is in ourself. It is interesting to note that the author of works on Psychosynthesis, Dr. Assagioli, has dropped use of the word “spiritual” and replaced it by “transpersonal.” However, if we heed their earliest beginnings and do not ignore their smallness, glimpses can be cultivated. They can grow. Look for them in the feelings—these light delicate intuitions—for that is what they mostly are. Let us be united; let us speak in harmony; let our minds apprehend alike. Common be our prayer; common be the end of our assembly; common be our resolution; common be our deliberations. Alike be our feelings; unified by our hearts; common be our intentions; perfect be our unity. Our God and god of our fathers, ay our remembrance and the remembrance of our forefathers come before Them. Remember the Messiah of the house of David, Thy servant, and Jerusalem, Thy holy city, and all Thy people, the house of Israel. Please grant us deliverance and wellbeing, lovingkindness, life and peace on his day. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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If Speak You Must, then Let Loose Your Own Wretched Spiritual Condition!

My Dear Winchester—We have had a terrible shock this morning. Jean did not come down to breakfast, and Clara went to see if she was ill. We heard her scream, and rushing up, there was poor Jean sitting at the old bureau, quite dead. She had fallen forward on the desk, and her housekeeping-book was crumpled up under her. She had been so all night long, we suppose, for she was not undressed, and was quite cold. The doctors say it was disease of the heart.

We would like to believe that everything we think and say is right, but we cannot. That is because we do not have grace enough or sense enough. Of course, there is a wit in each of us, but even this is dimmed through negligence. What we really fail to notice is that we are losing our interior vision. How do you know?? When we act so daily, and the excuses we cook up are so abysmal! When we explode with passion and think, no I am not angry, I am just defending the faith. When we peck at the peccadillos of others, and our own whoppers we let pass unchallenged, as the Evangelist Matthew has pointed out (7.3)! When we ponder what we will put up with from others, but pay little attention to how much others will have to put up with from us! Is there a moral anywhere in this? Whoever wants one’s own actions to be tolerably received would do well not to judge the behaviour of others so intolerably. Whoever has an interior life should put the spiritual care of oneself before the care of others. You will never be internal and devout until you hold your tongue about others. If speak you must, then let loose your own wretched spiritual condition. If you focus entirely on your relationship to God, precious little of the hubbub of the World will be able to penetrate your recollection. When you have that vacant stare in your eye, you might well ask yourself, before someone else does, just where are you? When you have run through everything the World has to offer, why, if I may echo Matthew (16.26), do you seem to have advance to the real? The moral? #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
If you want True Peace and True Union, then you just have to postpone everything else and attend to your own case. If only you drag your torso away from every temporal festival, you will make spiritual progress. When you put a value on each temporal thing, you will lose spiritual ground. All of which means, you can keep nothing as your own nothing big, nothing small, nothing nice, nothing new; that is to say, nothing except God and everything that smacks of God. However, all hose lovely creaturely consolations that came your way, what about them? Forget about them! The soul that loves God loathes everything that is not God. God Eternal, God Immense, “fulling all the space,” as Jeremiah phrased it (23.24); the soul’s solace, the heart’s True Joy. Although already a thriving business—having sold over 100,000 lever-action repeaters by the early 1880s—Winchester was ready to expand its market with different-action firearms. The Hotchkiss, a bolt action designed by American inventor Benjamin B. Hotchkiss and produced in hopes of military sales, appeared in 1883. In the same year, Winchester bought the rights to the falling block single-shot rifle invented and patented by John M. Browning. Spawned by the Browning connection with Winchester, the single-shot appeared in the Winchester catalogue for 1885. The single-shot would not reach the market until 1885 and remained in product line until approximately 1920. There are so many variations in calibers, barrels, overall configurations, finishes, triggers, sights, and other feature that sportsmen, the military, and target shooters were all offered every variety of possible use for a single-shot rifle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The number of cartridge chamberings for this model exceeds that of any other firearm made by Winchester: approximately sixty-five. The single-shot was made at a time when target shooting was as popular as golf is today and a major match like the Creedmoor (on New York’s Long Island) was very much the Masters of its day. Not only were the single-shots beautifully constructed and of a solid, virtually unbreakable design, but they were phenomenally accurate, used in international matches which were shot at distances up to 1,000 yards, with exquisitely constructed open sights and finely built tubular scope sights. The champion target shooters were international celebrities, and elaborate trophies were designed and built by such silversmiths as Gorham and Tiffany. The Browning-Winchester single-shot rifles were also a favourite of sportsmen-hunters as the wide selection of chamberings meant that cartridges were available for every type of North American game animal. Then, as now, hunters preferred the simplicity and reliability of a single-shot mechanism, as well as the challenge of having only one shot available, without the rapid-repeating capability of magazine arms. Taking a grizzly bear with a nonrepeating rifle required cool nerves and a steady hand. When Oliver Winchester brought out a John Browning design, the company certainly got its money’s worth. The $8,000.00 ($231,230.64 inflation adjusted for 2021) went a long way with the single shot. The Winchester rifles were highly successful. In June of 1888, John and Matt Browning were issued a patent for a slide-action magazine rifle, which—as the Model 1890—became Winchester’s first rifle of that type. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

The model 1890, in two basic grades only (Sporting Rifle and Fancy Sporting Rifle, all having 24-inch octagonal barrels and rifle-style steel buttplates), remained in production through 1932, with a total production of nearly 850,000. The 1890 was Winchester’s all-time sales leader in .22 rimfire, and many 1890s are still in use around the World today. As an economical version of the Model 1890, the factory brought out the 1906 pump-action. And the 1906 thereby also became the factory’s first rifle advertised and sold which accommodated the three cartridges interchangeably. A further sales factor was that all Model 1906s featured takedown capability. Serial numbering on the 1906 was in its own range, and, like the 1890, the 1906 achieved an extraordinary sales total—nearly 850,000 made—before being discontinued in 1932. Hundreds of thousand of Winchester rifles were produced and they were assembled in what is called the Winchester Complex, which is in New Haven, Connecticut USA. In 1862, William Wirt Winchester, the son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, married Sarah Lockwood Pardee. (Oliver Fisher Winchester was a very wealthy and prominent man, not only the owner of Winchester Repeating Arms, but also Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut.) Sarah and William’s life together was happy, and they moved in the best of New England society. However, in 1866, disaster struck when their infant daughter, Annie died of the then mysterious childhood disease marasmus. Mrs. Winchester fell into a deep sadness. Fifteen years later, her husband William Wirt Winchester who was at the time president of Winchester Repeating Arms Company suffered a premature death. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Mrs. Winchester inherited 777 shares of Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and $20,000,000.00 ($532,737,254.90 inflation adjusted for 2021). She was told she could rest assure that her life was not in danger and by building a house similar to the Winchester Complex, which was 3,250,000 square feet, would give her eternal life. Now, no one really knows how much the Winchester’s were worth. In 1915, for instance, they may a deal with the British government in the sum of $47,500,000.00 ($1,277,778,217.82 inflation adjusted for 2021), so Mrs. Winchester’s inheritance was just a fraction of their cumulative wealth. In the late 1800s, the Santa Clara Valley presented sweeping visas of rural open space. It was a serene setting for Mrs. Winchester to begin her building project. In 1884 she purchased an unfinished eighteen-room farm house just three miles west of San Jose—and over the next thirty-eight years she produced the sprawling complex we know today as the Winchester Mystery House. The death of the child cannot be explained on natural grounds except by suggesting that there was something wrong with it quite unrelated to the father’s experience. However, there is eloquent testimony about evidence of the power of witchcraft. There were known to witches in New Haven, Connecticut in 1646. A servant named Mary Johnson was accused of being a witch. Others were known to practice black magic. However, it did not occur to anyone to notice that the evidence suggested that the malignant power must also reside not only in the witch but in the charms hey use or in the Devil’s power that lay behind them, since they worked equally well whether they were manipulated by a confessed witch or by a Godly magistrate. I am a believer of words, I believe everything depends on who says them. What if the direful creatures, whose report lingers in these tales of the Winchester, should have an origin far older still? What if they were the remnants of a vanishing period of the Earth’s history long antecedent to the birth of mastodon and iguanodon; a stage, namely, when the World, as we call it, had not yet become quite visible, was not yet so far finished as to part from the invisible World that its mother, and which, on its part, had no then become quite invisible—was only almost such. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

When, as a credible consequence, strange shapes of those now invisible regions, of Eden and Hell, might be expected to gloom out occasionally from the awful Fauna of an ever-generating World upon that one which was being born of it. Hence, the life-periods of a World being long and slow, some of these huge, unformed bulks of half-created matter might, somehow, like the megatherium of later times, a baby creation to them, roll at age-long intervals, clothes in a might terror of shapelessness into the half-recognition of human beings, whose consternation at the uncertain vision were barrier enough to prevent all further know of its substance. Ever since I was born, I suppose the changes of a World are not to be measured by the changes of its generations. When one’s discrimination is no greater than to lump everything marvellous—demons, Angels, kelpies, ghosts, vampires, doppelgangers, witches, fairies, nightmares under the one head of ghost—it upsets the reappearing of the of the departed. It matters very little whether we believe in ghost, or not, provided that we are ghosts—that within this body, which so many people are ready to consider their own very selves, their lies a ghostly embryo, at least, which has an inner side to it God only can see, which says I concerning itself, and which will soon have to know whether or not it can appear to those whom it has left behind, and thus solve the question of ghosts for itself, at least. Is telling a person about a ghost, affording one the source of one’s conviction? It is the same as a ghost appearing to one? Not at all. The impression may be deeper and clearer on your mind than any fact of the next morning will make. Not everyone can feel it, but the person who does is convinced. It cannot be conveyed. It is something you have to experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

In the year 1825 Oliver Fisher Winchester fell in love. This was before he met and married his wife Jane Ellen Hope. Here are notes from his journal: Well, I was walking along Chapel Street, and feeling a little bewildered in consequence—for it was quite the dusk of the evening. There was a haze in the air, when, from the crossing that cuts off the corner in the direction of Crown Street, just as I was about to turn towards it, a lady stepped upon the kerbstone of the pavement, looked at me for a moment, and passed—an occurrence not very remarkable, certainly. However, the lady was remarkable and so was her dress. I am not good at observing, and I am still worse at describing dress, therefore I can only say that hers reminded me of an old picture—that is, I had never seen anything like it, except in old pictures. She had no bonne, and looked as if she had walked straight out of an ancient drawing-room in her evening attire. The next instant I met a man on the crossing, who stopped and addressed me. So betwixt was I that, although I recognized his voice as one I ought to know, I could not identify him until he got closer, which I did instinctively in the act of returning his greeting. At the same time, I glanced over my shoulder after the lady. She was nowhere to be seen. “What are you looking at?” asked Gary James. “I was looking after that lady,” I answered, “but I cannot see her.” “What lady?” said James, with just a touch of impatience. “You must have seen her,” I retuned. “You were not more than three yards behind her.” “Where is she then?” “She must have gone down one of the areas, I think. However, she looked a lady, though an old-fashioned one.” “Have you been dining?” asked James, in a tone of doubtful enquiry. “No,” I replied, not suspecting the insinuation; “I have only just come from the Museum.” “Then I advise you to call on your medical man before you go home.” “Medical man!” returned; “I have no medical man. What do you mean? I never was better in my life.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

“I mean that there was no lady. It was an illusion, and that indicates something wrong. Besides, you did not know me when I spoke to you. “That is nothing,” I returned. “I had just taken a moment to recall your name.” “How was it you saw the lady, then?” The affair was growing serious under by friend’s interrogation. I did not a all like the idea of his supposing me subject to hallucinations. So I answered, with a laugh, “Ah! to be sure, that explains it. I was just confused.” It was a drizzly afternoon in the beginning of the last week of October when I left the two of New Haven. I hard hardly left the town, and the twilight had only in a post-chaise to ride to East Haven, the property of my friend’s father. I had hardly left the town and the twilight had only begun to deepen, when, glancing from one of the windows of the chaise, I fancied I saw, between me and the hedge, the dim figure of a horse keeping pace with us. I thought, in the first interval of unreason, that it was a shadow from my own horse, but reminded myself the next moment that there could be no shadow where there was no light. When I looked again, I was at the first glance convinced that my eyes had deceived me. At the second, I believed once more that a shadowy something, with the movements of a horse in harness, was keeping pace with us. I turned away again with some discomfort, and not till we had reached an open moorland road, whence a little watery light was visible on the horizon, could I summon up courage enough to look out once more. Certainly then there was nothing o be seen, and I persuaded myself that it had been all a fancy. As we turned into the avenue that led up to East Haven, I found myself once more glancing nervously out the window. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The moment the trees were about me, there was, if not a shadowy horse out there by the side of the chaise, yet certainly more than half that conviction in here in my consciousness. When I saw my friend, however, standing on the doorstep, dark against the glow of the hall fire, I forgot all about it; and I need not add that I did not make it a subject of conversation when I entered, for I was well aware that it was essential to a man’s reputation that his senses should be accurate, though his heart might without prejudice swarm with shadows, and his judgment be a very stable of hobbies. I was kindly received. Mrs. James had been dead for some years, and Florence Ida, the eldest of the family, was at the head of the household. She had two sisters, little more than girls. The father was a burly, yet gentlemanlike Yorkshire squire, who ate well, drank well, looked radiant, and hunted twice a week. In this pastime his son joined him when in the humour, which happened scarcely so often. I, who had never crossed a horse in my life, took his apology for not being able to mount me very coolly, assuring him that I could rather loiter about with a book than be in at the death of the best-hunted werewolf or Hellhound in East Haven. I very soon found myself a home with the James’s; and very soon again I began to find myself no so much at home; for Miss James—Florence Ida as I soon ventured to call her—was fascinating. There was an empty place in my heart. Florence’s figure was graceful, and her face was beautiful. Order was a very idol with her. Hence the house was too tidy for any sense of comfort. If you left a book on the table, you would, on retuning to the room a moment after, find it put aside. What the furniture of the drawing-room was like, I never saw; for not even on Christmas Day, which was the last day I spent there, was in uncovered. Everything in it was kept in bibs and pinafores. Even the carpet was covered with a slippery sheet of brown holland. Mr. James never entered that room, and therein was wise. Gary remonstrated once. She answered him quite kindly even playfully, but no change followed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

What was worse, she made very wretched tea. Her father never took tea; neither did Gary. I was rather fond of it, but I soon gave it up. Everything her father partook of was first-rate. Everything else was somewhat poverty-stricken. My pleasure in Florence’s society prevented me from making practical deductions from such trifles. The first day of November was a very lovely day, quite one. I was sitting in a little arbour I had just discovered, with a book in my hand—not reading, however, but day-dreaming—when, lifting my eyes from the ground, I was startled to see, through a thin shrub in from of the arbour what seemed the form of an old lady seated, apparently reading from a book on her knee. The sight instantly recalled the lady from Chapel Street. I started to my feet, and then, clear of the intervening bush, saw only a great stone such as abounded on the moors in the neighbourhood, with a lump of quartz set on top of it. Some childish taste had put it there for ornament. Smiling at my own folly, I say down again, and reopened my book. After reading for a while, I glanced up again, and once more started to my feet, overcome by the fancy that there verily sat the lady reading. You will say it indicated an excited condition of the brain. Possibly; but I was, as far as I can recall, quite collected and reasonable. I was almost vexed this second time, and sat down once more to my book. Still, every time I looked up, I was startled afresh. I doubt, however, if the trifle is worth mentioning, or had any significance even in relation to what followed. I wondered if Florence practiced witchcraft. There were others who may or may not have practiced it—the evidence is insufficient—but who had clearly used their reputation for occult power to gain illegitimate personal ends. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Gary said that Florence had been dabbling in the occult for years; about five years ago he said she had borrowed a book on palmistry, containing rules on how to know the future. However, he told her it was an evil book and evil art. His charity was wasted, however, since Florence continued telling people’s futures, somethings through reading their faces as well as through reading their palms. Fortunetelling is often only white magic. However, it easily becomes black magic when it concerns itself with the time or manner of the subject’s death. After dinner I strolled out by myself, leaving father and son over their claret. I did not drink wine; and from the lawn I could see the windows of the library, whither Florence commonly retired from the dinner-table. It was a very lovely soft night. There was no moon, but the stars looked wider awake than usual. Dew was falling, but the grass was not yet wet, and I wandered about on it for half and hour. The stillness was somehow strange. It had a wonderful feeling it as if something were expected—as if the quietness were the mould in which some even or other was about to be cast. Even then I was a reader of certain sorts of recondite lore. Suddenly I remembered that this was the eve of All Souls. This is the night on which all the faithful departed, those baptized Christians who are believed to be in purgatory because they died with the guilt of less sin on their souls, came out of their graves to visit their old homes. “Poor dead!” I thought with myself; “have you any place to call a home now? If you have, surely you will not wander back here, where all you have called home has either vanished or given itself to others, to be their home now and yours no more! What an awful doom the old fancy has allotted you! To dwell in your graves all he year, and creep out, this one night, to enter at the midnight door, left open for welcome! A poor welcome truly!—just an open door, a clean-swept floor, and a fire to warm your rain-sodden limbs! The household asleep, and the houseplace swarming with the ghost of ancient times—the miser, the spendthrift, the profligate, the coquette—for the good ghosts sleep, and are troubled with no walking like yours! Not one man, sleepless like yourself, to question you.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

“Yet who can tell?” I went on to myself. “It may be your hell to return thus. It may be that only on this one night of the year you can show yourself to one who can see you, but that the place were wicked is the Hades to which you are doomed for ages.” I thought and thought till I began to feel the air alive about me, and was enveloped in the vapours that dim the eyes of those who strain them for one peep through the dull mica windows that will not open on the World of ghosts. At length I cast my fancies away, and feld from them to the library in hopes that no one would raise the Devil to kill or bewitch me. There were many books of fortune-telling and grimoires, of course, full of diagrams. The bodily presence of Florence made the World of ghosts appear shadowy indeed. “What a reality there is about a bodily presence.” I said to myself, as I took y chamber-candle in my hand. “But what is there more real in a body?” I said again, as I crossed the hall. “Surely nothing,” I went on, as I ascended the broad staircase to my room. “The body must vanish. If there be a spirit, that will remain. A body can but vanish. A ghost can appear.” I woke in the morning with a sense of such discomfort as made me spring out of bed at once. When I looked at my watch after I was dressed, I found I had risen an hour earlier than usual. I groped my way downstairs to spend the hour before breakfast in the library. No sooner was I seated with the book than I heard the voice of Florence scolding the butler, in no very gentle tones, for leaving the garden door open all night. The moment I heard this, the strange occurrences I am about to relate began to dawn upon my memory. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

The door had been open the night long between All Saints and All Souls. In the middle of the night I awoke suddenly. I knew it was not the morning by the sensations I had, for the night feels altogether different from the morning. It was quite dark. My heart was beating violently, and I either hardly could or hardly dared breathe. A nameless terror was upon me, and my sense of hearing was, apparently by the force of its expectation, unnaturally roused and keen. There it was—a slight noise in the room!—slight, but clear, and with an unknown significance about it! It was awful to think it would come again. I do believe it was only one of those creaks in the timers which announced the torpid, age-long, skin flow of every house back to the dust—a motion to which the flow of the glacier is as a torrent, but which is no less inevitable and sure. Day and night it ceases not; but only in the night, when house and heart are still, do we hear it. No wonder it should sound fearful! for we are we not the immortal dwellers in ever-crumbling clay? The clay is no near us, and yet not of us, that it is every movement starts a fresh dismay. For what will its final ruin disclose? When it falls from about us, where shall we find that we have existed all the time? My skin tingled with the bursting of the moister from its pores. Something was in the room besides me. Sometimes apparitions had the reputation for torture and the torture included choking. People should teach their children to fear God, should come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the Devil. A confused, indescribable sense of utter loneliness, and yet awful presence, was upon me, its blood did cry for vengeance against me. Nobody seemed to have noticed that the specters differed about the means by which the supposed murders were done. The Devil himself did no know so far. This presence was mingled with a dreary, hopeless desolation, as of burnt-out love and aimless life. All at once I found myself sitting up. The terror that a cold hand might be laid upon me, or a cold breath blow on me, or a corpselike face bend down through the darkness over me, had broken my bonds!—I would meet half-way whatever might be approaching. The moment that my will burst into action the terror began to ebb. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

The room in which I slept was a large one, perfectly dreary with tidiness. I did not know till afterwards that it was Florence’s room, which she had given up to me rather than prepare another. The furniture, all but one article, was modern and commonplace. I could not help remarking to myself afterwards how utterly void the room was of the nameless charm of feminine occupancy. I had seen nothing to wake a suspicion of its being a lady’s room. The article I have excepted was an ancient bureau, elaborate and ornate, which stood on one side of the large bow window. They very morning before, I had seen a bunch of keys hanging from the upper part of it, and had peeped in. Finding, however, that the pigeon-holds were full of papers, I closed it at once. I should have been glad to use it, but clearly it was not for me. At that bureau the figure of a woman was now seated in the posture of one writing. A strange dim light was around her, but whence I proceeded I never thought of enquiring. As if I, too, had stepped over the bourne, and was a ghost myself, all fear was now gone. I got out of bed, and softly crossed the room to where she was seated. “If she should be beautiful!” I thought—for I had often dreamed of a beautiful ghost that was pleased with me. The figure did not move. She was looking at the faded brown paper. “Some old love-letter,” I thought, and stepped nearer. So cool was I now, that I actually peeped over her shoulder. With mingled surprise and dismay I found that the dim page over which she was bent was that of an old account-book. Ancient household records, in rusty ink, held up to the gliosis of the waning moon, which shone through the parting in the curtains, their entries of shillings and pence!—Of pounds there was not one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

No doubt pounds and fathers are much the same in the World of thought—the true spirit-World; but in the ghost-World this eagerness over shillings and pence must mean something awful! To think that coins which had since been worn smooth in other pockets and purses, which had gone back to the Mint, and been melted down, to come out again and yet again with the heads of new kings and queens—that diners, eaten by the worms—that polish for the floors inches of whose thickness had since been worn away—that the hundred nameless trifled of a life utterly vanished, should be perplexing, annoying, and worst of all, interesting the soul of a ghost who had been in Hades for centuries! The writing was very old-fashioned, and e words were contracted. I could read nothing but the moneys and one single entry—“Corinths Vs.” Currans for a Christmas puffing, most likely! Ah–, poor lady! the pudding and not the Christmas was her care; not the delight of the children over it, but the beggarly pence which it cost. And she cannot get it out of her head, although her brain was “powdered all as thin as flour” ages ago in the mortar of Death. “Alas, poor ghost!” It needs no treasure hoard left behind, no floor stained with the blood of the murdered child, no wickedly hidden parchment of landed rights. Was this a demonic conspiracy? Witches cannot send the Devil to torment people by making a covenant with the Devil. Some people in this town had a lot of evidence against them for trafficking in the occult. In fact, if you recall, during the Salem Witch Trials, renegade members of the clergy had played a large part in the history of witchcraft in fact and in fiction. It should be recalled that Morgan le Fey, King Arthur’s sister, was supposed to have learned her evil craft in the nunnery where she was educated, that Benvenuto Cellini’s sorcerer-friend was a priest, and that a renegade priest is supposed to be necessary to the performance of Black Mass. An old account-book is enough for the hell of the house-keeping gentlewoman! She never lifted her face, or seem to know that I stood behind her. I left her, and went into the bow window, where I could see her face. I was right there. It was the same lady I had met at Chapel Street, walking in front of Gary James. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Her withered lips went moving as if they would have uttered words she had the breath been commissioned thither; her brow was contracted over her thin nose; and once and again her shining forefinger wen up to her temple as if she were pondering some deep problem of humanity. How long I stood gazing at her I do not know, but at last I withdraw to my bed, and left her struggling to solve that which she could never solve thus. It was the symbolic problem of her own life, and she had failed to read it. I remember nothing more. She may be sitting there still, solving at the insolvable. I should have felt no inclination, with the broad sun of the squire’s face, the keen eyes of Gary James, and the beauty of Florence before me at the breakfast table, to say a word about what I had seen, even if I had not been afraid of the doubt concerning my sanity which the story would certainly awaken. What with the memories of the night, I passed a very dreary day, dreading the return of the night, for, cool as I had been in her presence, I could not regard the possible reappearance of those ghost with equanimity. I had a belly ache. Gary James said he would take a pipe of tobacco and light it. I told him that I thought it was not lawful. [The idea that this remedy was unlawful is probably a result of the use of tobacco in it. Tobacco was an “Indian Weed” and used in Indian ceremony and medicine. The Puritans, like other seventh-century Christians, thought the Indians to be Devil worshippers and thought of their medicine men as magicians.] He said it was lawful for man or beast. However, when the night did come, I slept soundly to the morning. The next day, not being able to read with comfort, I went wandering about the place, and at length began to fit the outside and inside of the house together. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

The house was a large and rambling edifice, parts of it very old, parts comparatively modern. I first found a beautiful stained-glass window, which looked out back. It was kind of a countercharm and verged on black magic because it was supposed not only to break the witch’s spell but to injure the witch or compel her presence. Below this window, on one side, there was a door. I wondered whiter it led, but found it locked. At the moment Gary James approached from the stables. “Where does this door lead?” I asked him. “I will get the key,” he answered. “It is rather a queer old place. We used to like it when we were children.” “There is a stair, you see,” he said, as he threw the door open. “It leads up over the kitchen.” I followed him up the stair. “There is a door into your room,” he said, “but it is always locked now. And here is Grannie’s room, as they call it, though why, I have not the least idea,” he added, as he pushed open the door of an old-fashioned parlour, smelling very musty. A few old books lay on a side table. A china bowl stood besides them, with some shrivelled, scented rose-leaves in the bottom of it. The cloth that covered the table was riddled by moths, and the spider-legged chairs were covered with dust. A conviction seized me that the old bureau must have belonged to this room, and I soon found the place where I judged it must have stood. However, the same moment I caught sight of a portrait on the wall above the spot I had fixed upon. “Good Lord!” I caried, involuntarily, “that is the very lady I met at Chapel Street!” “Nonsense!” said Gary James. “Old-fashioned ladies are like babies—they all look the same. That is a very old portrait.” “So I see,” I answered. “It is like a Zucchero.” “I don’t know whose it is,” he answered hurriedly, and I thought he looked a little queer.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

“Is she one of the family?” I asked. “They say so; but who or what she is, I don’t know. You must ask Jean,” he answered. “The more I looked at it,” I said, “the more I am convinced it is the same lady.” “Well,” he returned with a laugh, “my old nurse used to say she was rather restless. But it’s all nonsense.” “That bureau in my room looks about the same date as this furniture.” I remarked. “It used to stand just there,” he answered, pointing to the space under the picture. “Well, I remember with what awe we used to regard it; for they said the old lady kept her accounts at it still. We never dared touch the bundles of yellow papers in the pigeon-holes. I remember thinking Jean a very heroine once when she touched one of them with the tip of her forefinger. She had got yet more courageous by the time she had it moved into her own room.” “hen that is your sister’s room I am occupying?” I said. “Yes.” “I am ashamed of keeping her out of it.” “Oh! she’’ do well enough.” “If I were she though,” I added, “I would send that bureau back to its own place.” “What do you mean, Oliver? Do you believe ever old wife’s tale that ever was told?” “She may get a fright some day—that’s all! I replied. He smiled with such an evident mixture of pity and contempt that for the moment I almost disliked him; and feeling certain that Florence would receive any such hint in a somewhat similar manner, I did not feel inclined to offer her any advice with regard to the bureau. Little occurred during the rest of my visit worthy of remark. Somehow or other I did not make much progress with Florence. I believe I had begun to see into her character a little more, and therefore did not get deeper in love as the days went on. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
I know I became less absorbed in her society, although I was still anxious to make myself agreeable to her—or perhaps, more properly, to give her a favourable impression of me. I do not know whether she perceived any difference in my behaviour, but I remember that I began again to remark the pinched look of her nose, and to be a little annoyed with her for always putting aside my book. At the same time, I daresay I was provoking, for I never was given to tidiness myself. At length Christmas Day arrived. After breakfast, the squire Mr. James, and the two girls arranged to talk to church. Florence was not in the room at the moment. I excused myself on the ground of a headache, for I had had a bad night. When they left, I went up to my room, threw myself on the bed, and was soon fast asleep. How long I slept I do not know, but I work again with that indescribable yet well-known sense of not being alone. The feeling was scarcely less terrible in the daylight than it had been in the darkness. With the same sudden effort as before, I sat up in the bed. There was the figure at the open bureau, in precisely the same position as on the former occasion. However, I could not see it so distinctly. I rose as gently as I could, and approached it, after the first physical terror. I am not a coward. Just as I got near enough to see the account book open on the folding cover of the bureau, she started up, and, turning, revealed the face of Florence. She blushed crimson. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Winchester,” she said, in great confusion; “I thought you had gone to church with the rest.” “I had lain down with a headache, and gone to sleep,” I replied. “But forgive me, Miss James,” I added, for my mind was full of the dreadful coincidence, “don’t you think you have been better at church than balancing your accounts on Christmas Day?” “The better day the better deed,” she said, with a somewhat offended air, and turned to walk from the room. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

“Excuse me, Florence,” I resumed, very seriously, “but I want to tell you something.” She looked conscious. It never crossed me, that perhaps she fancied I was going to make a confession. Far other things were then in my mind. For I thought how awful it was, if she too, like the ancestral ghost, should have to do an age-long penance of haunting that bureau and those horrid figures, and I had suddenly resolved to tell her the whole story. She listened with varying complexion and face half turned aside. When I had ended, which I fear I did with something of a personal appeal, she lifted her head and looked me in the face, with just a slight curl on her thin lip, and answered me. “If I had wanted a sermon, Mr. Winchester, I should have gone to church for it. As for the ghost, I am sorry for you.” So saying she walked out of the room. The rest of the day I did not find very merry I pleaded my headache as an excuse for going to be early. How I hated the room now! Next morning, immediately after breakfast, I took my leave of East Haven. If I lost a wife at all, it was a stingy one. I should have been ashamed of her all my life long. However, extravagant runs the rich, and the stingy robs the poor. I have kept up my friendship with her brother. All he knows about the matter is, that either we had a quarrel, or she refused me—he is not sure which. I must say for Florence, that she was no tattler. Well, here is a letter I had from Gary James this very morning, I will read I to you. My Dear Winchester—We have had a terrible shock this morning. Jean did not come down to breakfast, and Clara went to see if she was ill. We heard her scream, and rushing up, there was poor Jean sitting at the old bureau, quite dead. She had fallen forward on the desk, and her housekeeping-book was crumpled up under her. She had been so all nigh long, we suppose, for she was not undressed, and was quite cold. The doctors say it was disease of the heart. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Some people thought the ghost had come to tell that she had hidden away money in some secret place in the old bureau, one would see why she was permitted to come back. And of course, those wretched accounts were not over and done with, you see. That is the misery of it. Good night. Then I walked out into the wind. We who have lost our sense and our senses—our touch, our small, our vision of who we are; we who frantically force and press all things, without rest for body or spirit, hurting our Earth and injuring ourselves: we call a halt. We want to rest. We need to rest and allow the Earth to rest. We need to reflect and to rediscover the mystery that lives in us, that is the ground of every unique expression of life, the source of the fascination that calls all things to communion. We declare a Sabbath, a space of quiet; for simply being and letting be; for recovering the great, forgotten truths; for learning how to live again. Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest. Please Sanctify us through Thy commandments, and grant our portion in Thy Torah. Please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and 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 sanctified Thy name, rest thereon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who halowest the Sabbath. O Lord our God, be gracious unto Thy people America and accept their prayer. Please restore America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and please receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worship of thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

Winchester Mystery House

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Some Proclaim to have a Hot Line to God!

