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And Now the Purple Dusk of Twilight Time Steals Across the Meadows of My Heart!
Civilization beings with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos. If one is always a little hungry, never quite warm enough, and never falling prey to the dangers of the soft life of self-gratification, a person can think and meditate better. Meditation is just oiling the machinery and making the unused parts come into use. You have not done enough, you have never done enough, so long as it is possible that you have something of value to contribute. Let us now consider whether justice requires the toleration of the intolerant, and if so under what conditions. There are a variety of situations in which this question arises. Some political parties in democratic states hold doctrines that commit them to suppress the constitutional liberties whenever they have power. Again, there are those who reject intellectual freedom but who nevertheless hold positions in the university. It may appear that toleration in these cases is inconsistent with the principles of justice, or at any rate not required by them. I shall discuss the matter in connection with religious toleration. With appropriate alterations the argument can be extended to these other instances. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Several questions should be distinguished. First, there is the question whether an intolerant sect has any title to complain if it is not tolerated; second, under what conditions tolerant sects have a right not to tolerate those which are intolerant; and last, when they have the right not to tolerate them, for what ends it should be exercised. Beginning with the first question, it seems that an intolerant sect has no title to complain when it is denied an equal liberty. At least this follows if it is assumed that one has no title to object to the conduct of others that is in accordance with principles one would use in similar circumstance to justify one’s action toward them. A person’s right to complain is limited to violations of principles one acknowledges oneself. A complaint is a protest addressed to another in good faith. It claims a violation of a principle that both parties accept. Now, to be sure, an intolerant human will say that one acts in good faith and that one does not ask anything for oneself that one denies to others. One’s view, let us suppose, is that one is acting on the principle that God is to be obeyed and the truth accepted by all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
This principle is absolute authority is perfectly general and by acting on it one is not making an exception in one’s own case. As one sees that matter, one is following the correct principle others reject. The reply to this defense is that, from the standpoint of the original position (designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice), no particular interpretation of religious truth can be acknowledged as binding upon citizens generally; nor can it be agreed that there should be one authority with the right to settle questions of theological doctrine. Each person must insist upon an equal right t decide what one’s religious obligations are. One cannot give up this right to another person or institutional authority. In fact, a human exercises one’s liberty in deciding to accept anther as an authority even when one regards this authority as infallible, since in doing this one in no way abandons one’s equal liberty of conscience as a matter of constitutional law. For this liberty as secured by justice is imprescriptible: a person is always free to change one’s faith and this right does not depend upon one’s having exercised one’s powers of choice regularly or intelligently. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
We may observe that human beings having an equal liberty of conscience is consistent with the idea that all humans ought to obey God and accept the truth. The problem of liberty is that of choosing a principle by which the claims humans make on one another in the name of their religion are to be regulated. Granting that God’s will should be followed and the truth recognized does not as yet define a principle of adjudication. From the fact that God’s intention is to be complied with, it does follow that any person or institution has authority to interfere with another’s interpretation of one’s religious obligations. This religious principle justifies no one in demanding in law or politics a greater liberty for oneself. The only principles which authorize claims on institutions are those that would be chosen in the original position. Let us suppose, then, that an intolerant sect has no title to complain of intolerance. We still cannot say that tolerant sects have the right to suppress them. For one thing, others may have a right to complain. They may have this right not as a right to complain on behalf of the intolerant, but simply as a right to object whenever a principle of justice is violated. For justice is infringed whenever equal liberty is denied without sufficient reason. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The question, then, is whether being intolerant of another in grounds enough for limiting someone’s liberty. To simplify things, assumes that the tolerant sects have the right not to tolerate the intolerant in at least one circumstances, namely, when they sincerely and with reason believe that intolerance is necessary for their own security. This right follows readily enough since, as the original position is defined, each would agree to the right of self-preservation. Justice does not require that humans must stand idly by while others destroy the basis of their existence. Since it can never be to human’s advantage, from a general point of view, to forgo the right of self-protection, the only question, then, is whether the tolerant have a right to curb the intolerant when they are of no immediate danger to the equal liberties of others. Suppose that, in some way or other, an intolerant sect comes to exist within a well-ordered society accepting the two principles of justice. How are the citizens of this society to act in regard to it? Now certainly they would not suppress it simply because the members of the intolerant sect could not complain were they to do so. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Rather, since a just constitution exists, all citizens have a natural duty of justice to uphold it. We are not released from this duty whenever others are disposed to act unjustly. A more stringent condition is required: there must be some considerable risks to our own legitimate interests. Thus just citizens should strive to preserve the constitution with all its equal liberties as long as liberty itself and their own freedom are not in danger. They can properly force the intolerant to respect the liberty of others, since a person can be required to respect the rights established by principles that one would acknowledge in the original position. However, when the constitution itself is secure, there is no reason to deny freedom to the intolerant. The question of tolerating the intolerant is directly related to that of the stability of a well-ordered society regulated by the two principles. We can see this as follows. It is from the position of equal citizenship that persons join the various religious associations, and it is from this position that they should conduct their discussions with one another. Citizens in a free society should not think one another incapable of a sense of justice unless this is necessary for the sake of liberty itself. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