In the struggle between life and death, sometimes survival is not the only way to win. It takes two to get you off the ground, or so said the Great Bernard in his Consideration mental prayer (5.3); that is to say, it takes Simplicity and Purity. Simplicity you should be able to find under Intention. Purity resides in Affection; yes, the soul has affections. Simplicity leads to God; Purity, to general understanding and enjoyment. If he raucous affections of your soul are under your control, no good action will get in your spiritual way. If you intend to seek nothing else than good favour of God and the goodwill of your neighbour, your heart will be free as a bird’s. If your heart is right, then every creature great and small is a mirror of life and a book of doctrine. And that from the wormy to the pachydermy: each one of hem reflects something of the goodness of God. Here is some common wisdom on the subject of Purity. If you are good and pure on the inside, then you will see everything on the outside without impediment and seize it well. The pure of heart sees clearly through to Heaven and Hell. As each one lives interiorly, so one will judge exteriorly. If there is joy in the World, the person with the pure heart surely possesses it. If there is tribulation and anxiety anywhere in the World, or so Paul surmised to Romans (2.9), who knows more about it than the gentleperson whose conscience is continually assailed by evil? As an iron thrust into the fire loses its rust and heats to a glowing whole, so Humankind turning itself completely to God emerges from its torpor and is transmuted into a new Humanity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Humanity quickly loses interest in the spiritual life. At moments like this, people do not want to lift a finger to help themselves; they freely accept all the handouts they can get. However, when they increase their efforts in behalf of the spiritual life, an odd thing happens. They stand up straight and begin to walk it virilely on the Via Domini. There is one sure sign of this. What they once thought important, they now can hardly remember. Whenever a glimpse is given to one, one should stretch its duration to the utmost. This can be markedly helped by being very careful to keep one’s physical position unchanged, by not even slightly moving hand or foot or trunk. The perfectly still body offers the best condition for retaining the perfectly still mind. If attention is to be placed anywhere in the body, it should be placed in the region of the heart. The sudden but gentle drawing away from outer activity to the inner one, “the melting away in the heart,” as the Old World mystics call it, felt actually inside the middle-chest region, may make itself felt occasionally, or, in an advanced or regular meditator, every day. In the last case it will tend to appear at around the same hour each time. This is a call which ought o be treated properly with all the reverence it deserves. However, before it can be honoured, it must be recognized. Its marks of identification must be studied in books, learned from experience, gleaned from the statements of other persons, or obtained from a personal teacher. When it comes, the human should heed the signal, drop whatever one is doing, any obey the unuttered command to turn inwards, to practise remembrance, or to enter meditation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The significant points in this matter are three: first, it is a call to be recognized and understood; second, it is a command from the highest authority to be obeyed instantly, as disregard brings its own punishment, which is that the call may not come again; third, it is an offer of grace. If the call is heeded and its meaning known or intuited, the aspirant should first of all arrest one’s movements and remain utterly frozen, as if posing for a portrait painter. Let the mind be blank, held as empty thoughts as possible. After a while, when adjusted to this sudden suspension of activity, one may with extreme slowness and with utmost gentleness assume a bodily posture where one will be more relaxed and more comfortable, or perhaps even a formal meditation posture. One may then shut one’s eyes or let the say in a steady gaze as if one were transfixed, or one may alternate with both according to the urge from within. If everything else is dropped and all these conditions are fulfilled, then a successful mediation brining on a spiritual glimpse is sure to follow. The psychology which believes its study of humans to be complete with its study of one’s reflexes, complexes, emotions, and behaviour is superficial. It has still to get at and explain one’s consciousness of those things. There are two essential divisions in the psychological constitution of humans. The first is the realm of thoughts, the second is that which is aware of the thoughts, the thinker. Modern psychology has done nothing more than grope in the first realm; it has been quite unable to find the final verified truth about the second one, about the mind that is behind all thoughts. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

The psychoanalyst, the psychological counsellor, and the psychotherapist can all study and practise philosophy with benefit to their professional work. Having done so, they can then play a useful role in treating those who would like to undertake involvement but are emotionally or psychologically too egocentric, too easily upset and unbalanced, or suffering too much from psychoses or neuroses, to be able to rise to its impersonal demands. There is of course a semi-lunatic fringe always around religion, spiritualism, and occultism, with a smaller one around mysticism, for there is some sort of ego satisfaction to be found there. The philosopher is not concerned with this atmosphere. Too many unbalanced persons prematurely occupy themselves with occultism, hypnotism, spiritualism, and even mysticism. It is better not to encourage them, for that will only make their present condition worse. Their first need is to get straightened out and for this they need outside help. The proper help is not easy to find. If it is professional and paid for such as that given by psychologists, psychoanalysts, or psychiatrists, it may have only a very limited value. The kind of help that would be really efficient would be a combination of these professional skills with philosophic, intuitive, and psychic skill. More individuals suffering from mental disorders drag out miserable lives in hospitals than those suffering from other forms of sickness, although sickness may kill more people more quickly. This is only a part of the price modern humans are paying for one’s “civilized” way of life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Dr. Freud’s outlook was too materialistic, his interpretation of psychological process too mechanistic, his personal experience too one-sided to permit him to adequately solve the human problem. Nevertheless he presented a good start in opening up a neglected mental hinterland to science. Dr. Adler advanced beyond Dr. Freud. Dr. Jung advanced beyond Dr. Adler. Psychoanalysis has indeed made a useful contribution, amidst all its errors and exaggerations. It has brought into light what was formerly and unhealthily hidden in darkness. It has said what needed saying but what nobody had the courage to say. It has said what needed saying but what nobody had the courage to day. It has helped people understand their character better. However, this said, its work is useful only on its own level, which is much inferior to the philosophical one. Insofar as one can bring anyone to see oneself as one is, the psychiatrist may prepare one—at a price—for this quest or, if one is particular materialistic, may hinder one’s patient from it. Those who take only a casual interest in their mental health will not take a serious interest in philosophy. There has never been in incarnation so high a proportion of neurotics, psychotics, and mildly unbalanced, destructive, violent, or largely mad persons. Everybody can recognize a bodily deformity—whether it be one’s own or another’s—in an instant, whereas hardly anybody recognizes a mental deformity until weeks, months, or even years have passed: sometimes it is never recognized at all. Ignorance of the laws of psychic well-being is not less dangerous because it is so common. There is a legitimate place for experiment in the applied sciences: it contributed so much to their development. However, in the matter of psychology, consciousness, physical investigation, and the religious inner life, the need for guarding sanity and safeguarding morality is surely there. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

To tell yourself that you are getting better and better every day, when the cause of your sickness is making it worse and worse, is to lead the mind into illusion, error, and self-deceit. Suggestion has its proper place and usefulness, but it is only a part and not the whole of psychotherapy. If we are lucky, our strength and confidence are derived from our early days by phantasies that are confirmed by sensory events. Our youthful phantasies that something nice would soon happen coincided regularly with the onset of the nice thing happening. Sensory events (of food, warmth, love, and so on) then confirmed our central (phantasy) processes. We are weakened when there is a discontinuity between these two: in the later day, the life of the senses will not be so deeply involved with thoughts of what we could enjoy. When individual satisfactions are not closely related to the arousal of youthful ness, the individual misses opportunities to acquire the sense that is has control over getting pleasant things for itself. Moreover, if the arousal of need is very unconnected with the arrival of whatever might in other circumstances be greeted as a pleasant, satisfying thing, the individual is left feeling that there is little one can do for oneself. To that extent, one will feel one cannot cope with the World. Disappointed youth and adults in this mood may prefer to remain in the World of their phantasies, and keep away from the World their senses convey to them. In the life of phantasy we can try to continue to have phantasy satisfactions, or at least some measure of control over our phantasy creations. The incentive to stay with out phantasies will be greater, the more we have suffered from the World our senses bring to us—the World of other people and things over which we have no control. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Strange, impossible ideas may enter the mind at times. Alarm may flood us whenever that painful World threatens to intrude, and signal-anxiety may keep us clinging to our phantasies. Reason soon bids them take their exit, and then a few will reappear to haunt one. Day-dreams are preferred to what the senses may bring. External relationships seem to have been emptied by a massive withdrawal of the real libidinal self. Effective mental activity has disappeared into a hidden inner World; the individual’s conscious ego is emptied of vital feeling and action, and seems to have become unreal. You may catch glimpses of intense activity going on in the inner World, through dream and phantasy, but the individual’s conscious ego merely reports these as if it were a neutral observer not personally involved in the inner drama. The attitude to the outer World is the same: non-involvement and observation at a distance without any feeling, like that of a press reporter describing a social gathering of which one is not a part, in which one has no personal interest, and by which one is bored. Such activity as is carried on may appear to be mechanical. On the other hand, it is possible for people to retreat into the life of the senses, and to cut off their consciousness from more central processes. Babies and adults in this mood give an impression of responsiveness and lively feelings. However, the responsiveness is to the momentary stimulus—it does not touch the more central regions in any coherent way. There is no coherence at the back of this apparent vitality and vivacity, no reliability of mood or direction—not even a strong self-preservative purpose. Such people sometimes appear to be at the mercy of their moods. Women who behave like this have often been prized by those with a strong need to nurture and protect; they are regarded as good fun, and their silliness is gratifying to others. However, if no such protector can be found, their fate is tragic. Romantic literature is full of them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

So here is a split or weakness in the connections between the phantasy World and the coping self, and also between the sensory life and the coping self. Once there are such splits, people can choose to retreat into either, to diminish their pain. Saint Anthony, founder of Christian monasticism and father of Christian anchoritisms, laid down a rule for oneself to eat only once a day, and after the sun had set. However, many self-actualized have a rule to eat the last meal at midday when the Sun is at its highest point! Can we not see here as in so many other spiritual matters, how much human opinion governs humans—and not divine inspiration! The less affluent in Germany and Russia, in Bulgaria and China, know the worth of black bread. However, with the pseudo-progress and the surrender to appearances rather than to honest values, its replacement by whiter and whiter bread is possible, perhaps probable. Many spiritual aspirants who are practising healing usually prepare their own food. The theory is that the magnetic influence of the person who prepares the food affects the latter, and the aspirant eating food permeated with bad magnetism suffers thereby. The advance self-actualized do not need to be too concerned about this, as they are more immune in some ways, although more sensitive in others. However, where they have the choice, they will be careful in this matter. We must ostentatiously take every care to free our hearts and minds from selfish, materialistic, or unworthy thoughts and feelings. People of faith historically have followed multiple routes to discerning God’s will. They have gleaned guidance from sacred texts such as the Bible; their tradition’s historical wisdom as collected in creeds, hymns, prayers, and scholarship; the counsel of spiritual mentors such as rabbis, priests, and pastors; and their individual intuitions as gleaned through prayer and meditation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Their last route for discerning God’s will, which was famously practiced by Christian mystics whose writings survive as part of the World’s spiritual heritage, is today in favour among individualists Americans. As the teachings of one’s communal religious heritage—in Scripture memorization, catechism classes, Torah teaching—have waned, private talking with God has not. Such prayer often incorporates both a desire for discernment and a pursuit of power. Pray The Prayer of Jabez (a little book that stood atop best-seller lists in 2001 with 4.1 million copies sold in its first six months) and you are promised the abundance of blessings that God has ready for you. God is only waiting for you to pray, as did the honourable Jabez in the Old Testament, to “bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory.” Prayers for blessings are common to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. However, so is a dash of realism. Job, equally honourable, prays for blessings and finds oneself accursed—and becomes our everlasting reminder that the rain falls on both the just and unjust. “When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen,” the Old Testament Isaiah records a displeased God as saying. Most faith traditions are especially skeptical of those who claim a hot line to God and presume to tell the rest of us what God is thinking, or to be special channels of God’s healing power. The church historian Gerald Sittser notes that such presumption “allows a few people to be demagogues and makes the rest of us suckers or cynics.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

Some years ago, I started receiving mass mailings from something called the Don Stewart Evangelistic Association, each inviting me to send in a contribution and a request for a miracle. One enclosed a “miracle prayer cloth” that had supposedly touched Stewart’s body. Like the woman healed upon touching Jesus’ garment, I, too, could unleash miraculous power if I would write a wish for myself and a friend on the prayer-cloth envelop and mail it in after it had spent a night under my pillow (remembering Jesus’ words, “Give and it shall be given”). Stewart then promised to devote three days and nights to ardent fasting and prayer over my request, after which he would send the prayer cloth back to me as the “point-of-release.” I decided to test Stewart’s miracle system. I asked this man of the cloth to get God “to stop Don Stewart from exploiting suffering people with his arrogant self-deification.” On schedule, my prayer cloth returned with a note from Stewart printed to appear handwritten: “For three days and three night your special prayer requests and prayer cloth have been in my private prayer chamber, and I have been praying. I have asked God to give you this special miracle you need and to put his hand on your loved one. I really feel good about it! Victory coming!” if only he were right. And if we say that we are rejecting the old images in order to do more justice to the moral attributes of God, we must again be careful of what we are really meaning. When we wish to learn the love and goodness of God by analogy—by imagining parallels to them realm of human relations—we turn of course to the parables of Christ. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

However, when we try to conceive the reality as it may be in itself, we must beware lest we interpret “moral attributes” in terms of mere conscientiousness or abstract benevolence. The mistake is easily made because we (correctly) deny that God has passions; and with us a love that is not passionate means a love that is something less. However, the reason why God has no passions is that passions imply passivity and intermission. The passion of love is something that happens to us, as “getting wet” happens to a body: and God is exempt from that “passion” in the same way that water is exempt from “getting we.” He cannot be affected with love because He is love. To imagine that love as something less torrential or les sharp than our own temporary and derivative “passions” is a most disastrous fantasy. Again, we may find a violence in some of the traditional imagery which tends to obscure the changelessness of God, the peace, which nearly all who approach Him have reported—the “still, small voice.” And it is here, I think that the pre-Christian imagery is least suggestive. Yet even here, there is a danger lest the half conscious picture of some huge thing at rest—a clear, still ocean, a dome of “white radiance”—should smuggle in ideas of inertia, or vacuity. The stillness in which the mystics approach Him is intent and alert—at the opposite pole from sleep or reverie. They are becoming like Him. Silences in the physical World occur in empty places: but the ultimate Peace is silent through very density of life. Saying is swallowed up in being. There is no movement because His action (which is Himself) is timeless. You might, if you wished, call it movement at an infinite speed, which is the same thing as rest, but reached by a different—perhaps a less misleading—way of approach. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Humans are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract and negative deity to the living God. I do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of the objection to traditional imagery. It was hated not at bottom, because it pictured Him as a man but because it pictured Him as king, or even as warrior. The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a self. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that ay any time Heaven and Earth should flee away at His glance. If He were the truth, then we could really say that all the Christian images of kingship were a historical accident of which our religion ought to be cleansed. It is with a shock that we discover them to be indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters—when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes besides you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. “Look out!” we cry, “it is alive.” And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An “impersonal God”—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless lifeforce surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. However, God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (“Man’s search for God!”) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us? So it is a sort of Rubicon. One goes across; or not. However, if one does, there is no manner of security against miracles. One may be in for anything. Is violence born in the heart or the mind? If we must kill to protect ourselves, what will that do to our heart, and our souls? Remaining thus among themselves in the state of nature, the bodies politic soon experienced the inconveniences that had forced private individual to leave it; and that state became even more deadly among these great bodies than the state had been among the private individuals of who they were composed. Whence came the national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals that make nature tremble and offend reason and all those horrible prejudices that rank the honour of shedding human blood among the virtues. The most decent people learned to consider it one of their duties to kill their fellow humans. Finally, humans were seen massacring one another by the thousands without knowing why. More murders were committed in a single say of combat and more horrors in the capture of a single city than were committed in the state of nature during entire centuries over the entire face of the Earth. Such are the first effects one glimpses of the division of humankind into different societies. Let us return to the founding of these societies. I know that many have ascribed other origins to political societies, such as conquests by the most powerful, or the union of the weak; and the choice among these causes is indifferent to what I want to establish. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Nevertheless, the one I have just described seems to me the most natural, for the following reasons. In the first cause, the right of conquest, since it is not right, could not have founded any other, because the conqueror and conquered peoples always remain in a state of war with one another, unless the nation, returned to full liberty, were to choose voluntarily its conqueror as its leader. Until then, whatever the capitulations that may have been made, since they have been founded on violence alone and are consequently null by this very fact, on this hypothesis there can be neither true society nor body politic, nor any other law than that of the strongest. These words strong and weak are equivocal in the second case, because in the interval between the establishment of the right of property or of the first occupant and that of political governments, the meaning of these terms is better rendered by the words poor and rich, because, before the laws, man did not in fact have anu other means of placing his equals in subjection except by attacking their goods or by giving the part of his. Since the poor had nothing in return. On the contrary, since the rich men were, so to speak, sensitive in all parts of their goods, it was much easier to do them harm, and consequently they had to take greater precautions to protect themselves. And finally it is reasonable to believe that a things was invented by those to whom it is useful rather than by those to whom it is harmful. Incipient government did not have a constant and regular form. The lack of philosophy and experience permitted only present inconveniences to be perceived, and there was thought of remedying the others only as they presented themselves. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Despite all the labours of the wisest legislators, the political state always remained imperfect, because it was practically the work of change; and, because it had been badly begun, time, in discovering faults and suggesting remedies, could never repair the vices of the constitution. People were continually patching it up, whereas they should have begun by clearing the air and pitting aside all the old materials, as Lycurgus did in Sparta, in order to raise a good edifice later on. At first, society consisted merely of some general conventions that private individuals promised to observe, and concerning which the community became the guarantor for each of them. Experience had to demonstrate how weak such a constitution was, and how easy it was for lawbreakers to escape conviction or punishment for faults of which the public alone was to be witness and judge. The law had to be evaded in a thousand ways; inconveniences and disorders had to multiply continually in order to make them finally give some thought to confiding to private individuals the dangerous trust of public authority, and to make them entrust to magistrates the care of enforcing the observance of the deliberations of the people. For to say that the leaders were chosen before the confederation was brought about that the ministers of the laws existed before the laws themselves is a supposition hat does not allow of serious debate. It would be no more reasonable to believe that initially the peoples threw themselves unconditionally and for all times into the arms of an absolute master, and that the first means of providing for the common security dreamed up by proud and unruly humans was to rush headlong into slavery. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

In fact, if not to defend themselves against oppression and to protect their foods, their lives their liberties, which are, as it were, the constitutive elements of their being, why did they give themselves over to superiors? Now, since, in relations between humans, the worst that can happen to someone is for one to see oneself at the discretion of someone else, would it not have been contrary to good sense to begin by surrendering into the hands of a leader the only things for whose preservation they needed one’s help? What equivalent could one have offered them for the concessions of so fine a right? And if one had dared to demand it on the pretext of defending them, would one not have immediately received the reply given in the fable: “what more will the enemy do to us?” It is therefore incontestable, and it is a fundamental maxim of all political right, that peoples have given themselves leaders in order to defend their liberty and not to enslave themselves. If we have a prince, Pliny said to Trajan, it is so that he may preserve us from having a master. [Our] political theorists produce the same sophisms about the love of liberty [our] philosophers have made about the state of nature. By the things they see they render judgments about very different things they have not seen; and they attribute to humans a natural inclination to servitude owing to the patience with which those who are before their eyes endure their servitude, without giving a thought to the fact that it is the same for liberty as it is for innocence and virtue: their value is felt only as long as one has them oneself, and the taste of them is lost as soon as one has lost them. “I know the delights of your country,” said Brasidas to a satrap who compared the life of Sparta to that of Persepolis, “but you cannot know the pleasure of mine.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

As an unbroken steed bristles his mane, paws the ground with his hoof, and struggles violently at the mere approach of the bit, while a rained horse patiently endures the ship and the spur, barbarous man does not bow his head for the yoke that civilized man wears without a murmur, and he prefers the most stormy liberty to tranquil subjection. Thus it is not by the degradation of enslaved peoples that human’s natural dispositions for or against servitude are to be judged, but by the wonders that all free peoples have accomplished to safeguard themselves from oppression. I know that enslaved peoples do nothing but boast of the peace and tranquility they enjoy in their chains and that they give the name “peace” to the most miserable slavery. However, when I see free peoples sacrificing pleasures, tranquility, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is regarded so disdainfully by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and abhorring captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of utterly naked savages scorn European pleasures and brave hunger, fire, sword and death, simply to preserve their independence, I sense that it is inappropriate for slaves to reason about liberty. During this time of great imbalance on planet Earth we may feel ourselves torn between the priorities of healing ourselves—resolving our own inner spiritual or psychological problems—and attempting to cure the social and economic ills that beset our culture. While each of us undoubtedly has much inner work to do, this attitude misses the main point of Earth Prayer. It continues to view the individual as somehow separate from the rest of the World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

However, if we accept that we are totally part of this living Earth, then we must recognize that isolated health is an illusion. Healing ourselves and working to resolve the contradictions in the human-Earth ecology is the same as work. All healing involves making whole again—resolving the contradictions that exist between self and other, body and spirit, mind and nature. Prayers area pathway back to an understanding and appreciation of life. They remind us that our participation extends to the whole. Knowing that we are not encapsulated, self-enclosed entities, but rather fields of energy integrated with the environment, everything we do transforms and reshapes the World. If our actions can destroy, so can they heal. In this light there is no difference between work and prayer, no distinction between physical activity and the work of the spirit. Precisely in the restoration of this balance between body and spirit lies the path for healing the greater whole. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. The Earth itself is the primary healer. It speaks in silence and solitude. It tells us of the comfort to be found in wild places. Our help is in the mountains, where we take ourselves to heal the Earthly wounds that people give o us. Prayers remind us that what we would like to see, we must help bring into being. All prayer is ultimately an act of hope. Without hope, it has no substance. Hope empowers our intention and gives character to action. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

While our action may be turned aside from its purposes or taken over by the milieu in which it occurs, prayer, when it is genuine, cannot be taken over. It attains its goals because it is its goal. I have come to terms with the future. From this day onward I will walk easy on the Earth. Plant trees. Kill no living things. Live in harmony with all creatures. I will restore the Earth where I am. Use no more of its resources than I need. And listen, listen to what it is telling me. Unto all generations we will declare Thy 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. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy King. Thou art One, Thy name is one, and who is like Thy people America, unique on Earth? A crown of distinction, a crown of salvation, the Sabbath Thou gavest us for the spirit’s rebirth. Our fathers have told us that on the Sabbath day, Abraham and Isaac rejoiced; Jacob and his sons found joy and rest. This day of true peace, this day of delight, granted in love for tranquil repose, by Thee was blest. May Thy children know that from Thee cometh rest. In observing the Sabbath, choicest of days, they hallow Thy name. Thou didst choose us for Thy service from among all peoples, loving us and taking delight in us. Thou didst exalt us above all tongues by making us holy through Thy commandments. Thou drawn us near, O our King, unto Thy service and hast called us by Thy great and holy name. And Thou hast given us in Love, O Lord our God, [Sabbaths for rest,] holidays for gladness, festivals and seasons for rejoicing. Thou hast granted us [this Sabbath day and] this Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Season of our Freedom, this Feast of Weks, the Season of the Giving of our Tora, this is the Feast of Tabernacles, the Season of our Gladness. To those who would corrupt the search for truth, be warned. The sword of justice cuts both ways. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!

Cresleigh Meadows is now selling! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes.
Homeowners will love the convenient commuter access to nearly Sacramento and Yuba City.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier.
Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Go! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
Labour More that By Good Works You May Make Sure Your Calling and Election!