If an intolerant sect appears in a well-ordered society, the others should keep in mind the inherent stability of their institutions. The liberties of the intolerant may persuade them to a belief in freedom. This persuasion works on the psychological principle that those whose liberties are protected by and who benefit from a just constitution will, ceteris paribus (other things equal), acquire an allegiance to it over a period of times. So even if an intolerant sect should arise, provided that it is not so strong initially that it can impose its will straightway, or does not grow so rapidly that the psychological principle has no time to take hold, it will tend to lose its intolerance and accept liberty of conscience. This is the consequence of the stability of just institutions, for stability means that when tendencies to injustice arise other forces will be called into play that work to preserve the justice of the whole arrangement. Of course, the intolerant sect may be so strong initially or growing so fast that the forces making for stability cannot convert it to liberty. This situation presents a practical dilemma which philosophy alone cannot resolve it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Whether the liberty of the intolerant should be limited to preserve freedom under a just constitution depends on the circumstances. The theory of justice only characterizes the just constitution, the end of political action by reference to which practical decisions are to be made. In pursuing this end the natural strength of free institutions must not be forgotten, nor should it be supposed that tendencies to depart from them go unchecked and always win out. Knowing the inherent stability of a just constitution, members of a well-ordered society have the confidence to limit the freedom of the intolerant only in the special cases when it is necessary for preserving equal liberty itself. Therefore, while an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger. The tolerant should curb the intolerant only in this case. The leading principle is to establish a justice constitution with the liberties of equal citizenship. The just should be guided by the principles of justice and not the fact that the unjust cannot complain. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
It should be noted that even when the freedom of the intolerant is limited to safeguard a just constitution, this is not done in the name of maximizing liberty. The liberties of some are not suppressed simply to make possible a greater liberty for others. Justice forbids this sort of reasoning in connection with liberty as much as it does in regard to the sum of advantages. It is only the liberty of the intolerant which is to be limited, and this is done for the sake of equal liberty under a just constitution the principles of which the intolerant themselves would acknowledge in the original position. The argument in this and in the preceding sections suggests that the adoption of the principle of equal liberty can be viewed as a limiting case. Even though their differences are profound and no one knows how to reconcile them by reason, humans can, from the standpoint of the original position, still agree on this principle if they can agree on any principle at all. This idea which arose historically with religious toleration can be extended to other instances. Thus we can suppose that the persons in the original position know that they have moral convictions although, as the veil of ignorance requires, they do not know what these convictions are. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
They understand that the principles they acknowledge are to override these beliefs when there is a conflict; but otherwise they need not revise their opinions nor give them up when these principles do not uphold them. In this way the principles of justice can adjudicate between opposing moralities just as they regular the claims of rival religions. Within the framework that justice established, moral conceptions with different principles, or conceptions representing a different balancing of the same principles, may be adopted by various parts of society. What is essential is that when persons with different convictions make conflicting demands on the basic structure as a matter of political principle, they are to judge these claims by the principles of justice. The principles that would be chosen in the original position are the kernel of political morality. They not only specify the terms of cooperation between persons but they define a pact of reconciliation between diverse religions and moral beliefs, and the forms of culture to which they belong. If this conception of justice now seems largely negative, we shall see that it has a happier side. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
When we overcome our own selfish desires and put God first in our lives and covenant to serve God regardless of the cost, we are then living the law of sacrifice. One of the best ways to be sure we are keeping the first great commandment is to keep the second. “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have any strange god before me. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” The faithful are required to honour the name of God. If we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, it makes sense that we are naturally to respect the name of God with equal passion and vigour. The law of sacrifice provides an opportunity for us to prove to the Lord that we love Him more than any other thing. As a result the course sometimes becomes difficult since this process of perfection that prepares us for the celestial kingdom to “dwell in the presence of God and His Christ forever and ever,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 76.62. The sacred mission of the Church is to “invite all to come unto Christ,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 20.59. Come unto Christ and be perfected in Him. In that light, the law of sacrifice has always been a means for God’s children to come unto the Lord Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Let us here observe, that a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation; it is though the medium of the sacrifice of all Earthly things that humans do actually know that they are doing the things that are well pleasing in the sight of God. When a human has offered in sacrifice all that one has for the truth’s sake, not even withholding one’s life, and believing before God that one has been called to make this sacrifice because one seeks to do one’s will, one does know, most assuredly, that God does and will accept one’s sacrifice and offering, and that one has not, nor will seek one’s face in vain. Under these circumstances, then one can obtain the faith necessary for one to lay hold on eternal life. We know what we do is pleasing before God and understand that this knowledge comes to us through sacrifice and obedience. Those who come unto Christ in this way receive a confidence that whispers peace to their souls and that will eventually enable them to lay hold upon eternal life. Sacrifice allows us to learn something about ourselves—what we are willing to offer the Lord through our obedience. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Through sacrifice and service, one comes to know the Lord. As we sacrifice our selfish desires, serve our God and others, we become more like Him. We do this by our obedience to the commandments of God. Thus, the laws of obedience and sacrifice are indelibly intertwined. As we comply with these and other commandments, something wonderful happens to us. We become more sacred and holy—more like our Lord! In fact, the word sacrifice means literally “to make scared,” or “to render sacred.” Our first lessons about the law of sacrifice, as well as other gospel principles, began in our premotal life. We were taught the fulness of the gospel and the plan of salvation. We knew of the Saviour’s mission and of His futre atoning sacrifice, and we willingly sustained Christ as our Saviour and our Redeemer. In fact, we learn from Revelation 12.9, 11 that it is by “the blood of the Lamb” (Christ’s atoning sacrifice) and our testimony that we are able to overcome Satan. The Lord designed in the beginning to place before humans the knowledge of good and evil, and gave one a commandment to cleave to good and abstain from evil. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
However, if one should fail, God would give unto one the law of sacrifice and provide a Saviour for one, that one might be brought back again into the presence and favour of God and partake of eternal life with God. This is the plan of redemption chosen and instituted by the Alight before human was placed on Earth. Adam and Eve were taught the law of sacrifice and were commanded to practice it by giving offerings. These included two emblems: the firstlings of the flock and the first fruits of the field. They obeyed without questioning. The effect of this law was that the best of the Earth produced, the best specimen in the flock or heard should not be sued for self, but for God. At a time in history when it was a struggle to make sure the family had food, those who sought to worship the Lord were asked to sacrifice the best part of their source of life. It was the real test of Adam and Eve’s faith, and they obeyed. “And now I speak concerning baptism. Behold, elders, priests, and teachers were baptized; and they were not baptized save they brought forth fruit meet that they were worthy of it. Neither did they receive any unto baptism save they came forth with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, and witnessed unto the church that they truly repented of all their sins. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
“And none were received unto baptism save they took upon them the name of Christ, having a determination to serve him to the end. And after they had been received unto baptism, and were wrought upon and cleansed by the power of the Holy Ghost, they were numbered among the people of the church of Christ; and their names were taken that they might be remembered and nourished by the good word of God, to keep them in the right way, to keep them continually watchful unto prayer, relying alone upon the merits of Christ, who was the author and the finisher of their faith. And the church did meet together oft, to fast and to pray, and to speak one with another concerning the welfare of their souls. And hey did meet together oft to partake of bread and wine, in remembrance of the Lord Jesus. And they were strict to observe that there should be no iniquity among them; and whoso was found to commit iniquity, and three witnesses of the church did condemn them before the elders, and if they repented not and confessed not, their names were blotted out, and they were not numbered among the people of Christ. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
“However, as oft as they repented and sought forgiveness, with real intent, they were forgiven. And their meetings were conducted by the church after the manner of the workings of the Spirit, and by the power of the Holy Ghost; for as the power of the Holy Ghost led them whether to preach, or to exhort, or to pray, or to supplicate, or to sing, even so it was done,” reports Moroni 6.1-9. It is especially in our families and similarly close associations that we must identify the elements of assault and withdrawal that defeat love and right relation to others. By insight and practice we must break away from them and reserve them, first by learning a calm but firm non-cooperation with those poisonous elements, and then by initiatives of goodwill and blessing in the midst of them. What we do in our meetings as Christians should be focused on enabling us to do this effectively wherever we are. Those meetings should and could be centers from which powerfully redemptive community spreads. Where to start? In various parts of the United States of America, publicly owned vehicles (police, street maintenance, schools) wear a bumper sticker that proclaims, “There is No Excuse for Domestic Violence.” It is a wonderful idea. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, we need to go deeper, of course. We need to become the kind of people whom domestic violence is unthinkable and never an option. We must be transformed in such a way that our minds and bodies—our very souls—simply do not have the makeup for it. This is the work of the Christian spiritual formations. We must begin in the family. Now the slogan must be, “There is No Excuse for Assault or Withdrawal in the Home.” Do you think that would take care of intimate partner violence? Of course it would. However, the reserve is not true: merely avoiding the subject of intimate partner violence, domestic violence or assault can still leave the home a hell of cutting remarks, contempt, coldness, and withdrawal or noninvolvement. Such a hell is often found in the homes of Christians and even of Christian leaders. Frequently they seem to honestly think that such a condition is normal, and they have no knowledge of any other way. Their very theology may strengthen this tragically false outlook. If I were married, I would seek the help of my spouse in this matter. If not, then a trusted friend who is spiritually mature and not abusive. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
I would then number my areas of need in order of importance, say: Purity, Mind, Prayer, Witness, Giving, Work, Friendship, and Leadership. Then, beginning with the first need, Purity, I would look over the suggested sub-disciplines and choose one to three things which I think would best help me improve. In doing this, I would resist the temptation to commit myself to too many disciplines. Better to succeed in a few than to assure failure by overcommitment. Perhaps, regarding the discipline of Purity I would choose to commit myself, first, to memorizing Scripture which help steel me to temptations, and second, to not watching anything sensual on TV or at the movies. Perhaps under Witness, I would make commitments to pray that God would give me someone to share Christ with and to join an interest club to meet unchurched people. After going through my life I would have perhaps twenty specific things which I could do to improve my eight weakest areas. However, before commitment to the specifics, I would look at the whole list with honest realism, asking, “Are the things which I am about to commit to really within my reach with the help of God?” #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Perhaps, regarding the discipline of Mind, I have become so convicted that I am considering committing myself to reading the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice, plus reading The Book of Mormon. Make sure your commitments make you sweat, but also make sure that taken together they are manageable. It is better to increase your commitments as you succeed than to bite off more than you can do. Success begets success. Before setting your commitments in concrete, give yourself a week to think about them and pray over them. Seek the Holy Spirit’s guidance for other ways of personal discipline not mentioned in this essay. Ask your spouse of friend to hold you accountable for your disciplines. Even if it has to be over the phone, make sure you regularly confer and pray. Be honest about your success and failures. And be willing to take advice and make adjustments. You may have some complications, no doubt, and may not succeed at time. When this happens, wounded pride and embarrassment can make you want to take your marbles and go home. We do not like to do things which we fail. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
However, we must realize that failure is a part of succeeding, provided we admit our failures and go at it again. Moreover, we are not under Law but grace. God is not counting our failure against us, and we are not building a treasure of merit with our success. We are simply trying to live a disciplined life which pleases our loving Father—and He understands our failures better than we understand our own children’s. When the movement in one direction has exhausted itself, there is a pause, and then a reversal directs the movement into the opposite direction. The flow of Nature follows the course indicated by the Principle of Reversion, which throws it back after a time in the opposite direction. When the point of farthest travel is reached, the forces reverse themselves. In this way, excess disciplines and even defeats itself. In this way too the Universe and all the different kinds of existence in it are kept in equilibrium. In the to-and-fro movement of human breathing, we have a kay to human development. Study it well with this assistance and you will discern a forward and backward movement, a pendulum-like swing, here too. Everything in the Universe is subject to a pendulum-like movement. It shuttles to and from with a coming-to-be and a ceasing-to-be effect. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Winchester Mystery House
Sarah Winchester had multiple rooms dedicated to plants and flowers. This room, her South Conservatory, contains over 200 panes of glass to allow for natural light. How would you spend a day alone in this room?
Explore the house from the comfort of your own home!
Learn More Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
Oh Come All Ye Faithful, Joyful and Triumphant—Behold Him Born the King of Angels!
Fear of losing is what makes competitors so great. Show me a gracious loser and I will show you a perennial loser. As Christmas day is upon us, each and everyone of us should open our hearts to receive once again a witness that Christ was born as the Saviour of the World, that He lives, and that because of Him, we will live again. Despite of al the distractions, Christmas is what we make of it, and at the center of our celebration is Christ. Because we keep the spirit of Christ, we will feel with spirit of Christmas. Christ came to Earth so we would have a perfect example to follow. As we strive to become more like Him, we will have joy and happiness in our lives and peace each day of the year. It is Christ’s example, which if followed, stirs within us more kindness and love, more respect and concern for others. Because Christ came, there is meaning to our mortal existence. Because Christ same, we know how to reach out to those in trouble or in distress, wherever they may be. Because Christ came, death hast lost its sting, the grave its victory. We will live again because Christ came. Because Christ came and paid for our sins, we have the opportunity to gain eternal life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Because Christ came, we are gathered here to worship Him and thank God for our lives and salvation. May of Christ’s precious Spirit, we will have a great and wonderful Christmas as we remember the gifts God has given us, and as best we can, we will offer these gifts to others. The spirit of Christmas is something I hope that every young person will have in their heart and in their lives, not only at this particular season but throughout the year. We are all naturally more comfortable when we are reaching out to others like us—likes winning likes—the rich winning the rich, lawyers lawyer, basketball players basketball plays, clerks clerks. However, that is not the ideal set by Jesus and the Early Church. Rather, we are to have a heart so filled with love, so willing to go the extra mile, that we reach out to anybody we come in contact with, regardless of any barriers. How are we to go about this? We must first understand that it is never to be done in patronizing “do-gooder” manner, but rather with a relational egalitarianism informed by God’s Word, understanding that we reach across barriers as sinners, equal to equal. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The opportunities are virtually limitless: lonely foreign students who long for contact with someone who genuinely cares; marginalized people desperately seeking to find justice as fairness in the mainstream culture; single people alone and in need of sanctuary and protection; the ever-present people at the bottom of the salary scale. It is not natural to cross barriers. It takes the supernatural heart of Christ, a heart which can only come through conscious prayer and discipline. Every believer is called to have a heart that reaches out. Will you pray for this heart for yourself? Will you discipline your heart to reach out? Jesus longs for your heart to beat with His. “The steps of a good human are ordered by the Lord,” reports Psalm 37.23. The ministering heart, like Jesus’ heart, senses that some beings are eternally glorious or lost souls, and treats all accordingly. The heart God uses is disciplined in perspective, seeing all its human relationships as sovereignly ordered encounters with eternal beings. To this heart, all life’s relationships are shrouded with the numinous-pulsating with spiritual potential—part of an eternal drama in which Christ has a special part to play. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