Man creates law to maintain his World. But what happens when the laws of man define the laws of nature? High Society may be for you or against you, Paul to the Romans (8.31)—but do not hand your life on such a supercilious judgment. Just take care that the Supernatural is with you in everything you do; in other words, keep a good conscience. In return, God will defend you well, and He will steer you clear of oncoming perversities. However, just in case you swerve unawares, know that there is no trick to extricating you from the ditch. God is faithful and quick; He knows the when and the how; at least according to the Acts of the Apostles (1.7) His modus operandi? He rescues, and He sweeps up after. You know you are in good hands. However, what if other discover your defects and throw them in your face? Well, that is humility. And if you suffer that exquisite pain in silence, it will lead to, of all things, greater humility. Yes, there are rascals who spend their days standing on the corner watching all the World go by. And yes, they are waiting for just such an oaf as yourself to trip up on your own defects. One moment you are humble, and the next? Well, you have given the ruffians a good laugh. Anyone humbled in this way God shields from further harm, dusts one off, patches one up. This is the sort of person He takes a liking to, according to Second Corinthians (7.6), and enriches with spiritual generosity according to First Peter (5.5) and James (4.6). He raises one from the street and lifts one up to Glory. In to one’s ear, or so the Gospel of Matthew intimates (11.25), He whispers the most extraordinary things, even asking one if one would like to be friends. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
What is the result of this sudden humility? Whenever the person trips, one falls, but the bloodied nose no longer shakes one’s peace of mind. That is because one’s standing is not with the rowdies on the next corner, but with the Angles in the next World. Now that is how God looks at it, but the view from your promontory–if needed there is one—is entirely different. Supposedly, you have made all this spiritual progress, but that is no reason to puff yourself up. Know that, compared with the rest of Humankind, none of whose spiritual condition you have any true knowledge of, you are still a very flat and uninspired person. Some, regarding the certainty of divine predestination, said that prayers were superfluous, as also anything else done to attain salvation; because whether these things were done or not, the predestined would attain, and the reprobate would not attain, eternal salvation. However, against this opinion are all the warnings of Holy Scripture, exhorting us to prayer and other good works. Others declared that the divine predestination was altered through prayer. This is stated to have the opinion of the Egyptians, who thought that the divine ordination, which they called fate, could be frustrated by certain sacrifices and prayer. Against this also is the authority of Scripture. For it is said: “But the triumpher in Israel will not spare and will not be moved to repentance,” reports 1 Kings 15.29; and that “the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance,” reports Romans 11.29. Wherefore we must say otherwise that in predestination two things are to be considered—namely, the divine ordination; and its effect. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

As regards the former, in no possible way can predestination be furthered by the prayers of the saints. For it is not due to their prayers that anyone is predestined by God. As regards for the latter, predestination is said to be helped by the prayers that anyone is predestined by other good works; because providence, of which predestination is a part, does not do away with secondary causes but so provides effects, that the order of secondary causes falls also under providence. So, as natural effects are provided by God in such a way that natural causes are directed to bring about those natural effects, without which those effects would not happen; so the salvation falls under the order of predestination; whether it be one’s own prayers or those of another; or other good works, and such like, without which one would not attain to salvation. Whence, the predestined must strive after good works and prayer; because through these means predestination is most certainly fulfilled. For this reason it is said: “Labour more that by good works you may make sure your calling and election,” reports 2 Peter 1.10. This argument shows that predestination is not furthered by the prayers of the saints, as regards the preordination. One is said to be helped by another in two ways: in one way, inasmuch as one receives power from one: and to be helped thus belongs to the weak; but this cannot be said of God, and thus we are to understand, “Who hath helped the Spirit of the Lord?” In another way one is said to be helped by a person through whom one carries out one’s work, as a master through a servant. In this way God is helped by us; inasmuch as we execute His orders, according to 1 Corinthians 3.9: “We are God’s coadjutors.” Nor is this on account of any defect in the power of God, but because He employs intermediary causes, in order that the beauty of order may be preserved in the Universe; and also that He may communicate to creatures the dignity of causality. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Secondary causes cannot escape the order of the first universal cause, as has been said above, indeed, they execute that order. And therefore predestination can be further by creatures, but it cannot be impeded by them. After the work of translation was completed and the eleven men had seen the plates, an Angel came for the golden plates and Urim and Thummim, and Joseph returned the precious things he had carefully watched over for so many months. The work of translating was over, but there still remained the work of printing the book that all might know the wonderful story. Oliver Cowdery made a copy of all the writings. One copy was for the printers to use, and one was to be kept in case the other was lost. In August, 1829, Oliver Cowdery began taking the writings to the printers in Palmyra, New York. He took a few pages at a time and stayed right with the work, proofreading the printed pages to see that the printing was correct. By March, 1830, the Book of Mormon was printed. Five thousand copies cost $3,000 (2021 inflation adjusted: $88,596.52). Martin Harris advanced the money, and as the books were sold the money was returned to him. The Book of Mormon tells the story of people who lived long ago in the Americas, having been led by God from Jerusalem across the sea to the promised land in America. It tells about God’s dealings with them. These ancient people knew about Jesus. The Lord gave them a sign of His birth and after His resurrection Jesus visited them and taught them His gospel. These ancient people kept records of their history. They wrote them on plates of gold because gold was durable and plentiful. God told his prophet Mormon to prepare the golden plates so they might be preserved and brought forth by the power of God at such time as the Lord desired. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

The records were hidden in a stone box in a hill and there they remained hidden in the care of the Lord until God chose to bring them forth by His wonderful power. God wanted the people who were to live hundreds of years later to know the story of the people Columbus called “Indians” when he arrived at the New World in his search for a new route to India. It is their story which was written upon the golden plates and was translated into the Book of Mormon. Now that the book was printed people could read for themselves the strange story told on the golden plates. The men went among the people, showing them the Book of Mormon, telling the wonderful story, and preaching the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. The World did not then know anything about those who had lived hundreds of years ago in the land of America. When some read the book, they believed it. Others, however, would not listen and in a cruel and wicked manner persecuted those who believed. One complete copy of the manuscript of the Book of Mormon has been carefully preserved for all the years since 1829. It is now in the custody of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It is kept in a bank vault, and for very special occasions it is brought from the vault and displayed, always under special police guard. The other copy was put in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House in Nauvoo, Illinois. When his building was rebuilt any years later, it was found that water had seeped into the cornerstone and little of it was legible. Most of this manuscript was completely ruined, but some pages of it are still in existence. When the sacred moment comes, let one not hesitate to let oneself go, to adore the Overself ecstatically, and to let one’s heart be ravished. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

The rapt return to mental indrawnness may come to the practising meditator quite unexpectedly and suddenly. It may find one engaged in some ordinary daily activity or caught speaking in the middle of a sentence, but whatever it be, one should instantly surrender oneself and one’s time to it. In the result, the meditation will gradually deepen into a mild ecstasy. The Overself throws out a clue to its existence and presence. This comes in various ways to different persons. One form is a delicate feeling drawing one inward either to deeper thought or to no thought at all. If one goes along with it even through hardly aware and half-involuntarily, one will be led by this clue to a glimpse. One could learn to recognize that these moments, which comes so suddenly and so delightfully, have a special value. As soon as they come one ought to suspend all activities, put aside whatever it is that one is doing, even stop what one is speaking, and concentrate all one’s attention in a passive submissive way upon the delicate feelings and deep understanding that come with them. When confronted with a compelling anecdote, people are often strangely insensitive to statistical information indicating that the anecdote is but an exception rather than the rule. Before buying his new car, Ken consults the Consumer Reports surveyof car owners and Bimmertips on the social media page of Instagram.com, and finds high ratings given to the 2022 BMW M760Li xDrive he is considering purchasing. Hearing of his intention, Jillian says, “Oh! Those are great cars. Justin and I were considering buying one on Father’s Day.” The research (and our own experience) suggests that Ken will go ahead and buy the car because his friends liked it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Vivid testimony often makes it hard to forget an object and discount it. Likewise, vivid terrorist acts in early 1986, although harming fewer than one in a million persons in Europe, caused fearful Americans to shun travel to Europe in favour of more dangerous vacations on American highways. The September 11, 2001, terrorist assaults motivated millions more people to drive where they would have flown, despite the much lower risk of flying (even after allowing for September 11). Indeed, had terrorist crashed fifty more similarly loaded plans in 2001, Americans (if they kept on flying) would still have ended the year safer in planes than cares. The human understanding is most excited by that which strikes and enters the mind at once and suddenly, and by which the imagination is immediately filled and inflated. It then begins almost imperceptibly to conceive and suppose that everything is similar to the few objects which have taken possession of the mind, whilst it is very slow and unfit for the transition to the remote and heterogenous instances by which axions are tried as by fire. This way of thinking has several implications. For psychologists, knowing our vulnerability to error beckons us not to disparage psychological science, but to restrain our unchecked speculations. Aware that we can conceive and defend almost any theory, we must be candid about our presuppositions and check our theories against the data of God’s created World. To appreciate the unreliability of unchecked intuition (that sixth sense that tells us we are right, whether we are or not) is to admit that we need to do science—to wed creative intuition with systematic observation. Our method and that of the skeptics agree in some respects at first setting out, but differ most widely, and are completely opposed to each conclusions: for they roundly assert that nothing can be known; we, that but a small part of nature can be known, by the present method; their next step, however, is to destroy the authority of the sense and understanding, whilst we invent and supply them with assistance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

The accumulating research on human error also beckons us to a personal humility. It helps us understand why Jesus admonished us not to judge. We can easily wrong people by our overconfident judgements—that John’s depression stems from his demanding parents, or that the quiet woman next door harbours suppressed hostility. Nor need we feel intimidated by other people’s cockiness, least of all by strict and rigid doctrines of heresy hunters who are so absolutely sure they are right that they dare to practice spiritual ventriloquism—by putting their words into the mouth of God and believing the voice they throw to be the word of the Lord. When we make our own words our absolute truth, then, said the theologian Karl Barth, we have made an idol out of our religion. We have forgotten that we are not gods, but finite humans who peer at reality in a mirror dimly. Oliver Cromwell’s 1650 plea to the Church of Scotland is worth hearing over and again: “I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken.” The one belief of which we cannot be overconfident is the conviction that some of our beliefs contain error. Although that may sound threatening, it should actually be reassuring. For it means that it is okay to have doubts. Doubt reveals a mind that asks questions, a humble mind, one that does not presume its own ideas to be certainties, one that checks it presumptions against the data of God’s creation. Indeed, the intellectually honest words, belief, faith, and hope acknowledge uncertainty. We do not believe that three times three equals nine or have faith that what we throw upward will come down, or hope that day will follow night; we know these things with psychological if not logical certainty. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
To take the leap of faith is to bet one’s life on a presumed truth that makes sense of the Universe, that gives meaning to life, that provides hope in the face of adversity and death. One need not await 100 percent certainty before risking a thoughtful leap across the chasm of uncertainty. One can choose to marry in the hope of a happy life. One can elect a career, believing it will prove satisfying. One can fly across the ocean, having faith in the pilot and plane. To know that we are prone to error does not negate our capacity to glimpse truth, nor does it rationalize living as a fence straddler. Sometimes, said the novelist Albert Camus, life calls us to make a 100 percent commitment to something about which we are 51 percent sure. When we consider the structure of the personality, it is important to keep in mind the withdrawn “regressed” ego. There are three stages in the process called the withdrawal of the regressed ego. At stage one, there is a deepening of the split between the (already existing) Central Ego (more in touch with the World of other people and things) an the (also already existing) Libidinal Ego (where a person’s more bodily feelings originate). This is a true “vertical” split. At stage two, an Anti-Libidinal structure interposes between the Central Ego and the Libidinal Ego. This makes it additionally difficult for people to be in touch with their libidinal feelings, and for their libidinal needs to find expression in the World of other people and things. People then experience (rejecting) anger, because of the (frustrated) existence of these (excited) feelings, but they are not conscious of the source of their anger. The structure here under consideration is a repressive one, more a horizontal “lid” than a vertical split. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

At stage three, a further vertical split occurs, this time within the Libidinal Ego, that is within the structures which involve libidinal feeling. This split ensures that, while some libidinal needs eventually find expression, however painfully they may be hampered by their connection with anti-libidinal anger and rejection, others are withdrawn from communication with any source of pain. These latter are then out of touch with the realities mediated by the Central Ego, and out of touch with the moralities of Anti-Libidinal Ego, and out of touch with other (libidinal) feelings, needs, hopes, wishes. They exist, but they are unknown to the person. The result is a (vertically) split-off personality of which the person is no usually conscious. This is the passive repressed ego which seeks to return to the ante-natal state of absolute passive dependent security. Here, in quietude, repose, and immobility, it may find the opportunity to recuperate and grow to a rebirth. The phenomenon of the regressed ego is a very important one. However, one of the first misconceptions about regression we must clear up is the ambiguity in the term “regression.” Regression is a reversion to an earlier state of mode of functioning. However, what kind of a reversion? To an earlier state of feeling? Or to an earlier mode of personality organization? The answer is that there are two kinds of regression at least. One involves reversion to earlier feelings, and more generally regression to an earlier way of experiencing self and others. The other involves a relaxation of integrating process and hence a reversion to an earlier and less integrated organization of structures, with more splits, more isolated regions, more “islands.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Even in normal states of mind, some people have to make efforts to hold themselves together. When they relax in a therapeutic situation, they relax those efforts. This is the aspect of what is usually called regression which I shall call relaxation. Sometimes when it is believed that people are retreating to some earlier state of being, I believe them to be relaxing the connections which hold them together. Secondly, we must that sometimes what people are describing as regression, is a sequence of events in a child’s life. We must not be misled by this; it is in fact a sequence of stages which some people go through in some kinds of psychotherapy. People do regress in an appropriately holding therapeutic environment. As they feel more and more secure with their therapist, they give up their self-protective devices more and more. This allows them to revive and express (and even act upon) more and more strongly protected thoughts, feelings, wishes, memories, phantasies. Many of these do indeed have their roots in childhood and infancy, and were part of our young minds, but they indicate more about how we felt than and feel now, than about the stages by which we got those feelings. Thirdly, our troubles are aggravated by the assumption that we start with a unified self which is destroyed by subsequent misfortunes. As for instance, in this complex pattern of ego-splitting or loss of primary psychic unity, with all the weakness and internal conflict it involves, is the root cause of personality disorders in later life: and the most vulnerable part of the self is the most hidden part, cut off from all human relationships. This is an accurate description of how it is with some people. However, it also contains the misleading assumption that the self has a primary unity and then splits. Sometimes what psychologists lead in the consulting room can be misleading. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
In a relationship of trust, as self-protective devices are abandoned, some people relax and show themselves to be less integrated than they at first appear to be. In my view, they are then as they have always been, at heat. Many, many people have a hidden, tender, vulnerable side, and it would be good if this were more in touch with the rest of the personality. However, this hidden “regressed” withdrawn ego is not necessarily the result of splits in a region or a structure which was once whole. Although it is true that sometimes a more developed part of the self withdraws from involvement in everyday sensory life, it seems to me equally true that many people have parts which have never developed or which have never been allowed to come to the fore. These parts are hidden, but they have always been hidden—they have not retreated from a more visible position. There is a vulnerable, tender part of the personality, something that is very sensitive, like a flower that shrinks at the slightest touch. Often this part has been split off or repressed, because it has been hurt. Shrinking, wincing, wounded, skinless, are the adjectives which best describe those regions then. Many psychologists are familiar with these tender, vulnerable states of mind, none more so than maybe yours, but they are often misled by what their adult patients say and do. Not having a background in pediatrics can be detrimental because a medical professional may be led to an over-reliance on the evidence one gets from one’s adult patients. However, if we disregard one’s developmental assumptions, what the medical professional may be saying on the structure of the personality, particularly as regards the vulnerable feelings, is absolutely valid, and can be used to understand uniquely important aspects of the schizoid state of mind. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

With information on genetics doubling every two years, with the gene mechanics working overtime New Scientist magazine reports that “genetic engineering has been going through an essential tooling up phase; it is not ready to go into business.” The distinguished science commentator, Lord Ritchie-Calder, explains that “Just as we have manipulated plastics and metals, we are now manufacturing living materials.” Major companies are already in hot pursuit of commercial applications of the new biology. They dream of placing enzymes in the automobile to monitor exhaust and send data on pollution to microprocessors that will then adjust the engine. They speak of what is called metal-hungry microbes that might be used to mine valuable trace metals from ocean water. They have already demanded and won the right to patent new life forms. General Electric, Asklepois BioPharmaceutical , CRISPR Therapeutics, Editas Medicine, Pfizer and many others are all in the race. Nervous critics including many scientists, justifiably worry that there is a race at all. They conjure up images not of oil spills, but of “microbe spills” that could spread disease and decimate entire population. The creation and accidental release of virulent microbes, however, is only one cause for alarm. Completely sober and respectable scientists are talking about possibilities that stagger the imagination. Should we breed people with cowlike stomachs so they can digest grass and hay—thereby alleviating the food problem by modifying us to eat lower down on the food chain? Should we biologically alter to fit workers to fit job requirements—for example, creating pilots with faster reaction times or assembly-line workers neurologically designed to do our monotonous work for us? #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Should we attempt to eliminate “inferior” people and breed a “super-race”? (Some have tried this, but without the genetic weaponry that may son issue from our laboratories.) Should we clone soldiers to our fighting? Should we use genetic forecasting to pre-eliminate “unfit” babies? Should we grow reserve organs for ourselves—each of us having, as it were, a “saving bank” full of spare kidneys, livers, or lungs? Wild as these notions may sound, every one has its advocates (and adversaries) in the scientific community as well as its striking commercial applications. As two critics of genetic engineering, Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard, state in their book Who Should Play God?, “Broad scale genetic engineering will probably be introduced to America much the same way as assembly lines, automobiles, vaccines, computers and all the other technologies. As each new genetic advance becomes commercially practical, a new consumer need…will be exploited and a market for the new technology will be created.” The potential applications are myriad. The new biology, for example, could potentially help solve the energy problem. Scientists are now studying the idea of utilizing bacteria capable of converting sunlight into electrochemical energy. They speak of “biological solar cells.” Could we breed life forms to replace nuclear power plants? And if so, might we substitute the danger of a bioactive release for the danger of radioactive release? In the field of health, many diseases now untreatable will no doubt be cured or prevented—and new ones, perhaps worse, introduced through inadvertence or even malice. (If it developed and secretly spread some new disease for which it alone had the cure, think what a profit-hungry company could do. Even a mild, coldlike ailment could create a massive market for the appropriate, monopolistically controlled cure.) #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
According to the president of Cetus, a California company to which many World-famous geneticists are commercially linked, “biology will replace chemistry in importance” in the next thirty years. And in Moscow an official policy statement urges “the wider use of micro-organisms in the national economy.” Biology will reduce or eliminate the need for oil in the production of plastics, fertilizer, cloths, paint, pesticides, and thousands of other products. It will sharply alter the production of wood, wool, and other “natural” goods. Companies like United States Steel, Fiat, Hitachi, ASEA, or IBM will undoubtedly have their own biology divisions as we begin to shift, over time, from manufacture to “bio-facture,” giving rise to a range of products unimaginable until now. Says Theodore J. Gordon, the head of The Futures Group, “In biology, once we get stated, we’ll have to think about things like…can you make a “tissue-compatible shirt” or a “mammary mattress”—created out of the same stuff as the human” organ of milk secretion. Long before then, in agriculture, genetic engineering will be employed to increase the World food supply. The much-publicized Green Revolution of the 1960’s proved, in large measures, a colossal trap for farmers in the First Wave World because I required enormous inputs of petroleum-based fertilizer that had to be brought abroad. The next bio-agricultural revolution aims at reducing that dependence on artificial fertilizer. Genetic engineering points toward high-yielding crops, crops that grow well in sandy or salty soil, crops that fight off pests. It also seeks to create entirely new foods and fibers, along with simpler, cheaper, energy-conserving methods for storing and processing foods. As though to balance off some of its awesome peril, genetic engineering once more holds out for us the possibility of ending widespread famine. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

One must remain skeptical of these glowing promises. Yet if some of these advocates of genetic farming are half right, the impact on agriculture could be tremendous, ultimately altering, among other things relations between the poor countries and the rich. The Green Revolution made the poor more, not less, dependent on the rich. The bio-agricultural revolution could do the reverse. It is too early to say with confidence how biotechnology will develop. However, it is too late to turn back to zero. We cannot undiscover what we know. We can only fight to control its application, to prevent hasty exploitation, to transnationalize it, and to minimize corporate, national, and interscientific rivalry in the entire field before it is too late. One thing is immutably clear: we are no longer locked into the four-hundred-year-old electromechanical frame of traditional Second Wave technology, and can only begin to glimpse the full significance of this historic fact. Just as the Second Wave combined coal, steel, electricity, and rail transport to produce automobiles and a thousand other life-transforming products, the real impact of the new changes will not be felt until we reach the stage of combing the new technologies—linking together computers, electronics, new materials from outer space and the oceans, with genetics, and all of these, in turn with the new energy base. Bringing these elements together will release a flood of innovation unlike any seen before in human history. We are constructing a dramatically new techno-sphere for a Third Wave civilization. The power of human emotion can neither be control by the laws we create nor by the will we impose. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Prior to the mass suburbanization following the second World War, working-class suburbs were almost certain to be older industrial or factory suburbs. An example would be Cudahy, south of Milwaukee, which was established when the Milwaukee city government refused to allow Patrick Cudahy to build a stockyard and slaughterhouse within the city. As a consequence, the meat packer established a new suburb outside the city limits, which he named after himself. Another example would be the working-class suburb of Cicero, west of Chicago. Cicero achieved national notoriety during the 1920s as the headquarters of Al Capone’s operations when a short-lived reform administration in Chicago temporarily forced the organization to move to the suburbs. Most prewar working-class suburbs, however, were simply factory towns. They were in no way distinctive. Plain but generally well-kept houses with small yards were the norm. Following World War II, the GI Bill allowed blue-collar workers as well as the traditional middle class to successfully apply for long-term mortgages. Growing prosperity also made it possible for working-class workers to purchase a family automobile. At the same time new interstate and other road networks made new suburban locations a reasonable alternative for aging inner-city factories. Industries could relocate beyond streetcar lines without fearing they would be unable to recruit a work force. As a result, factories and labour forces decentralized. It is sometimes forgotten that the new postwar working-class suburbanites that followed the factories to the suburbs were not fleeing decaying city neighbourhoods. More often than not, they were somewhat reluctantly leaving tight ethnic neighbourhoods with high levels of social interaction. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
In the 1960s, when they were forced to move from Richmond, California, to the suburb of Milpitas, California, in order to work at the new automobile plant, the lifestyle of one hundred blue-collar Ford assembly workers and their families changed. What was found was that suburbanization had little or no effect on the workers’ style of life. They did not see the move in terms of social mobility; they had no great hopes of getting ahead in their jobs. They had no illusions of wealth; their wage level was dependent on the union contract. At a consequence of becoming suburbanites, they did not change their political affiliations (81 percent Democrat), go to church more, or join community organizations. They participated only minimally in formal groups. What they did do is continue their traditional working-class pattern of tight, informal socialization, with long-term friends and neighbours. While they enjoyed the creature comforts of suburban living, they remained peer-group- and ethnic-group-centered. In brief, they lived life patterns quite similar to those workers living in blue-collar central-city neighbourhoods. Their new suburban homes were not seen as way stations on the road to social mobility, but rather as permanent places of residence. Now many of the postwar blue-collar suburbs are experiencing the same downward economic pressures suffered by central cities. Declines in nearby heavy-industry and manufacturing jobs mean that those living in older inner-ring suburbs have long commutes to service jobs in outlying edge suburbs. Commercial tax bases are also eroding in working-class suburbs. Additionally, older working-class suburbs, with their more affordable housing, have been most likely to attract a diverse group of people escaping the city. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The deterioration of job prospects for blue-collar workers in a postindustrial economy suggest that such workers may now find themselves trapped in declining work-class suburbs. These suburbs lack the affluence of other suburbs, and even the basic amenities of the central city. Hey! Lean to hear my feeble voice. At the center of the sacred hoop. You have said that I should make the tree bloom. With tears running, O Great Spirit, my Grandfather, with running eyes I must say the tree has never bloomed. Here I stand, and the tree is withered. Again, I recall the great vision you gave me. It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then that it may leaf and blood and fill with singing birds! Hear me, that the people may once again find the good road and the shielding tree. When I call upon the Lord, ascribe greatness unto our God. O Lord, open Thou my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. Praised art Thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, mighty, revered and exalted God. Thou bestowest lovingkindness and possessest all things. Mindful of the patriarchs’ love for Thee, Thou wilt in Thy love bring a redeemer to their children’s children for the sake of Thy name. Remember us unto life, O King who delightest in life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life so that we may live worthily for Thy sake, O Lord of life. O King, Thou Helper, Redeemer and Shield, be Thou praised, O Lord, Shield of Abraham. Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever. Thou callest the dead to immortal life for Thou art mighty in deliverance. It is needful to look into the self in depth, to a level where psychoanalysts are seldom able to reach. For the real aim is to penetrate through thoughts to Thought itself, through the personal being to the impersonal one. Further, according to the ancient tradition, not only must meditation penetrate deeply, it must also be continuous. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

Cresleigh Homes

What’s better than the most priceless art in the world? A view like this! The incredible wall of windows in the Mills Station Res 3 model is worth checking out; it’s truly breathtaking! 🙌

Enjoy a weekend read in this cozy sitting room and then make your way around the dual fireplace for a day of movie watching in the light, bright, and airy living room. Homes like these were designed for serious leisure time!

Uniting classic enrichments with modern practicality, Mills Station Res three, with approximately 2,400 square feet, features a defined foyer, elegant stair, and immediate views to the indoor/outdoor great room layout.
There are 3-4 bedrooms, an optional work shop, and 2.5-3.5 bathrooms. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-3/
Of Course, We All Need Friends, or there is No Way We Can Survive!
From the time our earliest ancestors looked to the stars, they have wondered what secrets the Heavens held. But, will we be ready when these secrets are disclosed? The Celestial Kingdom is the highest of the three degrees of Kingdoms of glory in Heaven. Those who inherit this Kingdom dwell in the presence of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. In the scriptures, the glory of the Celestial Kingdom is compared to the glory of the Sun. “And many of them that sleep in the dust of Earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever,” report Daniel 12.2-3. “The Kingdom of God is within,” said the Lord,” reports Luke 17.21. Therefore, turn your back on the wretched ways some people in this World. Grab hold of your heart and stand facing the Lord. Do that, wrote Evangelist Matthew 11.29, and your soul will find peace. The outside World? You know where that is at already. However, as to the whereabouts of the inside World, do you have a clue? No matter. The Kingdom of God will find you. How? The “Peace and Joy in the Holy Spirit,” as Paul wrote to the Romans (14.17), comes only to the pious; that is to say, only to those who invite Him. Clear out the rubbish within, then, and prepare a cool, bare place. Christ will come and take up residence. He will furnish it with “all of His glory,” as the Psalmist has song in the Latin Bible (45.14), and make it a warm, chatsworthy spot. Visit Him whenever you like. Feel at home there. It is your own True Home at last. Who would have believed it? #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

O Faithful Soul, prepare your heart for this committed Friend of yours. Make it a worthwhile retreat so that He will come visit and visit again. How? By keeping His word, as the Evangelist John put it (14.23). Do that, and He will establish quite a respectable presence under your very roof. Give Christ some space, therefore, and bar the door to the rest of your crowd. Why? When you have Christ, you have everything, as Paul phrased it in First Corinthians (1.5). He will take care of your needs; you will never want for a thing. The rest of Humankind? Forget about that reckless rabble! They are deflatable, defatigable. Christ, however, speaking in John (12.35), remains a friend, firm and fast forever. Even if you need people to do for your or jus to be friends with, do not put any great confidence in them; they try, of course, but eventually they trip up. Which is another way of saying, if they behave badly in public, do not shed a tear. One day they are slapping you on the back, and the next, they are stabbing you in the back. Rudderless, their skiffs are battered to smithereens on the gusty Nordsee. Of course, we all need friends, or there is no way we can survive. However, invest your friendship in God, as the Proverb has it (3.5). Let Him be your friend in good times and bad. He will respond in your behalf when the going gets rough; when things smooth out, He will look to your best interests. Why is this so? Because He knows, and He will teach you to know, that on this Earth you do not have “a city that lasts,” as the Letter to the Hebrews described it (13.14). Yet trudge you must. The beds are hard; the pillows, rocks; so Paul warned the Hebrews (11.13). No rest for the weary. No, no comfort until you have made room for Christ in your life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Why do you look for a comfortable rendezvous on this Earth when your heart’s True Home is not really here? “Heaven ought to be your home,” read Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians (5.2). Earth, therefore, ought to be viewed as a hostile hostelry, as the Wisdom of Solomon had it (5.9). What I mean to say is, all things pass away, and you with them. See, then, that you do not hand around too long. Why? The danger is that you will be sucked under and die. Let your rumination to rise to the Most High, as Paul wrote to the First Thessalonians (5.17). Let your meditation seek Christ. However, if your gaze rises too high for your nose and it begins to bleed, then lower your gaze and let your eyes rest on the Passion of Christ and His Holy Wounds. Flee to Jesus and let your eyes tend to His welts and wounds. When the World is falling apart, you will feel great comfort there; there you will recover the reputation your rivals stole from you; you will bear up under the blizzard of verbal abuse. When Christ walked among us, He suffered because of us. The neglect reached its climax at the time of the Great Necessity. The friends and acquaintances with whom He enjoyed euphoria left Him behind alone to suffer opprobria. Which raises some reasonable questions. Christ was willing to be assaulted and despised, and yet you have the nerve to moan and to wail just because something untoward happened to you? Christ had accusers and detractors, and yet you want to have only friends and benefactors? If it has never been crushed by adversity, how can your patience be crowned with prosperity? #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

If you are going to cry out every time you stub your toe, how will you ever be a friend of Christ’s. What is the answer? Face up to it. If you want to rule with Christ, then, as Paul put it to Timothy (2.12), you are going to have to suck it in and wade through the same muck as Christ. If you ever have the chance to visit the heart of Jesus, you will feel the love glowing in His hearth. No longer would you care about such petty things as conveniences or inconvenience. Instead, you would rejoice over the woeful opprobria that were laid on Him. Truth to tell, Jesus could and does get mad, but oftentimes He does not. He just allows Humankind to make a fool of itself. What is the moral? Whoever loves Jesus and Truth—that is to say, the truly internal soul who has disciplined one’s rumbustious affections—can turn to God whenever one wants, rise above oneself in spirit, and refresh oneself at one’s leisure. The person who trusts one’s own taste at the banquet of life, and not the finicky palates of the theological gourmets—one is the individual who is truly wise; that is how the prophet Isaiah would describe one (54.13). One’s knowledge comes more from God than humans. The Devout who knows from within how to walk and from without how to think does not require much space. Now does one expect scheduled times to do one’s devotions. The internal human can recollect oneself as quickly as need be. That is because one has not filled one’s shelves with baubles and bibelots. External labour does not maim a self-actualized, nor does an occupation that is deemed necessary for one’s community. No, one does an occupation that is deemed necessary for one’s community. No, one does not hesitate to make adjustments from time to time when survival is the issue. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Whoever is well disposed and well ordered within does not cause the wonderful or horrible things that Humankind does. As the details of the transaction tend to absorb one’s attention, one must be on guard lest they appear in prayer as impediments and distractions. If you would have disciplined yourself right from the start, as Paul wrote to the Romans (8.28), everything would have turned out all right, at least with regard to your own spiritual progress. However, apparently you did not. How do I know? So many things still displease you, drive you to distraction, sadden, even madden you. Why? You are not completely dead to yourself; that is to say, you have not really drawn the line between yourself and all the trinkets and trifles of this World. After all, nothing so soils or embroils the human heart as a reckless love of created things. What is the moral? Stand up to it! Put your foot down! Refuse all Worldly consolations! Only then can you get a clear vision of Heaven. Only then can you celebrate what little spiritual progress you have made to date. The push into the depths of the sea provides us with a mirror image of the drive into outer space, and lays the basis for the third cluster of industries likely to form a major part of the new Technosphere. The first historic wave of social change on Earth came when our ancestors ceased to rely on foraging and hunting, and began instead to domesticate animals and cultivate the soil. We are now at precisely this stage in our relationship to the seas. In a hungry World, the ocean can help break the back of the food problem. Properly farmed and ranched, it offers us a virtually endless supply of desperately needed protein. Present-day commercial fishing, which is highly industrialized—factory-ships sweeping the seas—results in ruthless overkill and threatens the total extinction of many forms of marine life. Already 93 percent of mega fish have been wiped out. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

By contrast, intelligent “aquaculture”—fish farming and herding, along with plant harvesting—could make a major dent in the global food crisis without damaging the fragile biosphere upon which all our lives depend. The rush to offshore oil drilling, meanwhile, has obscured the possibility of “growing oi” in the sea. Dr. Lawrence Raymond at the Battelle Memorial Institute has demonstrated that it is possible to produce algae with a high oil content, and efforts are under way to make the process economically effective. Th oceans also offer an overwhelming array of minerals, from copper, zinc, and tin, to sliver, gold, platinum and, even more important, phosphate ores from which to produce fertilizer for land-based agriculture. Mining companies are eyeing the hot waters of the Red Sea which hold an estimated $3.4 billion worth of zinc, silver, copper, lead, and gold. About 100 companies, including some of the World’s largest, are now preparing to mine potato-shaped manganese nodules from the sea bed. (These nodules are a renewable resource, forming at the rate of six to ten million tons per year in a single well-identified belt just south of Hawaii.) Today four truly international consortia are gearing up to start ocean mining on a multibillion scale, and this is expected to revolutionize World mining activities for selected minerals. In addition, Hoffmann-La Roche, the pharmaceutical company, has been quietly sourcing the seas for new drugs, such as anti-fungal agents and pain-killers or diagnostic assistant drugs that stop bleeding. As these technologies develop, we are likely to witness the construction of semi- or even wholly submerged “aquavillages” and floating factories. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

The combination of zero real estate costs (at east at present) plus cheap energy produced on the spot from ocean sources (wind, thermal currents, or tides) can make this kind of construction competitive with that on the land. The technical journal Marine Policy concludes that “Ocean floating platform technology appears to be inexpensive enough and simple enough to be within the reach of most nations of the World, as well as numerous companies and private groups. At present, it seems likely that the first floating cities will be built by crowded industrial societies for the purpose of offshore housing…Multinational corporations may see them as mobile terminals for trade activities, or as factory ships. Food companies may build floating cities to carry out mariculture operations. Corporations seeking tax havens and adventurers seeking new lifestyles may build floating cities and declare them to be new states. Floating cities may achieve formal diplomatic recognition or become a vehicle for marginalized populations to achieve their independence.” Technological progress associated with the construction of thousands of offshore oil rigs, some anchored to the bottom but many positioned dynamically with propellers, ballast, and buoyancy controls, are developing very rapidly and laying the basis for floating city and enormous new supporting industries. Overall, the commercial reasons for moving into the sea are multiplying so swiftly that, according to economist D. M. Leipziger, many large corporations today, “like homesteaders in the Old West, are queuing up waiting for the starter’s pistol to stake out large areas on the ocean floor.” This also explains why the non-industrial countries are fighting to guarantee that the resources of the oceans become the common heritage of the human race rather than of the rich nations alone. However, even these examples are small in comparison with the techno-quake now rumbling in our molecular biology laboratories. Biological industry will form the fourth cluster of industries in tomorrow’s economy, and may have the heaviest impact of all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

We will eventually be able to “pre-design” the human body, “grow machines,” chemically program the brain, make identical carbon copies of ourselves through cloning, and create wholly new and dangerous life-forms. Who shall control research into these field? How shall new findings be applied? Might we not unleash horrors for which humans are totally unprepared? Some people thought the forecast is farfetched. That, however, was before 1973 and the discovery of the recombinant DNA process. Today the same anguished questions are being asked by citizen protestors, congressional committees, and by scientists themselves as the biological revolution gains runway speed. Furthermore, there are a few types of residential suburbs that deserve special notation. A new of these variations follow. High-income suburbs are not new to the urban scene. As noted on romantic suburbs, the nineteenth century saw many examples of exclusive suburbs designed as refuges for the wealth. Then as now upper-status suburbs usually feature large, imposing homes built on extensive properties that are screened off from casual external observation by shrubbery and trees. Generally, such suburbs have been located at the outer suburban edges, but there are some clear exceptions, such as centrally located Grosse Points, bordered by Detroit, and Beverly Hills, surrounded by Los Angeles. Beverly Hills is now undergoing a real estate boom which, since the community has no open land, means that older mansions are being torn down so newer mansions can be constructed on the same sites. However, what gives most upper-status suburbs their character is not so much their housing style as the style of life and patterns of social interaction among the residents. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Demographically, high-income suburbs tend to have an older median age population and a low proportion of women employed in the labour force. Population turnover, except by death, is low. Particularly in the east and Midwest, the older elite suburbs were, and in many cases still are, socially closed WASP communities. Social life in earlier decades traditionally centered heavily around a few mainline churches. In more recent decades it has been more likely to focus on membership in an exclusive country club. Older elite suburbs have never been believers in multiculturalism. Wealth is required for entry, but nouveau riche outsiders are not considered suitable for membership either in the clubs or the community. Many ethnic groups are sparsely welcomed, as are some Whites from non-traditional backgrounds and certain religious groups. When the Kennedy family bought a large home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, several neighbours moved out on the ground that they felt the community was going downhill. Opposition remained even after John Kennedy became President of the United States of America. Similarly, the richest suburb in the country, Kenilworth, on Chicago’s North Shore, had, until fairly recently, a reputation for discouraging certain religions. Homes simply would not be sold to those who did no have the proper Anglo Saxon Protestant heritage. Those religions that were excluded found their own exclusive suburbs and country clubs. For example, some Jewish people responded by no being welcomed in North Shore suburbs, by developing Glencoe and Highland Park as wealthy suburbs. Yet, there is a tendency to equate the high costs of housing in an area with the affluence of the residents. This generally is the case, but it can be misleading insofar as it might suggest that counties with high housing costs, such as those in southern California, necessarily also have the highest percentages of affluent householders. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

In fact, recent census indicates that the East Coast dominates the list of counties where residents have the highest median household incomes. There are 38 counties with median household incomes above $100,000. Of the top 15 counties, six were located in Virginia or Maryland, just outside the nation’s capital, while four were located not far from New York City and three were in the San Francisco Bay Area. The top five riches counties in America are Loudon County, Virginia with a median household income of $142,299; Fall Church city, Virginia with a median household income of $127,610; Fairfax County, Virginia with a median household income of $124,831; Santa Clara County, California with a median household income of $124,055; San Mateo County, California with a median household income of $122,641. Before representative signs of wealth had been invented, it could hardly have consisted of anything but lands and livestock, the only real goods humans can possess. Now when inheritances had grown in number and size to the point of covering the entire landscape and of all bordering on one another, some could no longer be enlarged except at the expense of others; and the supernumeraries, whom weakness or indolence had prevented from acquiring an inheritance in their turn, became poor without having lost anything, because while everything changed around them, they alone had not changed at all. Thus they were forced to receive or steal their subsistence from the hands of the rich. And from that there began to arise, according to the diverse character of the rich and the poor, domination and servitude, or violence and theft. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

For their part, the wealthy had no sooner known the pleasure of domination, than before long they disdained all others, and using their old slaves to subdue new ones, they thought of nothing but the subjugation and enslavement of their neighbors, like those ravenous wolves which, on having once tasted human flesh, reject all other food and desire to devour only humans. Thus, when both the most powerful or the most miserable made their strength of their needs a sort of right to another’s goods, equivalent, according to them, to the right of property, the destruction of equality was followed by the most frightful disorder. Thus the usurpations of the rich, the acts of brigandage by the poor, the unbridled passions of all, stifling natural pity and the still weak voice of justice, made humans greedy, ambitious and wicked. There arose between the right of the strongest and the right of the first occupant a perpetual conflict that ended only in fights and murders. Emerging society gave way to the most horrible state of war; since the human race, vilified and desolated, was no longer able to retrace its steps or give up the unfortunate acquisitions it had made, and since it laboured only toward its shame by abusing the faculties that honour it, it brough itself to the brink of ruin. Horrified by the newness of the ill, both the poor human and the rich human hope o flee from wealth, hating what they once had prayed for. In is not possible that humans should not have eventually reflected upon so miserable a situation and upon the calamities that overwhelm them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
The rich in particular must have soon felt how disadvantageous to them it was to have a perpetual war in which they alone paid all the costs, and in which the risk of losing one’s life was common to all and the risk of losing one’s goods was personal. Moreover, regardless of the light in which they tried to place their usurpations, they knew fully well that they were established on nothing but a precarious and abusive right, and that having been acquired merely by force, force might take them away from them without their having any reason to complain. Even those enriched exclusively by industry could hardly base their property on better claims. They could very well say: “I am the one who built that wall; I have earned this land with my labour.” In response to them it could be said: “Who gave you the boundary lines? By what right do you claim to exact payment at our expense for labour we did not impose upon you? Are you unaware that multitude of your brothers perish or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you needed explicit and unanimous consent from the human race for you to help yourself to anything from the common subsistence that went beyond your own?” Bereft of valid reasons to justify oneself and sufficient forces to defend oneself; easily crushing a private individua, but oneself crushed by troops of bandits; alone against all and unable on account of mutual jealousies to unite with his equals against enemies united by the common hope of plunder, the rich, pressed by necessity, finally conceived the most thought-out project that ever entered the human mind. It was to use in his favour the very strength of those who attacked one, to turn one’s adversaries into one’s defenders, to instill in them other maxims, and to give them other institutions which were as favourable to one as natural right was unfavourable to one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

With this end in mind, after having shown one’s neighbours the horror of a situation which armed them all against each other and made their possessions as burdensome as their needs, and in which no one could find safety in either poverty or wealth, one easily invented specious reasons to lead them to one’s goal. “Let us unite,” one says to them, “in order to protect the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitions, and assure everyone of possessing what belongs to one. Let us institute rules of justice and peace to which all will be obliged to conform, which will make special exceptions for no one, and which will in some way compensate for the caprices of fortune by subjecting the strong and the weak to mutual obligations. In short, instead of turning our forces against ourselves, let us gather them into one supreme power that governs us according to wise laws, that protects and defends all the members of the association, repulses common enemies, and maintains us in an eternal concord.” Considerably less than the equivalent of this discourse was needed to convince crude, easily seduced humans who also had too many disputes to settle among themselves to be able to get along without arbiters, and too much greed and ambition to be able to get along without masters for long. They all ran to chain themselves, in the belief that they secured their liberty, for although they had enough sense to realize the advantages of a political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers. Those most capable of anticipating the abuses were precisely those who counted on profiting from them; and even the wise saw the need to be resolved to sacrifice one part of their liberty to preserve the other, just as a wounded human has one’s arm amputated to save the rest of one’s body. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

Such was, or should have been, the origin of society and laws, which gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, established forever the law of property and of inequality, changed adroit usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious humans henceforth subjected the entire human race to labour, servitude and misery. It is readily apparent how the establishment of a single society rendered indispensable that of all the others, and how, to stand head-to-head against the united forces, it was necessary to unite in turn. Societies, multiplying or spreading rapidly, soon covered the entire surface of the Earth; and it was no longer possible to find a single corner in the Universe where someone could free oneself from the yoke and withdraw one’s head from the often ill-guided sword which everyone saw perpetually hanging over one’s own head. With civil right thus having become the common rule of citizens, the law of nature no longer was operative except between the various societies, when, under the name of the law of nations, it was tempered by some tacit conventions in order to make intercourse possible and to serve as a substitute for natural compassion which, losing between one society and another nearly all the force it had between one human and another, no longer resides anywhere but in a few great cosmopolitan souls, who overcome the example of the sovereign being who has created them, embrace the entire human race in their benevolence. Gandhi denounced surgical techniques as unnatural and urged his followers to have nothing to do with them. Yet he lived to modify his view, for when he was stricken by appendicitis, he accepted the help of those very techniques. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

The operation was successful. The medieval Church placed a ban upon those who performed any operation upon the human body that was accompanied by the shedding of blood. The modern Church has removed the ban and, in its hospitals, permits the extensive practice of surgery. Thus the erroneous theory of Gandhi and the erroneous superstition of the Church were corrected by time which brought the facts of experience into play. I have always associated hospitals with gloom, with drabness, with ugliness, and with despondency. The association was once falsified in California and again in Denmark. However, not till I was taken through the hospital founded by Padre Pio at San Giovanni Rotondo did I associate such intensively beneficial values as cheerfulness, beauty, hopefulness, and the last word in modernity with such an institution. Iconoclastic science came into the World and in a few short centuries turned most of us into sceptic. It may therefore surprise the scientists to be told that within two or three decades their own further experiments and their own new instruments will enable them to penetrate into, and prove the existence of, a superphysical World. However, the best worth of these eventual discoveries will be in their beneficial demonstration the reality of a moral law pervading human’s life—the law that we shall reap after death what we have sown before it, and the law that our own diseased thoughts have created many of our own bodily diseases. There are diseases of the mind quite apart from those of the body, yet too often neither the sufferer nor those in one’s surroundings will recognize the morbid symptoms. One considered oneself, and they consider one, normal. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

The moderns refuse to split up Mind into Consciousness and its Consciousness and Contents and they will not believe that Consciousness per se has its pure, unalloyed existence. Hence the utter confusion of modern psychology. Ye it is the light of this Consciousness which enables their own busy intellects to function and their bodies to believe themselves to be conscious entities. Everything in Nature works by Its reflected light. The inner nature that is rent by unresolved conflicts and unhappy divisions needs healing just as much as the outer body that is afflicted by pain-bringing disease. If they are to fulfil their own best possibilities, psychoanalysis and psychiatry have to deepen themselves. If the existence of the higher Self is denied or ignored, the emotional vacillations and mental perturbations of the lower self must be studied and understood. The psychoanalysts, who are so body pointing out the complexes of other people, have themselves one supreme complex that dominates and obsesses. It is psychoanalysis itself! The mistake of the analysts is to treat lightly what ought to be taken seriously, to regard as parental fixation or repression of pleasures of the flesh what is really deep spiritual malady of our times—emptiness of soul. “A Spirit and a Vision,” said Blake, “are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing. They are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.” He is speaking only of how to draw pictures of apparitions which may well have been illusory, but his words suggest a truth on the metaphysical level also. God is basic Fact or Actuality, the source of all other facthood. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

At all costs therefore God must not be thought of as a featureless generality. If He exists at all, He is the most concrete thing there is, the most individual, “organized and minutely articulated.” God is unspeakable not by being indefinite but by being too definite for the unavoidable vagueness of language. The words incorporeal and impersonal are misleading, because they suggest that God lacks some reality which we possess. It would be safer to call His trans–corporeal, trans–personal. Body and personality as we know them are the real negatives—they are what is left of positive being when it is sufficiently diluted to appear in temporal of finite forms. Even our intimate desires should be regarded as the transposition into a minor key of that creative joy which in Him is unceasing and irresistible. Grammatically the things we say are of Him are “”metaphorical”: but in a deeper sense it is our physical and psychic energies that are mere “metaphours” of the real Life which is God. Divine Sonship is, so to speak, the solid of which biological sonship is merely a diagrammatic representation on the flat. And here the subject of imagery, which crossed our path can be seen in a new light. For it is just the recognition of God’s positive and concrete reality which the religious imagery preserves. The crudest Old Testament picture of Jahweh thundering and lightening out of dense smoke, making mountains ship like rams, threatening, promising, pleading, even changing His mind, transmits that sense of living Deity which evaporates in abstract thought. Even sub-Christian images gets in something which mere “religion” in our own days has left out. We rightly reject it, for by itself it would encourage the most blackguardly of superstitions, the adoration of mere power. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

Perhaps we may rightly reject much of the Old Testament imagery. However, we must be clear why we are doing so: not because the images are too strong but because they are too weak. The ultimate spiritual reality is not vaguer, more inert, ore transparent than the images, but more positive, more dynamic, more opaque. Confusion between spirit and soul (or “ghost”) has here done much harm. Ghost must be pictured, if we are to picture them at all, as shadowy and tenuous, for ghosts are half-men, one element abstracted from a creature that ought to have flesh. However, Spirit, if pictured at all, must be pictured in the very opposite way. Neither God nor even the gods are “shadowy” in traditional imagination: even the human dead, when glorified in Christ, cease to be “ghosts” and become “saints.” The differences of atmosphere which even now surrounds the words “I saw a ghost” and the words “I saw a saint”—all the pallor and insubstantiality of the one, all the gold and blue of the other—contains more wisdom than whole libraries of “religion.” If we must have a mental picture to symbolize Spirit, we should represent it as something heavier than matter. There will be a precise moment when one knows with a certitude totally and unequivocally unwavering, but until then it will more likely be unplanned, uncertain explorations. This may surprise some persons but it is still true hat the wind bloweth where it listeth. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. Or the Spirit enlightens who it chooseth. Of course the human element of seeking and trying must be there, but in the end it is the divine element which wins out. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

Out of visible light which rapidly increases in intensity and drew nearer, the face and form of Jesus appeared in this twentieth century of ours to two mystics, Sundar Singh in India and Martinus in Denmark. They saw him plainly, heard him speak clearly. In both cases they were already familiar with his name and story. Out of a not very dissimilar light, Jesus appeared to Saul on the Damascus Road. He too was familiar with them. A part of the source of these visions is to be traced back to the suggestive power of the thought-form already implanted in the mind; but the other part, the sudden and dramatic and total change of heart and shift of outlook, has still to be accounted for. What is the secret? It is contact with the Overself, Grace. The divine moment happens. It is the gift of grace. Its arrival is unbidden. Yet the previous longing and working for it have not been futile. The significant flash of night may come at any moment, the sacred presence of the Overself may be felt when it is not being sought, and the noble peace of reality may even visit one who has never practised any technique at all. For as the New Testament has warned one, “The wind bloweth where is listeth,” and as the Katha Upanishad has informed him, “Whomsoever the Divine chooses, by one alone is It reached.” The Glimpse is sometimes given to one and sometimes created by one. Sometimes the connection between one’s effort and its appearance may not be visible. Only by the Divine lovingly possessing three can this transcendental knowledge be got. The glimpses are not directly caused by one’s own endeavours. They are experiences of the working of Grace, gifts from the Overelf, echoes from former lives on Earth, or belated responses to one’s knocking on the door. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

It is essentially a grace-given experience. One day there will be a response to the search of one’s mind for its creative inspirational source. One’s “I,” hemmed in by its ignorance and limitations, is a small affair compared with the “I” which is drawing one onward and upward through the quest and which one must one day become. One’s personal self, controlled and purified, kept in its place, humbly prostrating itself before the Overself, can gratefully receive even now glimpses of that day, momentary revelations that bless the mind and put intense peace in the heart. Whoever does not feel that these affirmations apply to one but who is yet able to believe in their truth, will be befriended by grace at the time of death. The good karma or God allows one this glimpse of a loftier World in which one could live and thus put one’s personal turmoil to flight. If with the purpose of seeking to disidentify oneself with the ego a human practices the necessary self-denial, makes the requisite sacrifices, and trains one’s thoughts and feelings, after a certain time and at a certain point of one’s path the forces of Heaven will come to one to complete the work which one has started. One should be profoundly grateful for even a single glimpse. It is a grant of grace. Many beings on this Earth which have lived in the society of humans can sense their intent enough to fear death when one is taken to the slaughterhouse. It is are nature to fear a darkness in what we do not understand, but true evil may lie more in ignorance that what we do not understand. Is the peaceable human to reduce or stop violent aggression against one fellow beings but to continue it against other fellow creatures? We are not entitled to destroy life without an adequately necessary and morally justifiable purpose. Therefore it is well to enquire from the wise and good into the character of such purposes, be guided by their counsel rather than by environmental customs. For the latter has led us, through its utter ignorance and total unawareness of the higher laws, into a situation where blow after blow falls heavily upon the human race. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

Why should we be so astonished that peace is so hard to obtain, that all too often flaming violence of war and death and mutilation is carried across the land despite our prayers to God and our plans to the contrary? So long as millions of innocent people are bred only to be sent to the slaughterhouses, so long will Life pay us in like coin. The lower characteristics are taken into the body, the blood, the nerves, and the brain. They become part of us. The mind’s response to higher ideals is dulled. The passions which make for strife and thence for war meet with less opposition from conscience and reason. The fear, suspicion, fright, and desire for self-protection which contribute toward war, being impregnated into the blood of our body during the moments we watch doom and gloom and violence and hopelessness on the TV screen news media. It is not helping anyone. No one is learning how to stay alive nor anything educational. They are feeding you fear, and little by little this fear is brought into us through the glands, the nervous system, and the brain, as our own blood feeds them in turn. It would be desirable, although admittedly difficult, gradually to adopt a diet without news as a help to secure both the individual’s development and the World’s peace. Everything is polarized, whether in the visible Universe, or in the invisible forces of life itself. This is what the Hindus called the pairs of opposites and the Chinese call the Yin and Yang. All things are complementary and compensatory, yet at the same time antagonistic. If Yang gives us energy, Yin gives us calm. Both are necessary. Likewise, we should seek balance in diet as study. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Lord, please make this World to last as long as possible. Who took the dream of the land, who staked down “private property” through the soul of the deer? Who diverted streams, cleared forests, burned fields? I seek to know my own name. I seek to know why after all that I have done to hurt her, does the Mother Earth continue to embrace me. Let them praise the name of the Lord, for His nae alone is exalted. His glory is above the Earth and Heaven. He hath given glory unto His people, praise to all His faithful ones, to all the children of America, a people near unto Him. Hallelujah. When the Ark rested, Moses said: Mayest Thou, O Lord, dwell among the myriads of the families of America. Arise, O Lord, unto Thy sanctuary, Thou and they Ark of Thy strength. Let Thy priests be clothed with salvation, and Thy faithful ones exult. For the sake of David, Thy servant, reject not Thine anointed. I have given you good teachings; forsake not My Scripture. It is a Tree of Life to them that hold fast to it, and everyone that upholds it is happy. Its ways were ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace. Turn us unto Thee, O Lord, and we shall return; renew our days as of old. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His Kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed forever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Know that Through that Very Same Peephole the Eyes of the World are Ogling You!
Our survival as a species depends more upon our trust of one another than upon the machines that we increasingly rely. Perhaps we can never fully escape the animals we once were. But with our mind and our hearts, we can always fight to remain human. We did not actually evolve from animals, but our behavior, through evolution has become less savage or animalistic. When we say or hear the “Kingdom of God,” that literally mean the rulership of God; which is the extension of God in the Earth. Satan is not God’s adversary, but yours! The battle lines are drawn! Become built for the battle. Onward, Christian Soldier! Marching as to war. Paul said, “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sounds, who shall prepare oneself to the battle,” reports 1 Corinthians 14.8. In the book of Revelation, we are told of a war in Heaven. “And there was war in Heaven: Michael and his Angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his Angels fought back,” report Revelation 12.7. What kind of battle? What kind of war? He war is for the souls of men. The battle lines have been drawn since Adam: evil versus righteousness. In this the final dispensation and in preparation for the Millennium, the forces of evil have intensified and united under the powerful influences of Satan. On the opposite side of the line, the Kingdom of God is clearly sounding the trumpet of righteousness, as perhaps never before. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint is on the offensive in the declaration of good to be good and evil to be evil. Isaiah prophesied of our time on this very subject when he said, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” reports Isaiah 5.20. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Satan offers a stranger mixture of just enough good to disguise the evil along his downward path to destruction, as described by Nephi, an ancient prophet, when he said: “For behold, a that day shall he rage in the hears of the children of men, and stir them up to anger against that which is good. And others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well—and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell,” reports 2 Nephi 28.20-21. Satan does rage in the hearts of some. Many he will lull away into carnal security; others he flattereth, or he says there is no hell. He has lured and enlisted many followers with enticements of fame, riches, and power. He forges a Rembrandt-quality representation by calling evil good and good evil. He has confused many people, even nations and leaders, to the point of an immoral approach to moral issues. For example, one of the voices that are ungodly and powerful among Satan’s proclamations is the idea that the individual agency is justification for the destruction of a human life through murder; also that chastity and fidelity are old-fashioned and narrow-minded—to freely engage in pleasures of the flesh actively with free expression is acceptable. At this very moment, many role models are living immoral lives around the World through the powerful influence of the media. They are idolized and accepted by millions Worldwide. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The World in general seems to have lapsed into a coma of unrighteousness, leaving God-given and time-honored moral values and principles behind. However, we must hold fast to forceful proclamations from God regarding the sanctity of life, His eternal and never-ending instruction to be chaste and pure. His loving counsel that families are ordained of God with a father, mother, and children to live together forever was not intended to be the exception, but the rule. A return to Christ by an individual will bring peace of mind in place of turmoil, tranquility to replace strife, courage and optimism in place of fear. Who makes progress in the virtues? The one who takes the Godly way out; that is to say, isolates the things that are wrong with oneself and methodically destroys them one by one. People often say, “It is not fair that I have to suffer and work so hard to be good! I did not ask to be born!” Yes you did in premortality. Premortality refers to our life before we were born on this Earth. In our pre-Earth life, we lived in the presence of our Heavenly Father as His spirit children. We did not have a physical body. In this premortal existence, we attended a council with Heavenly Father’s other spirit children. At that council, Heavenly Father presented His great plan of happiness. “Now the Lord had shown unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the World was; and among all these there were many of the noble and great ones; and God saw these souls that they were good, and He stood in the midst of them, and he said: These I will make my rulers; for He stood among those that were spirits, and He saw that hey were good; and He said unto me: Abraham, thou art one of them; thou wast chosen before thou was born. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