The heart which is disciplined to labour, to reach out, and to see life’s relationship full of divine potential is, above all, a dangerously enlarged heart. Its high ideals and expanded sympathies makes it susceptible to a list of sorrows unknown to a small heart, but it is also open to a catalogue of joys the shriveled heart will never know. Cultivate a small heart and life may be smooth sailing, but you will never experience the exhilaration of the wind of the Spirit in your sails. Humans, the choice is ours. May we discipline ourselves for ministry. The word discipline means to “discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness,” report 1 Timothy 4.7. The rich etymology of “discipline” suggests a conscious divestment f all encumbrances, and then a determined investment of all one’s energies. Just as ancient athletes discarded everything and competed gumnos (naked), so must the disciplined Christian human divest oneself of every association, habit, and tendency which impedes godliness. Then, with this lean spiritual nakedness accomplished, one must invest all one’s energy and sweat in the pursuit of godliness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
The lithe, sculpted figure of the classic Greek runner gives the idea. Stripped naked, he has put his perspiration into thousands of miles for the purpose of running well. Even so, the successful Christian life is always, without exception, a stripped-down, disciplined, sweaty affair. The understanding that vigorous spiritual discipline is essential to godliness accords with the universal understand that discipline is necessary to accomplish anything in this life. The legendary success of Tom Brady NFL football quarterback of the New England Patriots has won three league MVP awards, six Super Bowls, and four Super Bowl MVP Award, and is a 14-time Pro Bowler. Brady has also twice led the NFL in passing yards. These accomplishments are a testimony to his remarkably disciplined life. Anne Rice’s massive literary discipline has transformed the way people think of popular culture and has attracted more youth to reading novels. Michangelo’s, da Vinci’s, and Tintoretto’s billion sketches, quantitative discipline of their work, prepared the way to the enduring cosmic quality of the works. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Sarah Winchester’s beautiful mansion, which was under constant construction for 38 years, and which is currently undergoing some restoration projects shows how one woman’s determination and discipline make her into a historical icon because her mansion is an architectural wonder. Winston Churchill, speaker of the century, was anything but a natural—unless by “natural” we mean a naturally disciplined man who overcame his remarkable impediments through much hard work and extra effort. Ignace Jan Paderewski the brilliant pianist, said it all when he remarked to an over ardent admirer, “Madam, before I was a genius, I was a drudge.” It is an immutable fact that we will never get anywhere in life without discipline—especially in spiritual matters. There are some who have innate athletic or musical advantages. However, none of us can claim an innate spiritual advantage. Some of us are inherently righteous, some of us naturally seek God, and some are reflexively good. To stay that way and help influence others, it takes discipline. Punishment calls for retributive suffering. However, discipline is training that corrects, molds, or perfects. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
We have come to recognize that certain behaviours are love destroying acts and therefore cannot be tolerated. These include things such as sassing, teasing, and name-calling. “Behold, mine is a house of order, saith the Lord God, and not a house of confusion,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 132.8. Order is an eternal principle—an important characteristic of the kingdom of God. We are instructed to follow the pattern and set our own houses in order. “And now a commandment I give unto you—if you will be delivered you shall set in order your own house,” Doctrine and Covenants 93.43. This grand spiritual axiom has provided the basis for our examination of sixteen disciplines which are essential to a godly life—the disciplines of: Purity, Marriage, Fatherhood, Friendship, Mind, Devotion, Prayer, Worship, Integrity, Tongue, Work, Church, Leadership, Giving, Witness, and Ministry. It is an intimidating list, to say the least! And it is made even more daunting—in that each of the disciplines has been presented to an intentionally prescriptive “do this” manner. In fact, each of the sixteen headings contain an average of seven recommended disciplines—which amounts to over 100 “do’s!” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
How then are we to respond? Certainly not with the “do nothing” passivity which has become increasingly characteristic of the American human. For many humans, a challenge is an opportunity to duck—to pull up the covers and stay in bed—“There is so much to do…I do not know where to begin…” –the paralysis of analysis. On the other hand, an equally deadly response is self-sufficient legalism. Admittedly, it is less a statistical danger than passivity. Nevertheless, there are many whose mind-sets could easily appropriate the sixteen disciplines and their multiplied “do’s” as a Draconian structure for a harsh legalistic hybrid. Oh, what possibilities we have for a list! “So you missed some days of reading the Bible this week? Shame! Remember, five pages a day puts the Bible away.” –“If Harry is the husband he says he is he would have gotten the door.” God saves us from the reductionism of such legalism which enshrines spirituality as a series of wooden laws and then says, “If you can do these six, sixteen or sixty-six things, you will be godly.” Christianity, godliness, is far more than a checklist. Being “in Christ” is a relationship, and like all relationships it deserves disciplined maintenance, but never legalistic reductionism. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
God save us also from self-righteous judgmentalism. How easily our sinful hearts can imagine our lists to elevate us, while at the same time providing us with a merciless rack of which to stretch others in judgment. As we said when we began, there is a Universe of difference between the motivations behind legalism and discipline. Legalism says, “I will do this to gain merit with God,” while discipline says, “I will do this because I love God and want to please Him.” Legalism is human-centered; discipline is God-centered. Paul the arch anti-legalist said, “Discipline [train] yourself to be godly”! An orderly home depends upon well-defined and well-understood rules. One way the Lord maintains order in His kingdom is to bless those who obey certain laws. “There is a law, irrevocably decreed in Heaven before the foundations of this World, upon which all blessings are predicated—and when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 130.20-21. An orderly home also operates on this important principle. Family rules must be established and observed before the blessing of family harmony can be attained. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