“And there stood one among them that was like unto God, and he said unto those who were with him: We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an Earth whereon these may dwell; and we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them; and they who keep their first estate shall be added upon; and they who keep not their first estate shall not have glory in the same kingdom with those who keep their first estate; and they who keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever. And the Lord said: Whom shall I send? And one answered like uno the Son of Man: Here am I, send me. And another answered and said: Here am I, send me. And the Lord said: I will send the first. And the second was angry, and kept not his first estate; and at that day, many followed after him,” reports Abraham 3.22-27. In harmony with the plan of happiness, the premortal Jesus Christ, the Firstborn Son of the Father in the spirit, covenanted to be the Saviour. “But, behold, my Beloved Son, which was my Beloved and Chosen from the beginning, said unto me—Father Thy will be done, and the glory be thine forever,” reports Moses 4.2. Those who followed Heavenly Father Jesus Christ were permitted to come to the Earth to experience mortality and progress toward eternal life. Lucifer, another spirit son of God, rebelled against the plan and “sought to destroy the agency of man,” reports Moses 4.3. He became Satan, and he and his followers were cast out of Heaven and denied the privileges of receiving a physical body and experiencing mortality. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Throughout our premortal life, we developed our identity and increased our spiritual capabilities. Blessed with the gift of agency, we made important decisions, such as the decision to follow Heavenly Father’s plan. These decisions affected our life then and now. We grew in intelligence and learned to love the truth, and we prepared to come to the Earth, where we could continue to progress. When one conquers the Enemy and mortifies one’s spirit, one makes progress down the spiritual path and deposits more grace in one’s Heavenly Account. Each of us has to general one’s own spiritual battles, right down to dealing death to one’s own vices. Who will win the spiritual race? The wild, unbridled human, with a bundle of prickly passions under one’s saddle, but with a good nature overall? Or the well-bridled fellow who strives for virtue but at one’s own well-modulated gait? If you wan to accelerate your spiritual progress, two things will help. First, spot what human nature draws you to and haul yourself with all deliberate speed in the opposite direction. Second, inventory your virtues and concentrate your efforts in filling in the gaps. One clue. If self-analysis has never been one of your strong suits, do not despair. Note down the nil admirari’s in others and avoid the same sort of things. Let that be your own personal agenda for the future. Make spiritual hay wherever you go. If and when you see or hear examples of good behaviour, make haste to imitate them. On the other hand, if you run into something immovable, pick up your feet and fly. If you make a wrong turn, do make up the ground you lost with all deliberate haste. As you see the faults of the World, know that through that very same peephole the eyes of the World are ogling you. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
What a pleasure it is to happen upon a community of fervent and devout brothers, sand the Psalmist (133.1), well-seasoned fellows who have grown easy over the years with the disciplined life! What a troubling and demoralizing experience it is to bump into brothers in another religious house who are walking about aimlessly, not the daily experiences that are so much part of their vocation! How devastating it is to neglect the monastic vocation for an occupation that has no true home in the monastery! Recall your shaggy life as self-actualized and compare it to the image of the Crucified. You would do well to be ashamed. You have been in the monastery long enough to know the life of Jesus Christ inside out, and yet you have striven so little to conform your life to His. Why is that? How can that be? Whoever pours over the Most Holy Life and Passion of the Lord with intensity and devotion will find in it everything one needs to get ahead. At last one can discontinue one’s perennial search; one has found the person of Jesus Christ, the subject of all holy quests. If only the Crucified Jesus would come into our hearts! He would teach us all we need to know. The fervent Religious does tolerably well in the monastery, and that makes one’s superior’s life an easier one. The negligent and tepid Religion, though, undergoes one tribulation after another and ends up claustrophobic to boot! Consolation is the reason. One cannot find it inside the walls, and one’s prohibited from seeking it outside the walls. The Religious who has left discipline behind leave oneself wide open to gravest ruin. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The Religious who plays fast and loose with the monastic life will always find oneself in a bind. That is because laxness and looseness, lateness and loutishness, no matter how attractive they may seem or feel at the time, are never benign. How come there are so many self-actualized who have lived fairly satisfied lives under the discipline of the cloister? They rarely leave the monastery grounds, they live without much external event to speak of, eat like paupers, dress uncomfortably, labour much, speak little, watch long hours, arise early, prolong their prayer time, read frequently, and keep a guard on themselves with every discipline. Carthusians, Cistercians, and a rainbow of other religious orders—they rise every night to psalm the Lord. So it is matins and lauds, and the whole of monasticism has already begun to sing “Joy to the Lord!” Why, then, are you always the last one to straggle into the chapel and take your place in choir? Sham bells in excelsis! Just one thing I wish for monasticism. To praise the Lord without interruption and devote ourselves to spiritual studies without fainting or complaining. We would be a happier lot, you and I, doing any one of these than having to stop every now and then to attend to our corporal needs. Would that there no such things as baths or using the toilet! Just supposes there were only sweetmeats of the spirit, a platter of them on the sideboard at the Heavenly Banquet. The taste? Out of this World! Though offered to us more frequently than we think, these nibblings often go unnibbled. Why is that? #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
When you stop seeking consolation from created things below, you start receiving Godly wisdom from above. However, how will you know the transformation is taking place? You will no longer rejoice in greatness or weep about insignificance. Instead, you will place yourself wholly and confidently in God. God is all in all, as Paul wrote to the Colossians (3.11). He loses nothing, He lets nothing perish. For Him every created things lives and obeys His every wink without His ever having to miss a wink. Some thumbnails and nutshells. Everything comes to an end, and time lost is gone forever. Without Solicitude and Diligence you will never acquire Virtue. Grow tepid, and you will begin to behave badly. Give yourself to fervor, and you will feel the great weight lift, all due to the grace of God and the love of virtue. The fervent and diligent self-actualized is ready for any and everything, whatever, to rip. The rigors of the soul vastly outsweat the labors of the body. Whoever stub one’s toe on small vices will take a header on large defects. Only if you spent the day making progress, will you enjoy the evening. Vigilate. Actuate. Remonstrate. Whatever bothers you about others, do not neglect in yourself. You get out of it only what you put into it. Amen to that! One explanation for our persistent overconfidence is our tendency to search for and to recall instances that confirm our ideas. We are eager to verify our beliefs, less eager to seek evidence that might refute them. All superstition is much the same whether it be that of astrology, dreams, omens, retributive judgment, or the like, in all of which the deluded believers observe events which are fulfilled, but neglect and pass over their failure, though it be much more common. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
When considering the biasing power of perception, keep in mind the human mind resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties of different objects. The human understanding, when any proposition has once been laid down (either from general admission and belief, or from the pleasure it affords), forces everything else to add fresh support and conformation. One of the most significant facts about our minds is the extent to which our preconceived notions bias how we view, interpret, and remember information. To believe is often to see and remember what we believe. The implications of this principle extend to our understanding of Scripture. The Bible always comes interpreted. Oppressors and the oppressed, people in power, and people out of power, Baptists of more sorts than one—all these read the book differently. Fanatic followers of naturopathy as well as of Christian Science reject the service of surgery. Yet do the humans among them ever stop to think that the acts of shaving, which they preform daily, is itself the performance of a minor surgical operation? For the hair is as much a tangible part of their anatomy as the bony skeleton. This also applies to finger nails, toe nails, calluses, and corns. Such opposition to surgery on the part of those who are unorthodox in their views of healing is based partly on blind fanaticism and partly on blind ignorance. The excessive attachment to their own particular system prevents them from seeing its true place and surgery’s true relation to it. If there is time, natural methods should be tried first, surgical methods only last. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
If natural methods are too late or tried without result, then it is quite proper to resort to surgery if any hope lies there. They should be given their chance in the earlier stages of a disease but if they are not, if the disease has advanced to a serious or chronic degree, surgery may fitly be considered, either alone or in conjunction with them. Even in divine healing, the spiritual force may still use a surgeon through which to express itself. It does not necessarily have to use only a saint to do so. Spiritual healing completes and does not displace the conventional allopathic or the unorthodox physical healing systems. It does not supplant but supplements them. Opposition to the new and powerful drugs is not because of their ineffectiveness. That they produce swift and curative results is admitted. The opposition is instigated by the harmful effects upon other organs or parts of the body subsequent to the cure, and sometimes accompanying it. To reject the valuable contribution of surgical art is to neglect human knowledge of anatomy and human capacity to co-operate with Nature. Thousands of years ago, a gifted Hindu writer and medico even acclaimed it in these words: “Surgery is the first and highest division of the healing art, least liable to fallacy.” Exaggerated, perhaps, but it is certain that the ancient Hindus knew and practiced a well-developed form of this art—even including plastic surgery—but it mysteriously disappeared in the course of time. The successive foreign invasion and their massacres of intellectuals may have something to do with it. Our leap beyond the classic technologies of the Second Wave are very striking in modern times. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

The space industry forms a second cluster in the emerging techno-sphere. Despite delays, five space shuttles may soon be moving cargo and people back and forth between the Earth and outer space on a weekly schedule. The impact of this is as yet underestimated by the public, but many companies in the United States of America and Europe regard the “high frontier” as the source of the next revolution in high technology and are acting accordingly. Grumman and Boeing are working on satellites and space platforms for energy generation. According to Business Week, “Another group of industries only now is beginning to understand what the orbiter may mean to them—manufacturers and processors whose products range from semi-conductors to medicines. Many high technology materials require delicate, controlled handling, and the force of gravity can be a nuisance. In space, there is no gravity to worry about, no need for containers, and no problems with handling poisons or highly reactive substances. And there is a limitless supply of vacuum, as well as super-high and super-low temperatures.” As a result, “space manufacturing” has become a hot topic among scientist, engineers, and high-technology executives. McDonell Douglas offers to pharmaceutical companies a space shuttle device that will space. Space-produced single-crystal semiconductors make Earth-made models primitive. Urokinase, a blood clot dissolver needed for patients suffering from certain forms of blood disease, now cost $1,205.00 for 1 milligram. According to Jesco von Puttkamer, chief of space industrialization studies of NASA, it could be manufactured in space for less than one fifth that amount. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
More important are the totally new products that simply cannot be made on Earth at virtually any price. TRW, an aerospace and electronics company, has identified four hundred different alloys that we cannot manufacture on Earth because of the pull of gravity. General Electric, meanwhile, has begun the design of a space furnace. Daimler-Benz and M.A.N. in West Germany are interested in the space manufacture of ball bearings, and the European Space Agency and individual companies like British Aircraft Corporation are also designing equipment and products aimed at making space useful commercially. Business Week tells its readers that “such prospects are not science fiction and a growing number of companies are deadly serious in pursuing them.” Equally serious, and even more zealous, are the supporters of Dr. Gerard O’Neill’s plan for creation of space cities. Dr. O’Neill, a Princeton physicist, has been indefatigably educating the public about the possibilities of building very large scale communities in space-platforms or islands with populations in the thousands—and has won enthusiastic support from NASA, and former President Trump (whose knows California’s economy is heavily space dependent), and more surprisingly, from a band of former hippies lead by Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. Dr. O’Neill’s idea is to build a city in space, bit by bit, out of materials mined on the Moon or elsewhere. A colleague, Dr. Brain O’Leary, has been studying the possibilities of mining the Apollo and Amor asteroids. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Regular conferences a Princeton bring together experts from NASA, General Electric, U.S. energy agencies, and other interested parties to swap technical papers on the chemical processing of lunar and other extraterrestrial minerals and on the design and construction of space habitats and closed ecological systems. The combination of advanced electronics and a space program that moves beyond terrestrial production possibilities carries the techno-sphere to a new stage, no longer limited by Second Wave considerations. Here on Earth, we take it for granted that city neighborhoods will change in socioeconomic statues over time. One-time prosperous neighborhoods are expected to decline and possibly be rebuilt or gentrified. For example, a neighborhood may have been built as upper-middle class at the turn of the century, drifted down to middle class by the 1930s, becomes rooming-house area by the 1950s, and been gentrified in the 1980s. This model of local community status change is basically a life-cycle model and is consistent with the earlier Burgess concentric zonal theory, which posited neighborhood change due to competition for land and the outgoing movement of affluent populations. However, when our focus shifts to suburbs, the assumption of status change is supplanted by the assumption of status consistency. Suburbs are seen as changing less than cities. There is a greater tendency to view suburban areas as locked in time. It is as if suburbs are not subject to the same laws of aging and change. For example, Chevy Chase, outside of Washington, and Berwyn, west of Chicago, remain, respectively, upper-middle-class and ethnic-working-class just as they were ninety-five years ago. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

The community of Chevy Chase includes many “Sears Catalog Homes,” a popular housing option in the early twentieth century that allowed individuals to order by mail the materials and instructions for a home and build them themselves. This status-persistence suggests that this assumption of less economic and social change over time in suburbs has a base in reality. Research done by Reynolds Farley and replicated by Avery Guest suggests that there is suburban persistence, with suburbs holding their position over time. Farley examined 137 suburbs of twenty-four cities and found that at least for the older established suburbs there was considerable consistency. In fact, one could accurately predict the educational level of a suburb by looking at the school attendance records of the high-school-age population forty year earlier. Guest further found that in the postwar period, growth of high-status populations enhanced rather than changed the status of suburb through advantages such as superior schools and facilities, and thus they protected their own investment. This political-power model is usually associated with scholars taking a conflict perspective, while the status-persistence model is usually associated with those holding an ecological model. However, in this instance both approaches seem to reinforce rather than contradict each other. Older and more affluent suburbs have had the greatest success in maintaining their favored position. There also appears to be regional variation. Specifically, in the north and Midwest, involuntary annexation of suburbs had ceased by the beginning of the twentieth century, while in some of the south, and especially in Texas, annexation is still possible. Thus, one would expect to find the greatest number of affluent suburbs practicing exclusionary zoning in the north and Midwest. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Exclusionary zoning is not a recent development. Zoning has been used by suburbs since the 1920s as a means of keeping out undesirable activities, housing, and people. An excellent example of a contemporary system is affluent Hoffman Estates, northwest of Chicago. To upgrade its image, it hired an additional fifteen building inspectors to clamp down on owners of low rent apartments. A strict adherence to the letter of the housing code makes it difficult to make a profit renting to lower-income populations. This was the intent. However, even more important than keeping undesirables out is attracting new high-status residents. Here a self-fulfilling prophesy seems to occur for affluent suburbs. A suburb having an established reputation as a high-status area employs its social prestige to attract new high-income newcomers toward what are perceived and being the more prestigious areas. Reputation creates a reality, which in turn reinforces reputation. In this fashion a suburb such as Lake Forest on Chicago’s North Shore has maintained its upper-states position for well over a century. When Burges posited his concentric zonal pattern of metropolitan growth, he suggested that socioeconomic status was directly related to distance from the center of the city. Centrally located space goes to those functions that can use space intensively and are willing to pay the costs. Costs include not only purchase price, but also taxes and factors such as congestion, pollution, noise, and so forth. As a consequence, central land was most expensive and peripheral space less so. This means that those affluent families living further out can afford more space. Thus, there is a tendency for an inverse relationship between the value of land and the status of those who occupy it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
In the inner ring adjacent to the city, the oldest suburbs often had the bulk of their housing completed prior to World War II. Many of these inner-ring suburbs are composed of substantial homes built originally for upper- and upper-middle-class occupancy. Some of these older suburbs still maintain their elite status. Outer-ringer suburbs have almost all been built in the postwar era of mass suburbanization, and they differ substantially in socioeconomic status. They tend to vary based on type of housing, characteristics of the residents, and direction from the city. Within the metropolitan area different ethnic, religious, and racial groups often suburbanized in specific directions. In Atlanta, for instance, African Americans went south and European Americans went north. Ethnic groups also followed specific patterns. In Chicago over the past century, Polish-heritage populations have moved near-north side to the northwest side and into northwest suburbs such as Niles. The Jewish housing pattern was roughly similar, with upper-middle-class Jewish people moving into the northwest suburbs such as Skokie and wealthy Jewish people moving north to Glencoe and Highland Park. Italian-heritage populations, on the other hand, moved progressively west, and in time into western suburbs such as Melrose Park. WASPs, by contrast, moved up the North Shore to Evanston, Wilmette, and Winnetka. Thus, the pattern of ethnic inner-city neighborhoods was in modified form carried to the suburbs. People whose experiences are dominated by phantasy relations with Frustrating Exciting and/or Rejecting Object will come to feel more and more that it is no use wanting good things. They will eventually cease to each out for what they cannot get. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Eventually the phantasy of something good simply raises anxiety or anger rather than a wish to get it: an Anti-Libidinal Ego has developed which protects the individual from the pain of frustration, though it in turn may be painfully experienced. The Anti-Libidinal Ego is a set of reactions to the Libidinal Ego which ensure that the individual’s needs remain hidden; it remains unconscious of them. Thus the Anti-Libidinal Ego keeps the libidinal part of the personality out of touch with the World of potentially satisfying as well as frustrating people and things—there is a basic fault between Libidinal and Anti-Libidinal Ego. A third personality-structure called the Central Ego, rather like Dr. Freud’s Ego, comprises the set of calculating reactions through which currently incoming information is registered and evaluated and retained for future planning—a useful structure for survival purposes. There may not be much connection between this structure and the other two—another basic fault. As we coon ourselves in the comforts technology affords, are we shielding ourselves from the very things that make us human? People need to look harder into themselves and persevere longer at the practices. They also need to get God’s grace. Furthermore, they need to get Jesus’s grace. Additionally, their destiny may have been unfavorable in this matter or, if favorable, was possible due to maturate at a later time. All these explanations seem to have some truth in them, but which the aspirant knows with any certainty which one of them—or which two in combination—apply to one’s own particular case? #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

It seems to me that as with other major events in human life obeying some law of nature, some process operated by infinite intelligence, there must be an invisible pattern behind these mystical happenings too. And when the truths of the higher philosophy were unveiled to me, I found that this was indeed so. These revealings of inner life, which put its truths before the mind so vividly, seem to come by chance to some, by working for them for others. Faith in a divinely-ordered Universe tells us, and philosophy confirms, that we may be sure that they follow certain laws even when we know nothing about those laws. The glimpse is as much subject to grace as the Enlightenment which endures forever. It happens outside the human’s own will, although inside one’s consciousness. Such a glimpse represents a bestowal of Grace. This is why it comes unsought and unworked for, and why some who inwardly work hard fail to experience the Glimpse. One can no more make the Glimpse come by personal endeavours than one can make oneself fall in love. The gifted—rather than the achieved—nature of the glimpse is much more frequent and may be seen from is unexpected manifestation at unforeseen times. The glimpse does not necessarily have to come to you during meditation, even though the work in meditation helps to bring about its occurrence. It may come at any time. Many self-actualized are made but some are also born. Destiny transcends all training and often it needs but a mere touch of illuminate’s finger to release the pent-up stores of secret power within a soul. These glimpses come on rare occasions, for the mind’s tumult is hard to still—only the Overself’s Grace can do so. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

The glimpse is a blessing which is given to those who have earned it, or those who have sought it in the right spirit. These illuminative glimpses do no come at will or at once. They do not come once for all or when it pleases us. They come and go like the wind and when it pleases them. For they come by Grace. The belief that mystical illumination is solely luck or accident or destiny must be refuted. That a human must work one’s way into this experience is one view. That a higher power must induce it in one is another. Such a mystical experience is not an after-effect of illness but the latter is used by the Overself to open the way for its reception in the conscious mentality. It is an uncommon experience, a visitation of the Overself, and a manifestation of its grace. Why it occurs could only be explained in terms of theory of reincarnation. One must find out by personal experience what one’s stomach can easily digest, and strictly take nothing else. This is one rule. One must each of such foods no more than one’s body really needs, which is always less than what custom and society have suggested one needs. Whatever we eat beyond that which the body really needs, gives no strength and yields no benefit. Instead, it actually harms us. Instead of strengthening, it weakens us. Instead of benefiting, it poisons us. How can the human race avoid the fate of being slaughtered in war when it itself slaughters so many innocent creatures in peace? The exploitation of other living beings to gain unnecessary resources, must be protested against. Forcing their enslavement to human service and slowly distorting their bodies into having unnatural exaggerated functions is a crime against them. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Here we are, God—a planet at prayer. Attune our spirits that we may hear your harmonies and bow before your creative power that we may face our violent discords and join with your Energy to make heard in every heart your hymn of peace. Here we are, God—a militarized planet. Transforms our fears that we may transform our war fields into cow pasters and wheatfields, arms into beautiful Winchester Repeating Arms with inlaying gold, silver, or platinum, gold or silverplating, engravings, carving or fancy checking by Tiffany & Co., done with the most artistic manner by the company’s own employees and used as display models. May our missiles be turned into brilliant light shows of Independence Day. May our Flag be a symbol of honor and highly respected. Here we are, God—a polluted planet. Please purify our vision that we may perceive ways to purify our beloved lands, cleanse our precious waters, de-smog our life-giving air, remove contaminants from our soil, abolish traffic jams, and produce cars that run on an abundant form of gasoline that produces no emissions and will never be depleted. Here we are, God—an exploited planet. Please heal our heart, that we may respect our sources, hold priceless our people, and provide for our starving child an abundance of Gold Leaf Bread from the master baker Moreno. Praised be the Lord who is blessed for all eternity. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Unver, who didst choose us from among all the peoples by giving us Thy Scripture. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Giver of the Bible. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who in giving us a Word of Truth, hast planted everlasting life within us. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Giver of the Scripture. This is the Scripture proclaimed by Moses to the Children of America at the command of the Lord. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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If Brooklyn Had Jet Bombers, Would it be a Nation?

Scientists declare laguage is a human quality that separates humans from all other species. Perhaps it is the same quality that can link us to the beyond, but only if we are willing to listen. Abaco is an island. It has a population of seventeen thousand, two hundred, and twenty-five and forms part of the Bahamas lying off the coast of Florida. Several decades ago, a group of American businessmen, arms merchants, free enterprise ideologues, an intelligence agent of African descent, and a member of the British House of Lords determined that it was time for Abaco to declare its independence. Their plan was to take over the island and break it away from the Bahamian government by promising each of the native residents of the island a free acre of land after the revolution. (This would have left over a quarter of a million acres for use by the real estate developers and investors behind the project.) The ultimate dream was the establishment on Abaco of a taxless utopia to which wealthy businessmen, dreading the Socialist apocalypse, might flee. Alas for free enterprise, the native Abaconians showed little inclination to throw off their chains, and the proposed new nation was stillborn. Nevertheless, in a World in which nationalist movements battle for power, and in which some 152 state claim membership in that trade association of nations, the United Nations, such parodic gestures serve a useful purpose. They force us to challenge the very notion of nationhood. At the time of the revolution in the 1970s, the population was sixty-five hundred and the question was if the sixty-five hundred people of Abaco, whether financed by oddball businessmen or not, constitute a nation? #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
If Singapore with its 2.3 million people (5.9 million in 2021) is a nation, why not New York City with its 8 million (18.8 million in 2021)? If Brooklyn had jet bombers, would it be a nation? Absurd as they sound, such questions will take on new significance as the Third Wave batters at the very foundations of Second Wave civilization. For one of those foundations was, and is, the nation-state. Until we cut through the foggy rhetoric that surrounds the issue of nationalism, we cannot make sense of the headlines and we cannot understand the conflict between First and Second Wave civilizations as the Third Wave strikes them both. Before the Second Wave began rolling across Europe most regions of the World were not yet consolidated into nations but were organized, rather, into a mishmash of tribes, clans, duchies, principalities, kingdoms, and other more or less local units. “Kings and princes,” write the political scientists S. E. Finer, “held powers in bits and blobs.” Borders were ill-defined, governmental rights fuzzy. The power of the state was not yet standardized. In one village, Professor Finer tells us, it amounted only to the right to collect tolls on a windmill, in another to tax the peasant, elsewhere to appoint an abbot. An individual with property in several different regions might owe allegiance to several lords. Even the greatest of emperors typically ruled over a patchwork of tiny locally-governed communities. Political control was not yet uniform. Voltaire summed it all up: In traveling across Europe, he complained, he had to change laws as frequently as horses. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24

There was more to this quip than met the eye, of course, for the frequent need to change horses reflected the primitive level of transport and communications—which, in turn, reduced the distance over which even the most powerful monarch could impose effective control. The farther from the capital, the weaker the authority of the state. Yet without political integration, economic integration was impossible. Only if they produced goods for larger-than-local markets, could costly new Second Wave technologies be amortized. However, if outside their own communities, they ran into a maze of different duties, taxes, labour regulations, and currencies, how could businessmen buy and sell over a larger territory? For the new technologies to pay off, local economies had to be consolidated into a single national economy. This meant a national division of labour and a national market for commodities and capital. All this, in turn, required national political consolidation as well. Put simply, a Second Wave political unit was needed to match the growth of Second Wave economic units. Not surprisingly, as Second Wave societies began to build national economies, a basic shift in public consciousness became evident. The small-scale local production in First Wave societies had bred a race of highly provincial people—most of whom concerned themselves exclusively with their own neighbourhoods or villages. Only a tiny handful—a few nobles and churchmen, a scattering of merchants, and a social fringe of artists, scholars, and mercenaries—had interests beyond the village. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
The Second Wave swiftly multiplied the number of people with a stake in the larger World. With steam- and coal-based technologies, and later with the advert of electricity, it became possible for a manufacturer of clothing in Frankfurt, watches in Geneva, or textiles in Manchester to produce far more units than the local market could absorb. He also needed raw materials from afar. The factory worker, too, was affected by financial event occurring thousands of miles away: jobs depended on distant markets. Bit by bit, therefore, psychological horizons expanded. The new mass media increased the amount of information and imagery from far away. Under the impact of these changes, localism faded. National consciousness stirred. Starting with the American and French revolutions and continuing through the nineteenth century, a frenzy of nationalism swept across the industrializing parts of the World. Germany’s three hundred and fifty marginal, diverse, quarreling mini-states needed to be combined into a single national market—das Vaterland. Italy—broken into pieces and ruled variously by the House of Savoy, the Vatican, the Austrian Hapsburgs, and the Spanish Bourbons—had to be united. Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Frenchmen, and others all suddenly developed mystical affinities for their fellows. Poets exalted the national spirit. Historians discovered long-lost heroes, literature, and folklore. Composers wrote hymns to nationhood. All at precisely the moment when industrialization made it necessary. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24