True discipline, other than determination, is not emotionally charged. Punishment, on the other hand, is frequently accompanied by a tide of uncontrolled emotion. There is no value in screaming at a child for misbehaviour. When parents engage in a shouting match with their children, the emotional temperature in the home rises and parents become guilty of the very thing the scriptures caution against: “Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, least they be discouraged,” reports Colossians 3.21. The structure of the Universe is built on two principles which, although opposite in tendency, work together to produce Nature’s harmonious order. The Universe is a conflict of opposites controlled by Eternal Justice. All things in Nature show this polarity of opposed characters. All forces and movements in Nature show it in their striving to adjust, balance, reconcile or unite their contradictory activities and conflicting rhythms. There is hardly any situation which does not have its composition of good and bad, at the same time. A favoured life is faulted at some point, an ill-favoured one compensated for in some way. The inexperience of youth is balanced by its vitality, the accumulated experience of maturity is countered by its infirmities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Opposite tendencies co-operate to produce an equilibrium in Nature. The notion that anything outside of God can exist or have meaning by itself is a false one. The Universe is what it is only because it depends on an equilibrium of opposing forces or of pairs of things united in opposition. The objective of Balance is held not only before a human but also before the Universe itself. The movements and forces within it are set for attraction and repulsion, opposition and contrast, so that as they balance themselves its own equilibrium is maintained. The cosmos has its own integral balance, or it could not remain a cosmos. And it must keep this balance all the time and in all places. Abrupt changes in history and brusque changes in ideas came in our time partly because they were due by Eternal Justice, or even overdue, and partly because of pressure from the World-Idea. All this means that the so-called good and the so-called bad interplay again to find a temporary equilibrium. Nature keeps her equilibrium by bringing in counter forces, or complementary ones, to correct or balance any condition where too much has gone too far. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
When the pairs of opposites, the contradictory forces, are brought into a reciprocal unity, equilibrium is established and harmony prevails. The opposites and the different meet here, are held in equilibrium, balance and supplement one another. It includes opposites, reconciles contradictories, unites differences. In this World, everything exists with an opposite. These opposites are contrasts, but also complements and in this sense dependent upon one another. The art of life, so far as these opposites affect us, is to establish a proper equilibrium between them. It is the equilibrium in which the pared opposites and the tension between them come to rest. Experience teaches human beings that life is governed by duality, that like Nature itself, it holds contrast and oppositions within itself. Just as day and night are positive and negative poles, so are joy and sorrow. However, just as there is a point where day meets night, a point which we call the twilight, so in our experience, human experience, the joys and sorrows have a neutral point—and in Nature, an equilibrium. So the mind must find its own equilibrium, and thus it will find its own sense of peace. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
To see that duality governs everything is to see why human life is one tremendous paradox. One accepts the tension that exists between the indivisible and interdependent opposites which compose life but puts it into one’s own inner harmony and tranquility. Opposites are generated by the Heavenly and Earthly energies. They complement each other; although independent, the effect is to work together. The one is positive and the other is passive. Finally, they test and complete each other. The philosophic ideal is to balance the two harmoniously. The polarity of Earthly Justice goes through all existence and therefore all experience. Neither can be destroyed, but what can be done is to bring them together, to reconcile them on a higher place. Here as in all the other dimensions of our life, the progression of redemption in our relations to others depends upon what we do as well as what God does for us and in us. And in order to do our part in the process of spiritual formation of social relations we must deeply identify and understand what is wrong in our relations with others (whether that wrong is coming from us or toward us) and how it can be changed. Thus we have spoken of assault and withdrawal. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Assault comes first in the development of a child, and it arises primarily from the conflicts of desire. The child wants something that another has. It does what it can to take that thing away from the other. However, the other resists, and the children involved become angry with each other. They therefore try to harm each other. This is the story of Cain, or the Republicans and Democrats. Or perhaps they experience envy and are displeased with one another because of that. Perhaps there is a status that one enjoys and the other does not. Feelings of resentment and contempt may arise and play back, back, forth and forth between them. As we grow older, theft, lying, murder, adultery, and settled attitudes of covetousness fall into place. These are all forms of assault on others. Central to them all is the will to make another suffer and suffer loss. The last six of the Ten Commandments therefore deal with assault, with the primary ways in which we are likely to injure, by aggressive action, those in social relation with us. With the exception of the sixth commandment, they are all explicitly negative—“Thou shalt not…” #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The six commandment, “Honour your father and mother,” deals with a relation so intimate in its nature that the command with reference to it must be positive, for to omit the positive here would amount to an injury to both parties involved. That also is why this “the first commandment with a promise,” as Paul said (Ephesians 6.2). Violation of it disrupts the human soul and makes dysfunctional people as nothing else does. Now we can see immediately that spiritual formation in Christ will mean becoming persons who would not, and therefore do not, assault those whom they stand in relation, those whom they are with. Of course the overall teaching of the Bible about assault is much more profonde and subtle than just these six commandments, which can be regarded as the rock bottom essentials for right relations to others. However, there are many ways of assaulting people and these merge into our other category of wrong in relationships, that of withdrawal. Here we see again, for example, the power of the tongue. A verbal assault (which can be done in very refined as well as brutal ways—we speak of a “cutting remark”) is specifically designed to hurt its object and to inflict loss of standing or respect in their own eyes and before others. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