Once we understand the industrial need for integration, the meaning of the national state becomes clear. Nations are not “spiritual unities” as Spengler termed them, or “mental communities” or “social souls.” Noor is a nation “a rich heritage of memories,” to use Renan’s phrase, or a “shared image of the future,” as Ortega insisted. What we call the modern nation is a Second Wave phenomenon: a single integrated political authority superimposed on or fused with a single integrated economy. A ragbag collection of locally self-sufficient, sparsely connected economies cannot, and does not, give rise to a nation. If it sits atop a loose conglomeration of local economies, nor is a tightly unified political system a modern nation. Nationalist uprisings triggered by the industrial revolution in the United States of America, in France, in Germany and the rest of Europe, can be seen as efforts to bring the level of political integration up to the fast-rising level of economic integration that accompanied the Second Wave. And it was these efforts, not poetry or mystical influences, that led to the division of the World into distinct national units. As each government sought to extend its market and its political authority, it came up again outer limits—language differences, cultural, social, geographic, and strategic barriers. The available transport, communication, and energy supplies, the productivity of its technology, all set limits on how large an area could be effectively ruled by a single political structure. The sophistication of accounting procedures, budgetary controls, and management techniques also determined how far political integration could reach. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Within these limits, the integrational elites, corporate and governmental alike, fought for expansion. The broader the territory under their control and the bigger the economic market area, the greater their wealth and power became. As each nation stretched its economic and political frontiers to the utmost, it ran up not merely against these inherent limits but also against rival nations. To break out of these confines the integrational elites used advanced technology. They hurled themselves, for example, into the “space race” of the nineteenth century—the building of railroads. In September 1825 a rail line was established that linked Stockton to Darlington in Britain. In May 1835, on the continent, Brussels was tied to Malines. That September in Bavaria the Nuremberg-Furth line was laid. Next were Paris and St. Germain. Far to the east, in April 1838, Tsarkoe Selo was connected to St. Petersburg. For the next three decades or more, railroad workers stitched one region to another. The French historian Charles Moraze explains: “The countries which were already almost united in 1830 were consolidated by the coming of the railway…those still unprepared saw new bands of steel…tightening around them…It was as if every possible nation was hastening to proclaim its right to exist before the railways were built, so that it might be acknowledged as a nation by transport system which defined the political boundaries of Europe for over a century.” In the United States of America the government awarded vast land grants to the private railroad companies, inspired, as historian Bruce Mazlish has written, by “the conviction that transcontinental roads would strengthen the ties of union between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 24

Hammering in the golden spike that completed the first transcontinental rail line opened the door to a truly national market—integrated on a continental scale. And it extended the actual, as distinct from nominal, control of the national government. Washington could now move troops quickly all across the continent to enforce its authority. What one saw, therefore, in one country after another, was the rise of this powerful new entity—the nation. In this way the World map came to be divided into a set of neat, nonoverlapping patches of red, pink, orange, yellow, or green, and the nation-state system became one of the key structures of Second Wave civilization. Beneath the nation lay the familiar imperative of industrialism: the drive toward integration. However, the drive for integration did not end at the borders of each nation-state. For all its strengths, industrial civilization had to be fed from without. It could not survive unless it integrated the rest of the World into money system and controlled that system for its own benefit. How it did so is crucial to any understanding of the World the Third Wave will create. In examining America’s postwar transformation of rural farm tracts into instant suburbs we must keep in mind several factors. First, without doubt, by far the most important factor in making possible the postwar suburban exodus was the liberalization of loan leading polices by federal government agencies. As noted earlier, prior to the war, mortgages would commonly only be given for a five-year period with a balloon payment at the end. A borrower would have to hope one could get a new mortgage when the note became due. Moreover, the mortgage would cover only half to at most two-thirds the value of the property. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
The new Veterans Administration loads radically changed all this. The new Veteran Administration (VA) loan guarantees made loans available to veterans at low interest rates, below conventional mortgages, with no money down with a twenty-five- or thirty-year repayment schedule. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) similarly liberalized its lending policies for nonveterans. The government, in effect, guaranteed the lending institutions profits by agreeing to make good any leans on which the borrower defaulted. This was a truly radical change. Bank suddenly wanted to make loans to millions of middle- and lower-middle-class families who they previously would have spurned. Families with a steady breadwinner could, for the first time, realistically expect to get mortgages to purchase their own homes. Moreover, it was easy to do. The whole process was streamlined by developers such as the Levitt brothers so that all the paperwork could be completed in a few hours. In an era when closing costs run thousands of dollars, it is worth noting that the total closing cost as of 1954 at the second Levittown outside Philadelphia, in New Jersey, was $10 ($100.07 in 2021 dollars). Following World War II, developers rushed to build acres of new suburban subdivisions. The were modest story book houses, and especially designed to be marketed to ex-GIs and their brides. For instance, Argo Homes offered detached brick and stucco bungalows for veterans only for $7,900.00 full price ($79,057.27 in 2021 dollars) for $53 monthly ($530.38 in 2021 dollars), which paid all carrying charges (total principle and interest payment of $636 a year, with a 4 percent mortgage for twenty-five years). Given such terms, veterans could hardly afford not to move to the suburbs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24

In this particular subdivision, the landscaped plots were 40×100, the houses had 4 rooms, automatic gas heat, fully insulated, large closets, scientific kitchen with built-in cabinets, modern gas range and inlaid linoleum floor, poured concrete foundation, steel lally columns, copper piping, unique balance double hung windows. Government lending policies—whether by design or accident—actively fostered purchasing suburban over city homes. Following World War II, VA and FHA government-guaranteed loans were readily available for new homes in the suburbs. Young veterans could and did purchase new—sometimes still-to-be-built VA and FHA approved suburban subdivision homes with nothing down and mortgage rates below the conventional amount. The above-mentioned Levittown in New Jersey sold homes in the mid-1950s for $8,990 ($89,965.17 in 2021 dollars). Veterans were required only to place a $100 ($1,000.72 in 2021 dollars) good-faith deposit, which was returned at the time of closing. Nonveterans needed only $450 ($4,503.26 in 2021 dollars) down. To purchase existing city homes required far larger down payment. The low housing prices, and particularly the availability of a long-term, no-money-down mortgage, was a crucial factor for new families just becoming economically established. By 1972, the FHA alone had made some 11 million new-home loans. Also important was the fact that purchasing in the city took time. To see if they met FHA standards, existing older homes in the city would have to be inspected, and this took weeks or months. By contrast, once a developer’s plans were approved, all the standardized models of that home he built automatically qualified. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
By contrast, once a developer’s plans were approved, all the standardized models of that home he built automatically qualified. A family could drive out to a new subdivision, pick a lot, put down a $100 ($644.01 in 2021 dollars from 1972 figures) deposit, and do the majority of the paperwork in a Sunday afternoon. Conventional mortgages were also easier to obtain in suburban locations. Two wars later, this was still the case. The author, a Vietnam-ear veteran with three young children and barely enough for a down payment, found mortgage funds readily available on suburban homes. For homes across the line in the city the funds were harder to obtain, and came with higher interest rates. Second, the Federal government further subsidized out-movement from the cities by initiating, in the 1950s, the construction of a federally financed metropolitan freeway system. Secretary of Commerce Weeks described the building of the national freeway system as, “the greatest public works program in the history of the World.” Without the newly built freeways, many of the new suburban subdivisions would have been all but impossible to reach. Automobile commuting would have been out of the question. The freeways meant distance from the city was now measure in time rather than mileage. Developers often put up billboards advertising their tract development as being, “Only 25 minutes from here.” Ironically, the very freeways that speed commuters from the city were originally pushed to be built by downtown business interests and city mayors. They mistakenly expected that new road would bring more shoppers and businesses downtown. They forgot that the roads could be used to go out rather than in. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24

Third, Following World War II, open land for buildings was almost by definition suburban land. By the 1950s cities had largely developed all the land within their legal boundaries. This was particularly true of the cities in the eastern and middle-western sections of the country. Without annexation, additional growth in urban areas would thus, by definition, have to be suburban growth. By the end of the way, there was an extreme need for new housing. As noted earlier, for over a decade and a half little had been built. The 1930s were the years of the Great Depression, and during the first half of the 1940s, there was World War II. Thus, by the 1950s there was a tremendous pent-up demand for housing, and this demand could only be met in the suburbs. It was not so much that families were fleeing the city; rather, it was that mot of he land available for development was, by definition, suburban. Forth, for decades following World War II, young families bought homes in the suburbs not so much for “togetherness” or to escape the supposed ills of the city, but because houses in suburban subdevelopment were both more available and more affordable with larger lots than those in the city. However, in communities like Pocket/Greenhaven in Sacramento, California USA; families did want to be close to each other and not live together, so many of the bought homes in the same community to have a sense of a true community, but with separation and privacy. In attempts to analyze he postwar move to the suburbs, this basic economic motivation is often given less weight than it deserves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
Economic, more than social-psychological needs for togetherness, propelled young could to the suburbs. In many cases it was more economical and safer to buy in the suburbs than to rent in the city. Safety concerns is why, before becoming President, Governor of California (1967-1975) Ronald Reagan’s wife, Nancy Reagan decided to move out of the Governor’s Mansion, and left in to the California State Parks to be managed as Governor’s Mansion State Historic Park. The mansion was built in 1877, and after the First Lady of California felt it was not a safe community, it sat vacant until 2015 and again is unoccupied since 2019. A family with a mortgage on a tract house in the suburbs found that monthly principal and financing costs usually were lower than on available housing in the city. Moreover, taxes were almost always lower than in the central city. This was in part because developers rarely put in the “extras,” such as city water, sewers, parks, sidewalks, curbs, street lighting, and, of course, schools that were taken as givens in the city. In time the demand for services and the assessments to pay for them increased in new suburbs. However, the initial front-end costs were ow and in a rough fashion met the needs of those at the beginning of their work careers who expected their incomes to increase with time. The 1950 and 1960 constituted a period in which unionization had brought even blue-collar workers high wages and benefits. Fifth, survey data consistently show that Americans have a strong preference for single-family home on their own lots. This is the type of housing that was most commonly built in the suburbs in the decades following the war. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24

The homes in the original Levittown in Long Island were modestly beautiful Cape Cod houses. The architectural characteristics denoted a home that was generally with a steep roof, shingled exterior, symmetrical façade, with a large chimney in the middle, and built on a slab. The Cape Cod architecture was considered all-American, as fresh as grandmother’s apple pie, and people stood in line for days waiting to get one. Planners and architects decried these subdivisions of little boxes, “all made out of ticky-tack and all in a row,” but they were vastly popular with the buying public. Lewis Mumford and other critics might rail about the problems of poor design and one-social-class communities, but people literally lined up to buy houses in the newly opened Levittown and other suburban developments. Actually, even if buyers wanted one, there was not a choice. Apartments were not covered by GI loans, and town houses were not being built. Still, even if people are given a choice between high-rise units, town houses, or single-family homes, suburban sprawl will win every time! This is true even for those without children. Research indicates that most families living in apartment buildings view their residency as temporary location before moving to a single-family house. If a suburban home is too expensive, a suburban town house, or even a garden apartment, may be temporarily substituted. Even those academics holding neo-Marxian views, which see suburban sprawl as a product of conscious decisions made by powerful economic interests, still acknowledges that people want single-family homes on separate lots. Imagine that, even socialists and communists like private property. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Suburban critics may feel that such housing is a blight on the landscape, but others believe when it is tastefully done and includes nature and the neighbourhood does not look like a parking lot, there is no question suburban sprawl looks like a glimpse of Heaven and is what the masses of the population wanted after the war and still want as we approve the half century mark. Postwar suburbia was “caused” by demographic changes. The return of both the veterans and of economic prosperity created a marriage boom that was followed in short order by the famous “baby boom.” The latter lasted from 1947 to 1964. Existing housing in cities and towns was simply not adequate for absorbing the exploding number of new families. Some 10 million new households were created in the decade after the war. In the tight postwar market, they were not welcome as renter. The result was that young couples with children were more or less forced from the overcrowded cities toward the new built standard-format suburb. And anyway, many families did not feel safe with their children living in cities because of the traffic and the rift raft the jails attracted. They needed space to grow families—a need that suburban developers were delighted to fill. “As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling,” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1891-92). #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
At the core of the religious impulse is a sense of awe, an attitude of bewilderment, a feeling that reality is more amazing than everyday scientific reasoning can comprehend. Wonder-struck, we humbly acknowledge our limits and accept that which we cannot explain. For many religious people the ultimate threat of science is therefore that it will demystify life, destroying our sense of wonder and with it our readiness to believe in and worship an unseen reality. Once we regarded flashes of lightening and explosions of thunder as supernatural magic. Now we understand the natural and humanmade process at work. Once we viewed certain mental disorders as demon possession. Now we are coming to discern genetic, biochemical, and stress-linked causes. Once we prayed that God would spare children from COVID-19. Now we vaccinate them. Understandably, some Christians might get the idea that science is elbowing out religion. We can also understand why such people therefore grasp at hints of the supernatural—at bizarre phenomena that science cannot explain. Browse your neighbourhood religious bookstore and you will find books that describe happenings that defy natural explanation—people reading minds or foretelling the future, levitating objects or influencing the roll of a die, discerning the contents of sealed envelopes or solving cases that dumbfounded detective. Whether viewed as a divine gift or as demonic activity, such a phenomena are said to refute a mechanistic Worldview that has no room for supernatural mysteries. Most research psychologist and professional magicians (who are wary of the exploitation of their arts in the name of psychic powers) are skeptical, for several reasons. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
They are skeptical because in the study of ESP and the paranormal there has been a distressing history of fraud and deception; most people’s beliefs in ESP are now understandable as a by-product of the efficient but occasionally misleading ways in which our minds process information; the accumulating evidence regarding the brain-mind connection more and more weighs against the theory that the human mind can function or travel separately from the brain; and, more important, there has never been demonstrated a reproducible ESP phenomenon, nor has there been found any individual who could defy chance when carefully rested. One National Research Council investigation of ESP concluded that “the best available evidence does not support the contention that these phenomena exist.” And in 1995, a CIA-commissioned report evaluated ten years of military testing of psychic spies, in which $20 million ($35, 327, 427.82 in 2021 dollars) had been invested. The result? The program produced nothing, and the psychic spy program was scrapped. After one hundred and twenty-five years of research, and after hundreds of failed attempts to claim a $1-million prize that has for two decades been offered to the first person who can demonstrate “any paranormal ability,” many parapsychologists conceded that what they need to give their field credibility is a single reproducible phenomenon and a theory to explain it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
We Christians can side with scientific skeptics on the ESP issue. We can heed not only the repeated biblical warnings against being misled by self-professed psychics who practice “divination” or “magic spells and charms,” but also the scientific spirit of Deuteronomy: “If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and what He does not come true, then it is not the Lord’s message.” We believe that humans are finite creature made by the one who declares, “I am God, and there is no one like me.” We are aware of how cult leaders have seduced people with pseudopsychic tricks. And we affirm that God alone is omniscient (the able to read minds and know the future), omnipresent (thus able to be in two places a once), and omnipotent (the capable of altering—or, better yet, creating—nature with divine power). In the biblical view, humans, loved by God, have dignity but not deity. If our senses of mystery is not to be found in the realm of the pseudosciences and the occult, then where? Having cleared he decks of false mysteries, where shall we find the genuine mysteries of life? We can take our clue from Sherlock Holmes, who was fond of telling people: “It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious. Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence.” The more scientists learn about sensation, the more convinced they are that what is truly extraordinary is not extrasensory perception, claims for which inevitably dissolve upon investigation, but rather our very ordinary moment-to-moment sensory experiences of organizing formless neural impulses into colourful sights and meaningful sounds. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
As you read this sentence, particles of light energy are being absorbed by the receptor cells of your eyes, converted into neural signal that activate neighbouring cells, which process the information for a third layer of cells, which converge to form a nerve tract that transmits a million electrochemical message per moment up to the brain. There, step by step, the page you are viewing is reassembled into its component features and finally—in some as yet mysterious way—composed into a consciously perceived image, which is instantly compared with previously stored images and recognized as words you know. The whole process is rather like taking a house apart, splinter by splinter, transporting it to a different location, and then, through the work of millions of specialized workers, putting it back together. All of this transpires in a fraction of a second. Moreover, it is continuously transpiring in motion, in three dimensions, and in colour. Twenty-five years of research on computer vision has no yet begun to duplicate this very ordinary, taken-for-granted part of our current experience. Further, unlike virtually all computers, which process information one step at a time, the human brain carries out countless other operations simultaneously, enabling us all at once to sense the environment, use common sense, converse, experience emotion, and consciously reflect on the meaning of our existence or even to wonder about our brain activity while wondering. The deeper one explores these very ordinary things of life, the more one empathizes with Job: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 24

To be sure, sometimes we use the word mystery not in its deep sense, as when the mind seeks to fathom it brain, but rather to refer to unsolved scientific puzzles. When wonder is based merely on ignorance, it will fade in the growing light of understanding. Science is a puzzle-solving activity. Among the still unsolved puzzles of psychology are questions such as, Why do we dream? Why do some of us become heterosexual, others homosexual? How does the brain store memories? The scientific detectives are at work on these “mysteries,” and they may eventually offer us convincing solutions. Already, new ideas are emerging and progress is occurring. Often, however, the process of answering one question exposes more and sometimes deeper questions. A new understanding may lead to a new, more impenetrable sense of wonder regarding phenomena that seem further than ever from explanation or that now seems more beautifully intricate than previously imagined. Not long ago scientists wondered how individual nerve cell communicated with one another. The answer—that they communicated through chemical messengers called neurotransmitters—raised new questions: How many neurotransmitters exist? What are the functions of each? Do abnormalities in neurotransmitter functioning predispose disorders such as schizophrenia and depression? If so, how might such problems be remedied? And how, from the electrochemical activity of the brain, do experienced emotions and thoughts arise: How does a material brain give rise to consciousness? #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
Deeper and deeper go to the questions, the deepest one of all being the impenetrable mystery behind the origin of the Universe: Why is there something and not nothing? (If a miracle is something that cannot be explained in terms of something else, then the existence of the Universe is a miracle that dwarfs any other our minds can conceive.) Human consciousness has long been a thing of wonder. More recently, wonder has also grown regarding the things our minds do subconsciously, automatically, out of sight. Our minds detect and process information without awareness. They automatically organize our perceptions and interpretations. They respond intelligently, via the brain’s right hemisphere, in ways that we can explain only if our left hemisphere is informed of what is going on. They effortlessly encode incoming information about the place, timing, and frequency of events we experience, about words meanings, about unattended stimuli. They ponder problems we are stumped with, and they occasionally spew forth a spontaneous creative insight. With the assistance of hypnosis, they may even, on orders, eliminate warts on one side of the body but not on others. There is, we now know, more to our minds than we are away of. And how fortunate that it should be so. For the more that routine functions (including well-learned activities such as walking, biking, or gymnastics) are delegated to control systems outside of awareness, the more our consciousness is freed to function like an executive—by focusing on the more important problems at hand. Our brains operate rather like BMW, with a few important matters decided by chair of the board, and everything else, thankfully, handled automatically, effortlessly, and usually competently be amazingly intricate native infotainment system. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24

Language researchers, too, have been awestruck by an amazing phenomenon: the ease with which children acquire language. Before children can add two and two they are creating their own grammatically intelligible sentences and comprehending the even more complex sentences spoke to them. Most parents cannot state the intricate rules of grammar. Yet before being able to tie their shoes, preschoolers are soaking up the complexities of language by learning several new words a day and the rules for how to combine them. They do so with a facility that puts to shame many college students who struggle to learn a new language with correct accents and many computer scientists who are struggling to simulate natural language on computers. Moreover, they, and we, do so with minimal comprehensions of how we do it—how we, when speaking, monitor our muscles, order our syntax, watch out for semantic catastrophes risked by the slightest change in word order, continuously adjust our tone of voice, facial expression, and gestures, and manage to say something meaningful when it would be so easy to speak gibberish. Our womb-to-tomb individual development is equally remarkable. What is more ordinary than humans reproducing themselves, and what is more wonder-full? Consider the incredible god fortune that brought each one of us into existence. The process began as a mature egg was released by the ovary and as some 300 million sperm began heir upstream race toward it. Against all odds, you—or, more exactly, the very sperm cell together with the very egg it would take to make you—won this one-in-300 million lottery (actually one in billions, considering that your conception had to occur from particular unions involving pleasures of the flesh). #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
What is more, a chain of equally improbable events, beginning with the conception of your parents and their discovery of one another, had to have extended backward in time for the possibility of your moment to have arrived. Indeed, when one considers the improbable sequence of unnumerable events that led to your conception, from the birth of the Universe onward, one cannot escape the conclusion that your birth and your death anchor the two ends of a continuum of probabilities. What is more improbable than that you, rather than one of your infinite alternatives, should exist? What is more certain than that you will not live on Earth endlessly? Most beings of life fail to survive the first week of existence. However, again, for you, good fortune prevailed. Your one cell became two, which became four; and then by the end of your first week even more astonishing thing happened: brain cells began forming and within weeks were multiplying at a rate of about one-quarter million per minute. The scientist-physician Lewis Thomas explains the wonder of that single cell, which had as its descendant all the cells of the human brain. The mere existence of that cell should be one of the greatest astonishments of Earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hour, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell. If you like being surprised, there is the source. One cell is switched on to become the whole trillion-cell, massive apparatus for thinking and imagining and, for that matter, being surprised. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
All the information needed for learning to read and write, playing the piano, arguing before senatorial subcommittees, walking across a street through traffic, or the marvelous human act of putting out one hand and leaning against a tree, is contained in the first cell. All of grammar, all syntax, all arithmetic, all music. No one has the ghost of an idea how this works, and nothing else in life can ever be do puzzling. If anyone doe succeed in explaining, it, within my lifetime I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all my money runs out. Human life—so ordinary, so familiar, so natural, and yet so extraordinary. Looking for mystery in things bizarre, we feel cheated when later we learn that a hoax or a simple process explains it away. All the while we miss the awesome events occurring before, or even within, our very eyes. The extraordinary within the ordinary. So it was on that Christmas morning two millennia ago. The most extraordinary event of history—the Lord of the Universe coming to the spaceship Earth in human form—occurred in so ordinary a way as hardly to be noticed. On a mundane winter day at an undistinguished inn in an average little town the extraordinary one was born of an ordinary peasant woman. Like our human kin at Bethlehem and Nazareth long ago, we, too, are often blind to the mystery within things ordinary. We look for wonders and for the unseen reality—the hand of God—in things extraordinary, when more often His presence is to be found in the unheralded, familiar, everyday, events of which life is woven. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
O Lord, Thou art on the sandbanks as well as in the midst of the current; I bow to Thee. Thou art in the little pebbles as well as in the calm expanse of the sea; I bow to Thee. O all-pervading Lord, Thou art in the barren soil and in crowded places; I bow to Thee. 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 the 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 statues, 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. For all this, Thy name, O our King, shall be blessed and exalted for ever and ever. May all the living do homage unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who art our salvation and our help. Blessed be Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whim our thanks are due. Our God and God of our fathers, bless us with the threefold blessing written in the Book of Mormon and Holy Bible, and in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, and spoken by Aaron and his sons, Thy consecrated priests: May the Lord bless thee and keep thee; so may it His will. May the Lord make His countenance to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord turn His countenance unto thee and give thee peace. So may it be His will. Please grant peace, well-being and blessing unto the World, with grace, lovingkindness and mercy for us and for all America, Thy people. To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose is the next best. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24

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Father God, I am at Peace Today Because I Know You are in Control!
We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon. God desires to dwell in the midst of His redeemed people on His own terms and His own grounds. That is, Divine holiness having dealt with human’s sinfulness. “As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. However, just as one who called you is holy, be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘By holy, because I am holy,’” reports 1 Peter 1.14-15. The same giant wedge that split producer from consumer in Second Wave societies also split work into two kinds. This had an enormous impact on family life, gender roles, and on our inner live as individuals. One of he most common gender stereotypes in industrial society defines men as “objective” in orientation, and women as “subjective.” If there is a kernel of truth here, it probably lies not in some fixed biological reality but in the psychological effects of the invisible wedge. In Firs Wave societies most work was performed in the fields or in the home, with the entire household toiling together as an economic unit and with most production destined for consumption within the village or manor. Work life and home life were fused and intermingled. And since each village was largely self-sufficient, the success of the peasants in one place was not dependent upon what happened in another. Even within the production unit most workers performed a variety of tasks, swapping and shifting roles as demanded by the season, by sickness, or by choice. The preindustrial division of labour was very primitive. As a result, work in First Wave agricultural societies was characterize by low levels of interdependency. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
The Second Wave, washing across Britain, France, Germany, and other countries, shifted work from field and home to factory, and introduced a much higher level of interdependency. Work now demanded collective effort, division of labour, coordination, the integration of many different skills. Its success depended upon the carefully scheduled cooperative behaviour of thousands of far-flung people, many of whom never laid eyes on one another. The failure of a major steel mill or glass factory to deliver needed supplies to an auto plant could, under certain circumstances, send repercussions throughout a whole industry or regional economy. The collision of low- and high-interdependency work produced severe conflict over roles, responsibilities, and rewards. The early factory owners, for example, complained that their workers were irresponsible—that they cared little about the efficiency of the factory, that they went fishing when most needed, engaged in horseplay, or turned up drunk and could not pony up their rent money because they blew it at the tavern. In fact, most of the early industrial workers were rural folk who were accustomed to law interdependency, and had little or no understanding of their own role in the overall production process or of the failures, breakdowns, and malfunctions occasioned by their “irresponsibility.” Moreover, since most of them earned pitiful wages, they had little incentive to care. However, Mrs. Winchester, at the time, paid her workers triple the market rate, and provided them housing, not in the main mansion, but in other Victorian farm houses located on the original 768 acres she owned. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
In the clash between these two work systems, the new forms of work seemed to triumph. More and more production was transferred to the factory and office. The countryside was stripped of population. Millions of workers became part of high-interdependence networks. Second Wave work overshadowed the old backward form associated with the First Wave. This victory of interdependence over self-sufficiency, however, was never fully consummated. In one place the older form of work stubbornly held on. This place was the home. Each home remained a decentralized unit engaged in biological reproduction, in child-rearing, and in cultural transmission. If one family failed to reproduce, or did a poor job of rearing it children and preparing them for life in the work system, its failures did not necessarily endanger the accomplishment of those tasks by the family next door. Housework remained, in other words, a low-interdependency activity. The housewife continued, as always, to perform a set of crucial economic functions. She “produced.” However, she produced for Sector A—for the use of her own family—not for the market. As the husband, by and large, marched off to do the direct economic work, the wife generally stayed behind to do the indirect more advanced form of work; the woman was left behind to take care of the other, more backward form of work. He moved, as it were, into the future; she remained in the past. This division produced a split in personality and inner life. The public or collective nature of factory and office, the need for coordination and integration, brought with it an emphasis on objective analysis and objective relationships. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
Men, prepared from boyhood for their role in the shop, where they would move in a World of interdependencies, were encouraged to become “objective.” Women, prepared from birth for the tasks of reproduction, childrearing; and household drudgery, performed to a considerable degree in social isolation, were taught to be “subjective”—and were frequently regarded as incapable of the kind of rational, analytic thought that supposedly went with objectivity. Not surprisingly, women who did leave the relative isolation of the household to engage in interdependent production were often accused of having been defeminized, of having grown cold, tough, and—objective. Gender differences and gender role stereotypes, moreover, were sharpened by misleading indemnification of men with production and woman with consumption, even though men also consumed and women also produced. In short, while women were oppressed long before the Second Wave began to roll across the Earth, the modern “war of the roses” can be traced in large measure to the conflict between two work-styles, and beyond that to the divorce of production and consumption. The split economy deepened the gender split as well. What we have seen so far, therefore, is that once the invisible wedge was hammered into place, separating producer from consumer, a number of profound changes followed: A market had to be formed or expanded to connect the two; new political and social conflicts sprang up; new gender roles were defined. However, the split implied far more than this. It also meant that all Second Wave societies would have to operate in similar fashion—that they would have to meet certain basic requirements. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26

Whether the object of production was profit or not, whether the “means of production” were public or private, whether the market was “free” or “planned,” whether the rhetoric was capitalist or socialist made no difference. So long as production was intended for exchange, instead of use, so long as it has to flow through the economic switchboard or market, certain Second Wave principles had to be followed. Once these principles are identified, the hidden dynamics of all industrial societies are laid bare. Moreover, we can anticipate how Second Wave people typically think. For these principles added up to the basic rules, the behaviour code book, of Second Wave civilization. It is difficult to fully understand the tremendous importance of the electric streetcar to the development of American suburbs. The electric streetcar literally changed the physical shape of metropolitan areas. It also contributed mightily to the modern residential pattern where one’s area of residence tells a great deal about one’s socioeconomic status. Electric streetcars permitted the construction of economically and socially homogenous suburbs. There had been numerous attempts to build an electric streetcar, but the first successful—that is, reliable—system was put into operation in Richmond, Virginia USA, in 1888. The system was designed by Frank Sprague, an inventor and electrical engineer who had earlier worked under Thomas Edison. Dr. Frank Sprague’s system was relatively straightforward. Electric current was transferred from an overhead line to the electric motor powering the wheels by means of a troller, or trolley, that was held against the overhead line by means of a spring. However, when Dr. Sprague signed the Richmond contract in 1887, much of the necessary equipment had yet to be designed, much less built and tested. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26

Moreover, Dr. Sprague’s contract specified that unless he could build a fully working system within a year that was acceptable to the Richmond officials, they would pay nothing. Dr. Sprague assumed the full cost of designing and building the entire system. To the delight of the city fathers and mothers, the system worked as specified. Dr. Sprague’s design was clearly superior to any of the experimental systems that had been tested elsewhere and found unreliable. Dr. Sprague’s system proved to be both safe and reliable. Within a year twenty other cities had brought Dr. Sprague’s system and he was both a famous and rich man. Dr. Sprague’s new electric streetcars were adopted in city after city with remarkable speed. Horse-drawn car lines, which accounted for two-third of all streetcar lines in 1890, the remainder being mostly cable system, had virtually vanished a mere decades later. Seldom has any invention so completely replaced its predecessors in such a short period. Electric streetcars had clear advantage over the earlier cable and horse-drawn systems. Electric streetcars could average 15 miles per hour, which was a least double and sometimes triple the speed of its cable and horse-drawn competitors. Moreover, the trolleys had over three times the carrying capacity of the horse-drawn cars without any of the pollution. The electric systems also cost far less to build and operate than cable systems. By 1902 electric trolleys accounted for 97 percent of all streetcar milage, with 2 percent still operated by cable care lines and only 1 percent of horse cars. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26

The electric streetcars, which provided comparatively high-speed transit for a modest 5-cent fare, changed the way urban-area dwellers lived. There no longer was any necessity for middle-class families to live within walking distance of their place of work. Industrialization was making residence near one’s work less attractive, while the streetcar meant it was not possible for middle-class employees to live in suburbs (Municipal Statistic Areas) as far as 10 or even 12 miles from the central business district and commute both rapidly and inexpensively. Within a short period, new middle-class residential suburbs were being constructed along the right-of-way of the streetcar lines. The burgeoning streetcar suburbs made it possible for the middle class to live in new housing areas on the city’s fringe while still being able to commute within thirty minutes to downtown offices and even shop at downtown department stores. From 1890 to 1920, the streetcar dominated metropolitan transport. The very shape of the metropolitan area changed. Previously, outer growth had occurred more or less everywhere on the periphery where growth was not constrained by geography. The electric streetcar, by contrast, restricted growth to narrow, fingerlike development along the streetcar tracks. Real estate developers built homes paralleling the tracks, but only to a depth of a few blocks on either side. The interstitial areas remained undeveloped. The special configuration of the American city changed from that of a compact city to that of a star-shaped metropolitan area. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26

The streetcar lines, which opened up outlying sites for development, often also made the existing city homes of the well to do and the upper-middle class living along major city thoroughfares less desirable. Living along an electric streetcar line was extremely noisy. Streetcars, in those days, made a great deal of clamour with squealing wheels and changing bells, and their constant passage created major noise pollution for those living in homes adjacent to the trolly line. On a hot summer’s night, with all the windows open, the jarring sound of screeching metal on metal made sleep difficult. Once-quiet residential streets became noisy streetcar lines. As a consequence, those who could afford to move o quieter and more sedate surroundings—usually further out. Because a location along the streetcar line was good for business, retail stores frequently opened stores in what were previously residences. A common pattern was for a storefront extension to be built out to the sidewalk on what was originally the front yard of a home. This pattern consisting of a shop in front with the original house behind can still be seen in many older cities today. Middle-class residents of turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs also found that their new homes had practical advantages beyond that of fast transportation to the city. Sewer lines, water lines, and gas lines tended to be installed along the street right-of-way, while electric and telephone poles paralleled the tracks. This was comparatively inexpensive for the utilities (usually private companies) to do, since it did not involve ripping up already-paved streets. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26

Suburbanites, being well-off, were also ideal customers from the business standpoint. Thus, outlying streetcar suburbs often received the services of the new utilities well before hey came to working-class areas of the city. Outer areas built at the turn of the century had from their time of construction “modern” advantages such as toilets and electricity. By contrast, some poor city neighbourhoods still had to use outhouses and light their homes with kerosene. At the time of World War I, three-quarters of American homes still did not have electric service. Even more important than the physical and quality-of-life differences between the city and the suburbs were the emerging social differences. Simply put, the suburban trolley lines allowed the upper-middle and middle class to move out. The technology of the steam railroad had allowed the well-to-do of earlier decades to separate their place of work from their place of residence. Now the technology of the streetcar allowed the middle class to do the same. The new suburban areas were almost exclusively middle class. The poor were excluded from the new subdivisions. Homogeneous economic and social communities replaced the more mixed pattern of the earlier walking city. Segregation of population as well as of land uses was becoming the norm. By providing the means for the middle class to move out of the city, the trolley provided a physical inheritance of housing type and distribution that we can still see throughout North America. Newer and more affluent homes on larger lots were built in outlying areas. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26

As one would ride the streetcar from center to suburb, there would be a clear upgrading in the size and quality of residences. When traveling the old street car routes, even over a century later, the patterns can still be clearly through the cities of the east coast and middle west today. Many of what were new middle-class neighbourhoods at the turn of the century became residences of the metropolis’ working class and poor, but now they are becoming the neighbourhoods of the affluent due to expanding businesses and economic growth, and a lot of people are dying to get their hands on old building, Brownstones, Victorians and redevelop them or find land near the city to copy these designs. Essentially the pattern of an inverse relationship between the centrality of residence and socioeconomic status of those occupying the property reverted to its original target group. While the electric streetcar lines certainly did not invent social and economic exclusivity, the trolleys did facilitate the separation of the city into homogenous socioeconomic, ethnic, and racial enclaves. The suburbs, in addition to being heavily middle class, also differed in ethic composition from the central city. The turn of the century was the high tide of southern and eastern European immigration to the United States of America. Ellis Island received over a million immigrants a year during the first decade to the twentieth century. The industrial cities of the east and Midwest were the principal destinations of these Italian, Polish, Slavic, and Jewish immigrants. As of 1900, over three-quarters of the population of cities such as New York, Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago were listed by the Bureau of the Census as being of foreign stock. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26

That is, the census listed the cities as being foreign because most of their population was born outside of the United States of America, or their parents were born outside of the United States of America. Suburbs, by contrast, were overwhelmingly WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant). The new suburbs allowed those who feared the menace of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” to escape to segregated neighbourhoods. Those who were uncomfortable living in a city teeming with foreign immigrants now had a convenient and comfortable alternative. Additionally, the suburbs offered middle-class WASPs the opportunity to remove themselves and their families from both the taxes and immigrant-dominated political machines of the city. Suburban enclaves were essentially homogeneous in social, economic, and ethnic composition. By the time of World War I, the pattern of a segregated urban area had become the norm. The poor and ethic working class lived in the central city, while the affluent and middle-class nonethnics increasingly commuted from out-city and suburban areas. However, in capital cities like Sacramento, California USA, some politicians built mansions near and around the state capitol so they could walk to work. Developers also created apartment buildings on N Street and a senator’s hotel on 15th street for political to live in. Were we to want to suppose a savage human as skilled in the art of thinking as our philosophers make one out to be; were we, following their example, to make one full-fledged philosophers, discovering by oneself the most subline truths, and, by chains of terribly abstract reasoning, forming for oneself maxims of justice and reason drawn from the love of order in general or from the known will of one’s Creator. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26

In a word, we were to supposed there was in one’s mind as much intelligence and enlightenment as one needs, and is in fact found to have dullness and stupidity, what use would the species have for all that metaphysic, which could not be communicated and which would perish with the individual who would have invented it? What progress could the human race make, scattered in the woods among animals? And to what extent could humans mutually perfect and enlighten one another, when, with neither a fixed dwelling nor any need for one another, they would hardly encounter one another twice in their lives, without knowing or talking to one another. Let us consider how many ideas we owe to the use of speech; how much grammar trains and facilitates the operations of the mind. And let us think of the inconceivable difficulties and the infinite amount of time that the first invention of languages must have cost. Let us join their reflections to the preceding ones, and we will be in a position to judge how many thousands of centuries would have been necessary to develop successively in the human mind the operations of which it was capable. May I be permitted to consider for a moment the obstacles to the origin of languages. First of all, how could have languages become necessary; for since humans had no communication among themselves nor any need for it, I fail to see either the necessity of this invention or its possibility, if it were not indispensable. I might well say, as do many other, that languages were born in the domestic intercourse among fathers, mothers, and children. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26

However, aside from the fact that this would not resolve the difficulties, it would make the mistake of those who, reasoning about the state of nature, intrude into it ideas taken from society. They always see the family gathered in one and the same dwelling, with its members maintaining among themselves a union as intimate and permanent as exists among us, where so many common interests unite them. However, the fact of the matter is that in that primitive state, since nobody had houses or huts or property of any kind, each one bedded down in some random spot and often for only one night. Males and females came together fortuitously as a result of chance encounters, occasion, and desire, without there being any great need for words to express what they had to say to one another. They left one another with the same nonchalance. The mother at first nursed her children for her own need; then, with habit having endeared them to her, she later nourished the for their own need. Once they had the strength to look for their food, they did not hesitate to leave the mother herself. And since there was practically no other way of finding one another than not to lose sight of one another, they were soon at the point of not even recognizing one another. It should also be noted that, since the child had all one’s needs to explain and consequently more things to the mother than the mother to the child, it is the child who must make the greatest effort toward inventing a language, and that the language one uses should in large part be of one’s own making, which multiplies languages as many times as there are individuals to speak them. This tendency was abetted by a nomadic and vagabond life, which does not give any idiom time to gain a foothold. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26

For claiming that the mother teaches her child the words one ought to use in asking her for this or that is a good way of showing how already formed languages are taught, but it does not tell us how languages are formed. Let us suppose this first difficulty has been overcome. Let us disregard for a moment the immense space that there must have been between the pure state of nature and the need for languages. And, on the supposition that they are necessary, let us inquire how they might have begun to be established. Here we come to a new difficulty, worse still than the preceding one. For if human needed speech in order to learn to think, they had a still greater need for knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speaking. And even if it were understood how vocal sounds had been taken for the conventional expression of our ideas, it would still remain for us to determine what could have been conventional expressions for ideas that, not having a sensible object, could not be indicated either by gesture or by voice. Thus we scarcely able to form tenable conjectures regarding the birth of this art of communicating thought and establishing intercourse between minds, a sublime art which is already quite far from its origin, but which the philosopher sill sees at so prodigious a distance from is perfection that there is no human so foolhardy as to claim that it will ever achieve it, even if the sequences of change that time necessarily brings were suspended in its favour, even if prejudices were to be barred from the academies or be silent before them, and even if they were able to occupy themselves with that thorny problem for whole centuries without interruption. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26

Human’s first language, the most universal, the most energetic and the only language one needed before it was necessary to persuade humans assembled together, is the cry of nature. Since this cry was elicited only by a kind of instinct in pressing circumstances, to beg for help in great dangers, or for relief of violent ills, it was not used very much in the ordinary courses of life, where more moderate feelings prevail. When the ideas of human begin to spread and multiply, and closer communication was established among them, they sought more numerous signs and a more extensive language. They multiplied vocal inflections and combined them with gestures, which by their nature, are more expressive, and whose meaning is less dependent on a prior determination. They therefore signified visible and mobile objects by means of gestures, and audible ones by imitative sounds. However, since a gesture indicates hardly anything more than present or easily described objects and visible actions; since its use is not universal, because darkness or the interposition of a body renders it useless; and since it requires rather than stimulates attention, humans finally thought of replacing them with vocal articulations, which, while not having the same relationship to certain ideas, were better suited to represent all ideas as conventional signs. Such a substitution could only be made by a common consent and in a way rather difficult to practice for humans whose crude organs had as yet no exercise, and still more difficult to conceive in itself, since that unanimous agreement had to have had a motive, and speech appears to have been necessary in order to establish the use of speech. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
Research on the “theory of mind” began with David Premack and Guy Woodruff’s 1978 description of animals that understand the minds of other animals. Theory of mind refers to an animal’s (or a person’s) ability to respond not just to another’s behaviour but also according to what it assumes about the other’s beliefs and desires. As a species’ brain cortex volume increases, so does its ability to read minds—to infer others’ mental states—and even to deceive others and to invent tools. For example, the psychologists Andre Whiten and Richard Byrne repeatedly saw one young baboon pretending to have been attacked by another as a tactic to get its mother to drive the other baboon away from its food. When observing monkey-human similarities in abilities such as mind reading, it becomes tempting to say that humans are therefore “nothing but” complex primates, and to ignore the distinctiveness of the ethical, moral, and religious aspects of human though and behaviour. However, primate abilities, including primates’ mind-reading capacity, may get overplayed. Dr. Byrne notes: “It is tempting, but may be utterly wrong, to assume that an animal….has some idea of the effect its behaviour is having on the mind of another.” Actually, one warns, the explanation may be simpler: “Rapid learning in social circumstances, a good memory for individuals and their different characteristics, and some simple genetic tendencies are capable of explaining much that has impressed observers as intelligent in simian primates.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
Dr. Frans de Waal similarly cautions against exaggerated claims: “Even if animals other than ourselves act in ways tantamount to moral behaviour, their behaviour does not necessarily rest on deliberations of the kind we engage in. It is hard to believe that animals weigh their own interests against the rights of others, that they develop a view of the greater good of society or that they feel lifelong guilt about something they should not have done….To communicate intentions and feelings is one thing; and to clarify what is right, and why, and what is wrong, and why, is quite something else. Animals are no moral philosophers.” Despite the concern of some Christian about apparently narrowing gap between ourselves and nonhuman primates, we see no great issues at stake in this research. We welcome developments in evolutionary psychology. As Dr. Byrne and Dr. de Waal illustrate, scholars are often dismayed by the excited interpretations of their findings in the popular media. If Christians are more discerning, they will be able to glimpse fresh pointers to the Creator’s greatness in the wonders of creation. They will also be able to draw on the findings of evolutionary psychology as they exercise stewardship for the creation and compassion for humanity. Research on theory of mind, for example, has expanded our understanding of autistic children, who have difficulty in reading others’ minds and therefore in responding appropriately. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26

When I think about London, I usually see a mental picture of Euston Street. However, when I think (as I do) that London has several million inhabitants, I do not mean that there are several million images of people contained in my image of Euston Station. Nor do I mean that several millions of real people live in the real Euston Station. In fact though I have the image while I am thinking about London, what I think or say is not about that image, and would be manifest nonsense if it were. It makes sense because it is not about my own mental pictures but about the real London, outside my imagination, of which no one can have an adequate mental picture at all. Or again, when we say that the Sun is ninety-odd million miles away, we understand perfectly clear what we mean by this number; we can divide and multiply it by other numbers and we can work out how long it would take to travel that distance at any given speed. However, this clear thinking is accompanied by imagining which is ludicrously false to what we know that the reality must be. To think, then, is one thing, and to imagine is another. What we think or say can be, and usually is, quite different from what we imagine or picture; and what we mean may be true when the mental images that accompany it are entirely false. It is, indeed, doubtful whether anyone except an extreme visualist who is also a trained artist ever has mental images which are particularly like the things one is thinking about. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
In these examples the mental image is not only unlike the reality but is known to be unlike it, at least after a moment’s reflection. I know that London is not merely Euston Station. Let us now go on to a slightly different predicament. I once heard a lady tell her young daughter that you would die if you are too many tablets of aspirin. “But why?” asked the child, “it is not poisonous.” “How do you know it is not poisonous?” said the mother. “Because,” said the child, “when you crush an aspirin tablet you do not find horrid red things inside it.” Clearly, when this child though of poison she had a mental picture of Horrid Red Things, just as I have a picture of Euston when I think of London. The difference is that whereas I know my image to be very unlike the real London, the child through that poison was really red. To that extent she was mistaken. However, this does not mean that everything she thought or said about poison was necessarily nonsensical. She knew perfectly well that a poison was something which killed you or made you ill if you swallowed it; and she knew, to some extent, which of the substances in her mother’s house were poisonous. If a visitor to that house had been warned by the child, “Do not thin that. Mother says it is poison” he would have been ill advised to neglect the warning on the ground that “This child has a primitive idea of poison as Horrid Red Things, which my adult scientific knowledge has long since refuted.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 26

Thinking may be sound in certain respect where is it accompanied not only by false images but by false images mistake for true ones. What the Old Testament writers called the shekinah is a sacred and luminous appearance. More than a hundred years ago, Konko Daijin founded a new religion in Japan. Called Konkokyo, “the religion of the golden light,” it enjoined its followers to live in dependence on “the God of Heaven’s brightness.” One of the states of samadhi in Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism is called “Pure Light.” One of the Attained Ones in this religion is Amita, or Amitabha, the “Buddha of Boundlessly Diffused Light.” That there is actually a light emitted by the divine World of being is indicated by the following excerpt from, I believe, a Mahayana Buddhist: “There are four successive stages of piercing in reality, identical in sleep and dying. The first, ‘Revelation,’ is experienced in the earliest period of sleep, and appears as a moonlit cloudless sky. The drowsiness deepens and ‘Augmentation’ is reached. It appears as brilliant clear sunlight. Few can go beyond this into the third stage, ‘Immediate Attainment.’ Here there is total darkness. It vanishes when sleep gets deeper still; then the Void is penetrated, called ‘Innate Light,’ the first clear radiance. The student thus passes into Reality and Enlightenment, whether in the nightly death of sleep or the end of human life.” The Quakers believe that what they call the Inner Light is a supernatural thing. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26

Saint Brendan saw, while at ceremonial prayer in the presence of other celebrated ancient Irish holy men, a bright flame-like light rising above his head and continuing until the end of the ceremony. If God is to be seen, then it must happen in a Light, as God Himself is Light. LIGHT: The seventeenth-century Welsh poet Henry Vaughan expressed the same idea in his lines: I saw Eternity the other night, like a great Ring of pure and endless light. If the grains, fruits, cereals, and vegetables which we eat are themselves undernourished because the soil in which they grow is deficient in minerals or otherwise exhausted then we in turn will not really receive from our food the proper nourishment we believe it is giving nor will the cattle pastured on such depleted soil. Nor is this all If the foods derived from unbalanced soil are our mainstay for a lengthy period of years, the unbalance will be reflected in our body as some kind of sickness or malfunction. Wherever and whenever people are properly nourished and housed in safe and clean locations, as the rule, and not the rarity that it is today for a certain segment of the population, we may expect violence and crime to abate markedly. The change our to proper nourishment creates in some cases a feeling of bodily weakness. This will be limited to the transition period only, which may be a matter of days or months, depending on the individual. Such persons should make the changeover gradually. Many others have made the change quite abruptly without any fatigue or any hard. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
The person who is afraid to alter one’s living habits, and especially one’s eating and drinking habits, because one is afraid that other persons may regard one as queer, eccentric, or fanatic forgets that the ownership of one’s body, the responsibility for its well-being, belongs to one, not them. Theory left unapplied is only one-third of knowledge. A surgeon knew and taught that anger would raise the pressure of the blood and strain the heart in proportion to its severity. Yet it was anger that eventually killed him. The influence of body on mind is shown by the efficacy—in his case at least—of Socrates’ method of smiling at himself when counterattacking a negative emotion while it was ye in is slender beginning. There is a corrective purpose in the existence of disease. Any cure which removed the symptoms but fails to correct the inner mental or physical cause of them is merely a temporary expedient, not a real cure. It serves the ego’s present convenience. However, the future must necessarily be menaced by a reappearance of the same disease, or of a different one which will also express the cause. And this may happen either in the same lifetime or in the next. A disease whose origin is physical will not need more than a physical remedy to cure it. However, one of a physical, mental, or moral nature can be reached and overcome only by corresponding means. The long walk which might fatigue your strength and become difficult drudgery becomes easy and endurable if, at the dame time, your mind is deeply absorbed in concentration on some lofty matter. Why? Because you are not then thinking of your ego. Such is the power of mind over the body. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26

If one lives only and wholly in an optimistic harmonious feeling, if one consistently rejects all negative and destructive ones, the result must certainly be that ne will enjoy better health in the body as one already enjoys the best in mind. Shun the madding crowd. Turn a deaf ear to the histories of the World. Whether original works or just condensation, they crow out our knowledge of the World of the spirit. And the vanity in these volumes—a light dusting at first, but before you know it, it is snowing soot! Many is the time I wish I had not gone outside the walls. All I did was talk. I yammered and listened to the yammerings of others, but when it was time to return to the realm of silence, my ears were battered the colour of plum. Tittlers and tattlers I suppose we all are when it comes to our bruised hearts; talk helps, and someone needs to listen. However, why is it that jokes and japes are so good a relieving the stress, the depression? Well, it must be the magpies in us, and though I hesitate to say it, it is not so bad every now and then to give them voice to jabber and to chatter and to tell you what the matter is with you. These klatches outside the walls, they are such a pain! At best, in vain. At worst, inane. They are for exterior consolation only, for they clash with the very consolation that is interior and divine. Inside the walls we Devouts must watch and pray, as the Gospel of Matthew urges us (26.41), that none of our time is spent idly. However, if we have to speak and to have the permission, we should do so but only about bonda fide Edifables; St. Paul would have the Ephesians do just that (4.29). Otherwise, abuse of this rule in particular and negligence of our own spiritual progress in general will lead us to lose control of our tongue. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26

Nevertheless, because you are in a religious community devoted to the Lord, conversational topics related to spiritual progress should come up from time to time. As Joseph and Oliver worked together on the translation of the golden plates, they learned many things. They were much interested in what was written about baptism for the remission of sins. They talked about it, studied about it from the Bible, and desired very much to be baptized as Christ taught in the golden book. One day they went into the woods to pray, asking God to explain baptism to them. It was a beautiful spring day, May 15, 1829. As they prayed near the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, an Angel came to them in a cloud of light saying he was John the Baptist of whom they had read in the New Testament. He said that he had been sent Saints Peter, James, and John, who has been apostles with Jesus when He lived on Earth. The Angel laid his hands upon them, saying, “Upon you, my fellow servants, in the name of Jesus, I confer the priesthood of Aaron, and his shall never again be taken from the Earth until the son of Levi do offer again an offering unto the Lord in righteousness.” The Angel explained that humans having the Aaronic priesthood may do much of the work in the church. He told them, however, that the Aaronic priesthood does not carry the authority for laving on of hands for the gift of the Holy Spirit. This power should be given to them later. Then he said, “God and be baptized.” Joseph and Oliver went into the water of the Susquehanna River. Joseph firs baptized Oliver, and then Oliver baptized Joseph. Then the Angel told them to ordain each other. As the two came out of the water they were so filled with the power of the Holy Spirit that they understood things they had been unable to understand previously, and many things were shown them about the Lord’s work which they were to do. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26

It is a wonderful experience for these two young men to hear the voice of an Angel speaking the words of the Lord. With great joy they returned to their work of translating. They old some of the family and closest friends about this wonderful experience and what God was about to do. Samuel and Hyrum Smith, two of Joseph’s brothers, believed and were baptized. Hyrum, the older brother, was a quiet and gentle man who loved Joseph very much. He was very happy about the wonderful message of Jesus, and he wanted to go out at once to tell everyone about it. Though he understood little about the things he heard and saw, he wanted to preach to the World. However, it was not the right time for men to preach, for the work of translating the golden plates had not been finished, and no one fully understood the teaching of Christ. Jesus Christ spoke by revelation through Joseph telling Hyrum to wait a little longer, then he could preach. The words of the Lord to Hyrum were: “Behold, I say unto you, Keep my commandments, and seek to bring forth and established the cause of Zion. Seek not for riches, but for wisdom. Put thy trust in that Spirit which leadeth to do good; yea, to do justly, to walk humbly, to judge righteously; and this is my Spirit. I will impart unto you of my Spirit, which shall enlighten your mind, which shall fill your soul with joy. By this shall you know all things whatsoever you desire of me. You need not suppose that you are called to preach until you are called. Wait a little longer, until you shall have my word, my rock, my church, and my gospel, that you may know of a surety my doctrine. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
“Then, behold, according to your desires, yea, even according to your faith, shall it be done unto you. However, now hold your peace; study my word which has gone forth among the children of humans, and also study my word which shall come forth among the children of humans, or that which is now translating. Treasure up in your hearts until the time which is in my wisdom that you shall go forth.” With these instructions the men continued their study and work so they might bring to all people the wonderful message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Earth, adored with heights and gentle slopes and plains, bears plants and herbs of various healing powers. May she spread wide for us, afford us joy! On whom are ocean, river, and all waters, on whom have sprung up food and ploughman’s crops, on whom moves all that breaths and stirs aboard—Earth, may she grant to us the long first draught! Whatever I dig up of you, O Earth, may you have quick replenishment! O purifying One, may my thrust never reach right into your vital points, your heart! O Earth, O Mother, dispose my lot in gracious fashion that I may be at ease, and in harmony with your powers. God’s glory pervades the Universe; His ministering Angels inquire of one another: Where is the place of His glory? In response they give praise. Praised be the glory of the Lord from His Heavenly abode. From His Heavenly abode may He turn in mercy and bestow grace unto the people who, reciting in the Shema evening and morning, twice daily, proclaim in love the unity of His name, saying: Hear, O America: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. He is our God; He is our Father, our Sovereign and our Deliverer. In His mercy He will again make known in the presence of all the living that He will be your God. “I am the Lord your God. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26

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In the Morning He Sells His Bed of Cotton and in the Even Returns in Tears to Buy it Back!

To restore a sense of reality, I think Walt Disney should have had a Hardluckland. With so few resources of ills, humans in the state of nature hardly has any need therefore of remedies, much less physicians. Human race is in no worse condition than all the others in this respect; and it is easy to learn from hunters whether in their chases they find many sick animals. They find quite a few that have received serious wounds that healed quite nicely, that have had bones or even limbs broken and reset with no other surgeon than time, no other regimen than their everyday life, and that are no less perfectly cured for not having been tormented with incisions, poisoned with drugs, or exhausted with fasting. Finally, however correctly administered medicine may be among us, it is still certain that although a sick savage, abandoned to oneself, has nothing to fear except one’s illness. This frequently makes one’s situation preferable to ours. Therefore we must take care not to confuse savage humans with the humans we have before our eyes. Nature treats all animals left to their own devices with a partiality that seems to show how jealous se is of that right. The horse, the cat, the bull, even he mule, are usually taller, and all of them have a more robust constitution, more vigour, more strength, and more courage in the forests than in our homes. They lose half of these advantages in becoming domesticated; it might be said that all our efforts at feeding them and treating them well only end in their degeneration. It is the same for humans themselves. In becoming habituated to the ways of society and a slave, one becomes weak, fearful, and servile; one’s soft and effeminate lifestyle completes the enervation of both one’s strength and courage. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Let us add that the difference between the savage and the human and the domesticated human should be still greater than that between the savage and the animal and the domesticated animal; for while animal and human have been treated equally by nature, humans give more comfort to themselves than to the animals they tame, and all of these comforts are so many specific causes that makes them degenerate more noticeably. It is therefore no great misfortune for those first humans, nor, above all, such a great obstacle to their preservation, that they are naked, that they have no dwelling, and that they lack all those useful things we take to be so necessary. If they do not have furry skin, they have no need for it in warm countries, and in cold countries they soon learn to help themselves to the skins of animals they have vanquished. If they have but two feet to run with, they have two arms to provide for their defense and for their needs. Perhaps their children learn to walk late and with difficulty, but mothers carry them easily: an advantage that is lacking in other species, where the mother, on being pursued, finds herself forced to abandon her young or to comfort her pace to theirs. [It is possible there are some exceptions to this. For example, the animal from the province of Nicaragua which resembles a fox and which has feet like a man’s hands, and according to Dr. Coreal, has a pouch under its belly in which the mother places her young when she is forced to take flight. No doubt this is the same animal that is called tlaquatzin in Mexico; the female of the species Laet descries as having a similar pouch for the same purpose.] #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Finally, unless we suppose those singular and fortuitous combinations of circumstances of which I will speak later, and which might very well have never taken place at any rate it is clear that the firs human who made clothing or a dwelling for oneself was giving oneself things that were hardly necessary, since one done without them until then and since it is not clear why, as a grown human, one could not endure the kind of life he had endured ever since one was a child. Alone, idle, and always near danger, savage humans must like to sleep and be a light sleeper like animals which do little thinking and, as it were, sleep the entire time they are not thinking. Since one’s self-preservation was practically one’s sole concern, one’s best trained faculties ought to be those that have attack and defense as their principal object, either to subjugate one’s prey or to prevent one’s becoming the prey of another animal. On the other hand, he organs that are perfected only by softness and sensuality must remain in a state of crudeness that excludes any kind of refinement in one. And with one’s senses of touch and taste: those of sight, hearing and smell will have the greatest subtlety. Such is the state of animals in general, and, according to the reports of travellers, such also is that of the majority of savage peoples. Thus we should not be surprised that the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope can sight ships with the naked eye as far out at sea as he Dutch can with telescopes; or that the savages of America were as capable of trailing Spaniards by smell as the best dogs could have done; or that all these barbarous nations endure their nakedness with no discomfort, whet their appetites with hot peppers, and drink European liquors like water. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In any terrestrial being I see nothing but an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses in order for it to renew its strength and to protect itself, to a certain point, from all that tends to destroy or disturb it. I am aware of precisely the same things in the human machines, with the differences that nature alone does everything in the operations of an animal, whereas humans contribute, as a free agent, to one’s own operations. The former chooses or rejects by instinct and the later by an act of freedom. Hence an animal cannot deviate from the rule that is prescribed to it, even when it would be advantageous to do so, while humans deviate from it, often to one’s own detriment. Thus a pigeon would die of hunger near a bowl filled with choice meats, and so would a cat perched atop a pile of fruit or grain, even though both could nourish themselves quite well with the food they disdain, if they were of a mind to try some. And thus dissolute humans abandon themselves to excesses which cause them fever and death, because the mind perverts the senses and because the will still speaks when nature is silent. Every animal has idea, since it has senses; up to a certain point it even combines its ideas, and in this regard humans differ from animals only in degree. Some philosophers have even suggested that there is a greater difference between two given humans than between a given human and an animal. Therefore it is not so much understanding which causes the specific distinction of humans from all other animals as it is one’s being a free agent. Nature commands every animal, and beasts obey. Humans feel the same impetus, but they know they are free to go along or to resist; and it is above all in the awareness of this freedom that the spirituality of one’s soul is made manifest. For physics explains in some way the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power, we find only purely spiritual acts, above which the laws of mechanics explain nothing. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
However, if the difficulties surrounding all these questions should leave some room for dispute on tis difference between human and animal, here is another very specific quality which distinguishes them and about which there can be no argument: the faculty of self-perfection, a faulty which, with the assistance of circumstances, successively develops all the others, and resides among us as much in the species as in the individual. On the other hand, an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and is species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why are humans alone to becoming imbeciles? Is it not that they thereby return to their primitive state, and that, while the animal which has acquired nothing and which also has nothing to lose, always retains its instinct, human, in losing through old age or other accidents all that one’s perfectibility has enabled one to acquire, thus falls even lower than the animal itself? It would be sad for us to be forced to agree that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all human’s misfortunes; that this is what, by dint of time, draws one out of that original condition in which one would pass tranquil and innocent days; that this is what, through centuries of giving rise to one’s enlightenment and one’s errors, one’s vices and one’s virtues, eventually makes one a tyrant over oneself and nature. It would be dreadful to be obliged to praise as a beneficent being the one who first suggested to the inhabitant on the banks of the Orinoco the use of boards which one binds to one’s children’s temples, and which assure them of at least part of their imbecility and their original happiness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Savage humans, left by nature to instinct alone, or rather compensated for the instinct one is perhaps lacking by faculties capable of first replacing them and hen of raising one to the level of instinct, will therefore begin with purely animal functions. Perceiving and feeling will be one’s first state, which one will have in common with all animals. Willing and not willing, desiring, and fearing will be the first and nearly the only operations of one’s soul until new circumstances bring about new developments in it. Whatever the moralists may say about it, human understanding owes much to the passions, which, by common consensus, also owe a great deal to it. It is by their activity that our reason is perfected. We seek to know only because we desire to find enjoyment; and it is impossible to conceive why someone who had neither desires nor fears would go to the bother of reasoning. The passions in turn take their origin from our needs, and their progress from our knowledge. For one can desire or fear things only by virtue of the ideas one can have of hem, or from the simple impulse of nature; and savage humans, deprived of every sort of enlightenment, feels only the passions of this latter sort. One’s desires do not go beyond one’s physical needs. The only goods one knows in the Universe are nourishment, a woman and rest; the only evils one fears are pain and hunger and homelessness. I say pain and not death because an animal will never know what it is to die; and knowledge of death and its terrors is one of the first acquisitions that humans have made in withdrawing from the animal condition. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Were it necessary, it would be easy for me to support this view with the facts and to demonstrate that, among all the nations of the World, the progress of the mind has been precisely proportionate to the needs received by peoples from nature or to those needs to which circumstances have subjected them, and consequently to the passions which inclined hem to provide for those needs. I would show the arts coming into being in Egypt and spreading with the flooding of the Nile. I would follow their progress among the Greeks, where they were seen to germinate, grow and rise to the Heavens among the sands and rocks of Attica, though never being able to take root on the fertile banks of the Eurotas. I would point out that in general the peoples of the north are more industrious than those of the south, because they cannot get along as well without being so, as if nature thereby wanted to equalize things by giving to their minds the fertility it refuses their soil. However, without having recourse to the uncertain testimony of history, does anyone fail to see that everything seems to remove savage humans from the temptation and the means of ceasing to be savage? One’s imagination depicts nothing to one; one’s heart asks nothing of one. One’s modest needs are so easily found at hand, and one is so far from the degree of knowledge necessary to make one desire to acquire greater knowledge, that one can have neither foresight nor curiosity. The spectacle of nature becomes a matter of indifference to one by din of its becoming familiar to one. It is always the same order, always the same succession of changes. One does not have a mind for marveling at the greatest wonders; and we must not seek in one the philosophy that a human needs in order to know how to observe once what one has seen everyday. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
One’s soul, agitated by nothing, is given over to the single feeling of one’s own present existence, without any idea of the future, however, near it may be, and one’s projects, as limited as one’s views, hardly extend to the end of the day. Such is, even today, the extent of the Carib’s foresight. In the morning one sells one’s bed for cotton and in the evening one returns in tears to buy it back, for want of having foreseen that one would need it at night. The more one meditates on this subject, the more distance from pure sensations to the simplest knowledge increases before our eyes; and it is impossible to conceive how a human could have crossed such a wide gap by one’s forces alone, without the assistance of communication and without the provocation of necessity. How many centuries have perhaps gone by before humans were in a position to see any fire other than that from the Heavens? How many different risks did they have to run before they learned the most common uses of that element? How many times did they let it go out before they had acquired the art of reproducing it? And how many times perhaps did each of these secrets die with the one who had discovered it? What will we say about agriculture, an art that requires so much labour and foresight, that depends on so many other arts, that quite obviously is practicable only in a society which is at least in its beginning stages, and that serves us not so much to derive from the Earth food it would readily provide without agriculture, as to force from it those preferences that are most to our taste? #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
However, let us suppose that humans multiplied to the point where the natural productions were no longer sufficient to nourish them: a supposition which, it may be said in passing, would show a great advantage for the human species in that way of life. Let us suppose that, without forges or workshops, farm implements had fallen from the Heavens into the hands of the savages; that these humans had conquered the mortal hatred they all have for continuous work; that they had learned to foresee their needs far enough in advance; that they had guessed how the soil is to be cultivated, grains sown, and trees planted; that they had discovered the arts of grinding wheat and fermenting grapes: all things they would need to have been taught by the gods, for it is inconceivable how they could have picked these things up on their own. Yet, after all this, what human would be so foolish as to tire oneself out cultivating a field that will be plundered by the first comer, be it human or beast, who takes a fancy to the crop? And how could each human resolve to spend one’s life in hard labour, when, the more necessary to one the fruits of one’s labour may be, the surer one is of not realizing them? In a word, how could this situation lead humans to cultivate the soil as long as it is not divided among them, that is to say, as long as the state of nature is not wiped out? There is no security against Miracle to be found by the study of Nature. She is no the whole of reality but only a part; for all we know she might be a small part. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
If that which is outside her wishes to invade her she has, so far as we can see, no defences. However, of course many who disbelieve in Miracles would admi all this. Their objection comes from the other side. They think that the Supernatural would not invade: they accuse those who say that it has done so of having a childish and unworthy notion of the Supernatural. They therefore reject all form of Supernaturalism which assert such interference and invasions: and specially form called Christianity, for in it the Miracles, or at least some Miracles, are more closely bound up with the fabric of the whole belief than in any others. All the essentials of Hinduism would, I think, remain unimpaired if you subtracted the miraculous, and the same is almost true of Mohammedanism. However, you cannot do that with Christianity. It is precisely the story of a great Miracle. A naturalistic Christianity leaves out all that is specifically Christian. The difficulties of the unbeliever do not begin with questions about this or that particular miracle; they begin much further back. When a human who has had only the ordinary modern education looks into any authoritative statement of Christian doctrine, one finds oneself face to face with what seems to one a wholly “savage” or “primitive” picture of the Universe. One finds that God is supposed to have had a “Son,” just as if God were a mythological deity like Jupiter or Odin. He finds that this “Son” is supposed to have “come down from Heaven,” just as if God had a palace in the sky from which He had sent down His “Son” like a parachutist. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
One finds that this “Son” then “descended into Hell”—into some land of the dead under the surface of a (presumably) flat Earth—and thence “ascended” again, as if by a balloon, into His Father’s sky palace, where He finally sat down in a decorated chair places a little to His Father’s right. Everything seems to presuppose a conception of reality which the increase of our knowledge has been steadily refuting for the last two thousand and twenty-two years and which no honest human in one’s sense could return to today. It is this impression which explains the contempt, and even disgust, felt by many people for the writings of modern Christians. When one a human is convinced that Christianity in general implies a local “Heaven,” a flat Earth, and a God who can have children, one naturally listens with impatience to our solutions of particular difficulties and our defences against particular objections. The more ingenious we are in such solutions and defences the more perverse we seem to one. “Of course,” he says, “once he doctrines are there, clever people can invent clever arguments to defend them, just as, when once a historian has made a blunder one can go on inventing more and more elaborate theories to make it appear that it was not a blunder. However, if one had read one’s documents correctly in the first instance, it is clear that none of these elaborate theories would have been thought of. In the same way, if the writers of the New Testament had had he slightest knowledge of what the real Universe is actually like, is it not clear that Christian theology would never have come into existence at all?” #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Thus, at any rate, I used to think myself. The very human who taught me to think—a hard, satirical atheist (ex-Presbyterian) who doated on the Golden Bough and filled one’s house with the products of the Rationalist Press Association—thought in the same way; and one was a man as honest as the daylight, to whom I here willingly acknowledge an immense debt. His attitude to Christianity was for me the starting point of adult thinking; you may say it is bred in my bones. And yet, since those days, I have come to regard that attitude as a total misunderstanding. Remembering, as I do, from within, the attitude of the impatient sceptic, I realize very well how one is fore-armed against anything I may say for the rest of this essay. “I know exactly what this man is going to do,” he murmurs. “He is going to start explaining all these mythological statements away. It is the invariable practice of these Christians. On any matter whereon science has not yet spoken and on which they cannot be checked, they will tell you some preposterous fairytale. And then, the moment science makes a new advance and shows (as it invariably does) their statement to be untrue, they suddenly turn round and explain that they did not mean what they said, that they were using a poetic metaphor or constructing an allegory, and that all they really intended was some harmless moral platitude. We are sick of this theological thimblerigging.” Now I have a great deal of sympathy with that sickness and I freely admit that “modernist” Christianity has constantly played just the game of which the impatient sceptic accuses it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
However, I also think there is a kind of explaining which is not explaining away. In one sense I am going to do just what the sceptic thinks I am going to do: that is, I am going to distinguish what I regard as the “core” or “real meaning” of the doctrines from that in their expression which I regard as inessential and possibly even capable of being changed without damage. However, then, what will drop away from the “real meaning” under my treatment will precisely not be the miraculous. It is the core itself, the core scraped as clean of inessentials as we can scrape it, which remains for me entirely miraculous, supernatural—nay, if you will, “primitive” and even “magical.” “Do not unfold your heart to anyone,” said the cautious Jeremiah (17.5). When you get a problem, present it to a counselor who knows what one is doing and does not hesitate to tell you. The Book of Proverbs suggests much the same (25.9). Do not hang on the youngster and do not dawdle with the outsiders. Do not dally with the rich and famous; or so says the Book of Proverb (25.6). The humble and the simple, the devout and the obedient, these are the ones to associate with. And with them busy yourself only in the Edifiables. Do not commend yourself to any one woman in particular, but commend all women as a group to God. That is what Jesus son of Sirach would have us do (9.1-9). Do not draw attention to yourself in a crowd. However, if you must have some familiars, then choose God and His Holy Angels. Charity knows no bounds, but familiarity, apparently, has its limits. For example, we hear of a person who has a glowing reputation and immediately thing we could be such good friends. However, when we meet one face to face, of course we are polite, but once one opens one’s mouth, our eyes begin to glaze. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
And we are just vain enough to think that the opposite is not true. However, how true it is! Others should be quite pleased to meet us, we think, but, astonishingly, as soon as we begin to speak, and of course we speak so very well, their eyes grow steely, staring right through us; that is to say, they sense the latent load that is in us. It is a great thing you are living under obedience; that is to say, doing things the way a superior wants them, not the way you think they ought to be. And it is safer too. Nobody blames an inferior when something goes wrong. However, many Devout under obedience today feel they are prisoners, and their complaints rise like murmurings from the cell block. However, these Devouts will never achieve freedom of mind until they wholeheartedly subject themselves to the will of God. However, do not let me stop you. If you want, hit the road, hithering and thithering wherever you like! Mark you, you will not find rest until you humbly subject yourself to the superior’s regime. However, if you are so dreamy, then dream this: Yourself in front of the last monastery at the end of the World, ringing the bell at the gate—things will definitely be better here! Sweet dream, I grant you, but it is still a dream. And how many of today’s Devout have fallen for it! Yes, it is true, each one of us associates with those who feel the same way. However, Go is among us now. If we ever hope to achieve peace of soul, we have to leave behind what we feel. Is that too much to ask? #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Who is so wise that one can know everything there is to know? No one, of course. Therefore, do not rely too much on how you feel on any given day. However, do not hesitate to listen to the way others feel. At any given day. However, do not hesitate to listen to the way others feel. At any given moment we all feel we know wat is the right and good thing to do. However, next time it happens to you, take God’s advice and drive it out of your mind. Why? Follow yourself, and you will end up in ever decreasing circles. Follow another, and you will find yourself farter down the path toward perfection than you could have ever dreamed. Good Counsel, or o the Proverb goes (12.15): to accept it keeps one’s spirituality fresh, but to give it to the young of soul on a daily basis ages the counselor prematurely. Advice is one thing, but it is not the only thing. There are also Sound Reason and Good Cause. They too can encourage one to acquiesce to others. No matter whence the wisdom, not to defer to another is clear indication that, no matter what your age, you are either a pompous twit or a willful snot. The causes of life’s history cannot resolve the riddle of life’s meaning. What we today call evolutionary psychology—the study of the evolution of behaviour and the mind, using principles of natural selection—is akin to what psychologist once called “comparative psychology.” Comparative psychology explored sensation, learning, and behaviour across the phylogenetic scale of animal life, from worms to humans. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
With increasing brain complexity, comparative psychologists observed more elaborate learning and behaviours. Then “ethologists”—scientists studying animal behaviour in natural contexts—alerted us to complex behaviours exhibited by simple animals such as ants and bees. Still, all of this was relatively uncontroversial and therefore quite unlike evolutionary psychology, which has made the covers of Time, Der Spiegel, and leading scientific journals. Unlike comparative psychology and ethology, evolutionary psychology has seemed to challenge our self-understanding—our view of huma nature and our place in nature. “From the beginning philosophers have agonized over the question of what make us human,” notes Frans de Waal, a leading primatologist. “Is there a difference in kind or merely a difference in the degree between ourselves and other animals? Direct comparisons between people and animals are often seen as demeaning, even offensive.” Such comparisons are hardly new, even within theological circles. “It is dangerous to show a human too clearly how much one resemble the beast, without at the same time showing him his greatness,” wrote Blasie Pascal in the seventeenth century. “It is also dangerous to allow him too clear a vision of his greatness without his baseness. It is even more dangerous to leave one in ignorance of both.” Evolutionary psychology helps reduce that ignorance. Today, some excited psychologists see evolutionary psychology as mounting a takeover bid for the whole of psychology. David Buss chose the subtitle The New Science of the Mind for his recent book Evolutionary Psychology. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Dr. Buss then proceeded to reorganize the whole of psychology within evolutionary psychology. Others offer more modest claims. Britain’s Open University says simply, “Evolutionary psychology focuses on how human beings came to be the apparently special terrestrial beings we are today.” However, what is special about us? All terrestrial beings have special properties and abilities. Moles live underground. Bird fly. Monkeys swing through trees. Does language mark us as special? (The training of chimps to communicate by sign suggests a simple form of language in nonhuman primates). Are humans special only by virtue of having more complex thinking abilities? By linking us to animal ancestors, doe evolutionary psychology deny our faith claim of uniqueness that comes from God’s gracious invitation to a personal relationship? We believe no. Evolutionary psychology has no interest in such a question (though individual evolutionary psychologists will have views on this). The Light of God is felt as energy pulsing in space and tingling in the body; it is seen, usually with the mind’s eye but sometimes with the body’s, as an unearthly radiance; it is intuited as a glory filling the whole of one’s inner being. The Light is seen visually as a golden ball, a brilliant ray or shaft or beam, and finally as a vague radiance diffused in all directions. It may stay within the orbit of vision quite motionless and still. Or it may quiver, throb, and pulsate. Or it may shoot forward like a lightning flash. One who beholds the Light may be grateful for several reasons. First, it is the only occult experience of which it may be said ta it is entirely without risk or peril. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Secondly, the light is the loftiest of all clairvoyant visions. Third, it confers the feeling of perfect felicity, not in the Worldly sense, but of an ethereal unearthly kind. Fourth, it is a direct manifestation of God to humans, being the first of one’s outpourings, hence an uncommon blessing, a grace. Fifth, if it appears in consciousness as Power, the recipient may feel a tremendous force, unknown otherwise, throbbing all around and within one, or a sudden lightening-like flash of complete comprehension: one understands what neither bodily sense nor intellectual faculty can understand—the supernatural meaning of Spirit, of eternity, of transfiguration, and of reality. The Light may be sent forth as a ray to touch the heart or the head of any particular person to uplift or console, pacify emotions or exalt ideas; it may also be sent to encircle a person protectively. Light is also symbolic. Contrast with darkness, it suggests redemption and knowledge as against sinfulness and ignorance. It is significant that not only is night the time when human crime and passion are at their maximum but it is also the time when worrying thoughts are at their most morbid. The day with its brightness has ever been a symbol of spirituality, the night with its darkness a symbol of materiality. For one who has found one’s own spirit, finds peace and is free from fear, and consequently from its child—worry—too. The very nature of sunshine—all light—and the very condition in which sunrises and sunsets occur—stillness—helps us to understand why Light and the Overself are bracketed together. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Your own consciousness shinning, void, inseparable from the great body of radiance, is subject neither to birth nor death, but is the same as the immutable light, God. Use the light within you to revert to your natural clearness of sight. Among those who have seen this light, some Christians have named in “the glory of God,” or “the self-effulgent light.” The Light is a shining of the Holy Spirit in the soul. Through this light, God is truly known by the worthy and beloved soul. Light is identical with the Holy Spirit, and it reveals the reality of that Spirit while sanctifying the person. “The Lord is my Light,” report Psalm 27. Since predestination includes will, the reasons can be found on the part of the things willed; inasmuch as God wills one thing on account of something else. Wherefore nobody has been so insane as to say that merit is the cause of divine predestination as regards the ac of the predestinator. However, this is the question, whether, as regards he effect, predestination has any cause; or what comes to the same thing, whether God preordained that He would give the effect of predestination to anyone on account of any merits. Accordingly were some who held that the effect of predestination was pre-ordained for some on account of pre-existing merits in a former life. This was the opinion of Origen, who thought that the souls of humans were created in the beginning, and according to the diversity of their works different states were assigned to them in this World when united with the Body. The Apostle, however, rebuts this opinion where he says (Romans 9.11, 12): “For when they were not yet born, nor had done any good or evil not of works, but of Him hat calleth, it was said of her: The elder shall serve the younger.” The wisdom of the World-Mind has put quick-lines into the terrestrial mind—which you may call instinct if your wish—which show it how to keep alive by picking out the food needed. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Humans, being the possessor of a terrestrial body, shares a proportion of these instincts; for the rest one must use one’s judgements. Only good, beneficial thoughts were allowed to enter one’s head and good food one’s stomach. We are free to reduce the area of our destructiveness and to lessen the amount of pain we inflict. If we could examine the prehistoric period of humans, and not merely one’s last century, we would find that the duration of one’s life has since been shortened, while the condition of one’s body has deteriorated through new diseases. The cause in both cases lies in one’s changed feeding habits to some extent, and in one’s unrestricted habits dealing with pleasures of the flesh to a much larger extent. Where humans have given themselves up to excitement involving pleasures of the flesh as a continuing and enduring feature of one’s life—as contrasted with the wild animals which experience it only at particular seasons—the cause exists not in the different nature with which one has been endowed but in the excess of strongly nutritive material which has absorbed into one’s body. To prove that this is so, one has only to take the case of one’s domestic animals which, when also getting superfluous nutriment, are excited more often than the wild ones. Our definition of sin needs is widening. It is also sinful to break the laws of hygiene, to indulge in habits that are either poisonous or devitalizing. The overactive hyper-irritable nerve and brain fatiguing kind of life in which civilized humans have entangled themselves builds up much inner tension and loads one with useless psychic burdens of negative feelings. #RandolphHarrs 20 of 23
Depression, melancholia, and despair have been known to being on wasting ailments and even death. The mind’s suffering, if too intense and too prolonged, may shift to the flesh. Of these lower emotional causes of ill health, fear and shock are perhaps the commonest. Many an illness or the malfunctioning of an organ or a disease begin with a strong negative thought, and, by the latter’s constant repetition until it hardens into a chronic mental-emotional condition, builds up to a crisis in a subsequent year. It is the routine activity of the brain and especially the mental tendency toward anxiety and fear which is expressed through it, which interferes with Nature’s healing process—whether these be spiritual or physical or both—or obstructs them or delays them or defeats them completely. This anxiety arises through he sufferer’s confinement to one’s personal ego and through one’s ignorance of the arrangements in the World-Idea’s body-pattern for the human body’s protective care. The remedy is in one’s own hands. It is twofold: first to change from negative to optimistic thinking through acquiring either faith in this care or else knowledge of it; second, to give body and brain as total a rest as one’s capacity allows, which is achieved through fasting and in prayer. The first change is more easily made by immediately substituting the beneficial and the opposite idea as soon as the pessimistic one appears in one’s field of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
One trains oneself not to accept any harmful thought and watches one’s mind during this period of training. This constructive thought must be held and nourished with firm concentration for as long as possible. The second change calls for an abstinence from all thoughts, a mental quiet, as well as an abstinence from anything that may be stressful. To the extent that one can release oneself by inner discipline from one’s negatives, to that extent will one release oneself from many troubles which might otherwise descend upon one. As irritations fell away from one’s personal feelings, ills of body, circumstance, or relationship fall away from threatening one’s personal fortunes. If the mind of a spiritual healer can help to remove disease, it is equally true that the mind of some other person can contribute to cause it. If one’s own wrong thinking may be partly or wholly responsible for one’s diseases, others who are thinking constantly or powerfully about one may be partly or even wholly responsible for them too. His is the basis of sorcery in the East and of witchcraft in the medieval West. The mental and emotional adjustment to frustration or loss which philosophy brings about is definitely therapeutic. If ignorance of the laws of our psychophysical being causes many people to contravene those laws and become sick, carelessness about obeying them brings illness to some who do not know them. Selfish people, worrying people, negative people, complaining people, venomous people need to find this inner peace. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
People have to learn not to conjure dark angels, which fill them with guile and hate One must focus on the Light of God. It will heal them of their moral maladies, which in turn may be the causes of their physical maladies. Psychosomatic illnesses are curable by physical means. However, either the cures are temporary or other symptoms of a different kind appear and replace hose which have disappeared. Merely to express belief in faith healing is no enough to receive healing. If they are directed towards the inner causes of the illness, there must also be willingness to make needed moral and psychological adjustments. Everyone without a single exception wants to be healed of one’s diseases but how few want just as much to be healed of their hatreds, their rages, and their lusts? It is sometimes possible to deduce the nature of the wrong-doing from the nature of the subsequent affliction. Although they have tightly bound my arms and legs, all over the mountain I hear the song of birds, and the forest is field with perfume of spring-flowers. Who can present me from freely enjoying these, which take from the long journey a little of its loneliness? God causes the rain to fall. Thou sustainest the living with lovingkindness, and in great mercy callest the departed to everlasting life. Thou upholdest the falling, healest the sick, settest free those in bondage, and keepest faith with those that sleep in the dust. Who is like uno Thee, Almighty King, who decreest death and life and bringest forth salvation? Faithful art Thou to grant eternal life to the departed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who callest the dead to life everlasting. Holy art Thou and holy is Thy name and unto Thee holy beings render praise daily. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Holy God. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!
Cresleigh Meadows is now selling! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes.
Homeowners will love the convenient commuter access to nearly Sacramento and Yuba City.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Go. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/