You will find many people who never in their lifetime recover from particular verbal assault, or a pattern thereof, or from other nonverbal forms of harassment or degrading treatment they have received. Most often this happens to people while very young or otherwise weak and unprotected. However, withdrawal within a relationship, like assault, also wounds those involved. And the tongue, as is well known, can assault by withdrawal, by not speaking. So, to reemphasize an essential point, we do not want to draw too sharp a line between assault and withdrawal, for withdrawal is often by intention a form of assault or attack. Some forms of it are not, however, and may instead be motivated by weakness, fear, uncertainty, or even aesthetic considerations (“pretty,” “ugly,” and so on), rather than any direct will to harm. Often our own weakness and limitations make us withdraw without intending injury or even recognizing its possibility. Yet injure it does. To those without full consciousness of God’s enfolding love and power, no combination of good motives and explanation can prevent or heal the wounds of withdrawal. Without God, we can at most become hardened against them and “carry on.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
So far from assault and withdrawal, the social area of our life is meant by God to be a play of constant mutual blessing. Pain and dysfunction result from the lack of this. Of course there are degrees of “withness” or involvement that human beings have with one another, and these make a difference in the precise character of the “mutual blessing” appropriate in the given case. However, every contact with a human being should be one of goodwill and respect, with a readiness to acknowledge, make way for, or assist the other in suitable ways. Important to remember is the solemn truth: Obedience to God’s law will bring liberty and eternal life, whereas disobedience will bring captivity and death. In has been said by one, years ago, that history turns on small hinges, and so do people’s lives. Our lives will depend upon the decisions which we make—for decisions determine destiny. Decisions have their eternal consequences; for example, the decision made by the people at the time the prophet Noah, when they laughed and they mocked and they jeered as this prophet of God erected a vessel called an ark. However, when the rain began to come and when the rain failed to cease, they ceased from their laughing and their jeering. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
The people who mocked Noah has made a decision contrary to the instructions of God’s prophet, and they paid for that decision with their very lives. Each youth, indeed all of us, have the responsibility to make vitally important decisions. Our decisions may not be to invade the coast of Normandy, and they certainly will not be to ride with the Mongol hoards towards the gates of Riverlake; and we will not be called upon to make quite the same decision as did the people at the time of Noah. However, there are certain decisions that you young people make. They are all important. However, we should be our faith in the Heavenly Father, that each one should have the responsibility to find out for oneself whether or not this gospel of Jesus Christ is true. As we read the Bible and the Book of Mormon and the other standard works, as we put the teachings to the test, then we will know to the doctrine, for this is our promise; we will know whether it be of human or whether it be of God. Our quest can have far-reaching consequences. The World-Idea is not like a human architect’s planning. It is a mighty creative idea, pressing forward into activity, or retreating inward to repose, according to cyclic need. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The World-Idea contains the twin forces of evolution and involution—the two go together—but although they are simultaneously present in the whole, they act separately and at different times on each individual cell, entity, creature, or substance. Their presence and activity can be seen both in Nature and in human life. This history of universal events, the ceaseless developments and evolutions as well as the retrogressions, cataclysms, and destructions, the energies and substances, express the World-Idea. It is inherent in all things, latent in all laws of Nature. We must hold that the will of God is the cause of things; and that God acts by the will, and not, as some have supposed, by a necessity of His nature. This can be shown in three ways: First, from the order itself of active causes. Since both the intellect and nature act for an end, the natural agent must have the end and the necessary means predetermined for it by some higher intellect; as the end and definite movement is predetermined for the arrow by the archer. Hence the intellectual and voluntary agent must precede the agent that acts by nature. Hence, since God is first in the order of agents, He must act by intellect and will. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
This is shown, secondly, from the character of a natural agent, of which the property is to produce one and the same effect; for nature operates in one and the same way unless it be prevented. This is because the nature of the act is according to the nature of the agent; and hence as long as it has that nature, its acts will be in accordrance with that nature; for every natural agent has a determinate being. Since, then, the Divine Being is undetermined, and contains in Himself the full perfection of being, it cannot be that He acts b a necessity of His nature, unless He were to cause something undetermined and indefinite in being: and that this is impossible has been already shown. God does not, therefore, act by a necessity of His nature, but determined effects proceed from His own infinite perfection according to the determination of God’s will and intellect. Thirdly, it is shown by the relation of effects to their cause. For effects proceed from the agent that causes them, in so far as they pre-exist in the agent; since every agent produces its like. Now effects pre-exist in their cause after the mode of the cause. Wherefore since the Divine Being is His own intellect, effect pre-exist in Him after the mode of intellect, and therefore proceed from God after the same mode. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Consequently, they proceed from God after the mode of will, for His inclination to put in act what His intellect has conceived appertains to the will. Therefore the will of God is the cause of things. As God communicates His goodness, it is not merely to certain things, but to all; and as election implies a certain distinction. Because the essence of God is His intellect and will, from the fact of His acting by His essence, it follows that God acts after the mode of the intellect and will. God is the object of the will. The words, therefore, “Because God is good, God is great, we exist,” are true inasmuch as His goodness and greatness are the reason of His willing all other things. Even in us the cause of one and the same effect is knowledge as directing it, whereby the form of the work is conceived, and will as commanding it, since the form as it is in the intellect only is not determined to exist or not to exist in the effect, except by the will. Hence, the speculative intellect has nothing to say to operation. However, the power is cause, as executing the effect, since it denotes the immediate principle of operation. However, in God all these things are one. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Adequate preparation enhances the ability to think and decide, which is why school is so important. However, we find many people who are willing to alibi or who make excuse for failure. I urge you not to take counsel of your fears. I hope you will not say, “I am not smart enough t study chemical engineering; hence, I will study something less strenuous.” “I cannot apply myself sufficiently well to study this difficult subject or in this comprehensive field; hence, I will choose the easier way.” I plead with you to choose the hard way and tax your talents. Our Heavenly Father will make you equal to your tasks. If ne should stumble, is one should take a course and get less than the “A: grade desired, I hope such a one will not let it become a discouraging thing to one. I hope that one will rise and try again. Remember, you are a superstar. If we strive for it, all can have the guidance and direction of our Heavenly Father. “The manner of their elders and priests administering the flesh and blood of Christ unto the church; and they administered it according to the commandments of Christ; wherefore we know the manner to be true; and the elder or priest did minister it—and they did kneel down with the church, and pray to the Father in the name of Christ. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
“What they said during their prayer was, ‘O God, the Eternal Father, we ask thee in name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify this bread to the souls of all those who partake of it; that they may eat in remembrance of the body of thy Son, and witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father, that they are willing to take upon them the same of thy Son, and always remember him, and keep his commandments which he hath given them, that they may always have his Spirit to be with them. Amen,’” reports Moroni 4.1-3. Dear Lord in Heaven, please do not withhold you lightning spears, God whose own is true, shower the Earth with an abundance of rain and snow so we will have a wonderful spring and summer, and a bountiful harvest. God, please here the words of the one who loves you. And God, being full of compassion forgiveth iniquity, and destroyeth not. Yea, often He turneth His anger away and doth not stir up all His indignation. Thou, O Lord, wilt not withhold Thy mercies from me; Thy loving kindness and Thy truth will continually preserve me. Please, remember, O Lord, Thy mercies and Thy loving kindness for they have been from old. Ascribe power unto God. His majesty is over America, and His strength is in the Heavens. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Cresleigh Homes
Getting everything prepped for the festivities! How do you like to spend your Christmas Eve? 🎄✨
It is the Nature of Faith to Believe God Upon His Bare Word!
Sometimes you win in the first year under a new coach on enthusiasm and vitality and newness alone. It is a kind of high unto itself. However, then, when the romance is tailing off, you have to find a way to keep it up. That is the hard part. In football or any other marriage. A very relevant point—and one interesting for the analysis of contemporary industrial society deals with the whole question of economic scarcity among primitive hunters and the modern attitude toward the problem of what constitutes poverty. By common understanding an affluent society is one in which all the people’s wants are easily satisfied; and though we are pleased to consider this happy condition the unique achievement of industrial civilization, a better case can be made for hunters and gatherers, even many of the marginal ones spared to ethnography. For wants are “easily satisfied,” either by producing much or desiring little there are, accordingly, two possible roads to affluence. Adopting a Zen strategy a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty, although perhaps only a low standard of living. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Scarcity is the peculiar obsession of a business economy, the calculable condition of all who participate in it. The market makes freely available a dazzling array of products—all these “good things” are within a human’s reach—but never one’s grasp, for one never has enough to buy everything. To exist in a market economy is to live out a double tragedy, beginning in inadequacy and ending in deprivation. We stand sentenced to life at hard labour. It is from this anxious vantage that we look back on the hunter. However, if modern humans, with all their technical advantages, still has not got the wherewithal, what chance has this naked savage with one’s puny bow and arrow? Having equipped the hunter with bourgeois impulses and Paleolithic tools, we judge one’s hopeless situation in advance. Scarcity is not an intrinsic property of technical means. It is a relation between means and ends. We might entertain the empirical possibility that hunters are in business for their health, a finite objective, and bow and arrow are adequate to that end. A fair case can be made that hunters often work much less than we do, and rather than a grind the food quest is intermittent, leisure is abundant, and there is more sleep in the daytime per capita than in any other conditions of society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Rather than anxiety, it would seem, the hunters have a confidence born of affluence, of a condition in which all the people’s wants (such as they are) are generally easily satisfied. This confidence does not desert them during hardship. Many people question the assumption that a hunter-gather life is generally a precarious one of struggle for existence: Rather data on hunter-gathers, show a radically different picture. Reputable archaeologists have sometimes failed to appreciate the fallacy inherent in rating prehistoric communicates in terms of their surviving material culture. Words such as “degenerate” are taken from their usage to denote an assumed place in a typological series of pots, for instance, and transferred with an emotive and even moral connotation to the markers of the vessels; people with poor and scanty pottery become stigmatized as “poverty-stricken,” though their poverty may well have been only in their failure to provide the archaeologist with one’s favourite product. Social scientists distort the picture of societies under their observations by judging them from what seems to be the “nature” of economics, just as they come to conclusion about the nature of humans from the data, if not modern humans, at least of humans as we know them through most of the civilized history. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Justice as fairness provides strong arguments for an equal liberty of conscious. Therefore the parties have good grounds for adopting this principle. It is obvious that these considerations are also important in making the case for the priority of liberty. From the perspective of the constitution convention these arguments lead to the choice of a regime guaranteeing moral liberty and freedom of thought and belief, and of religious practice, although these may be regulated as always by the state’s interest in public order and security. The state can favour no particular religion and no penalties of disabilities may be attached to any religious affiliation or lack thereof. The notion of a confessional state is rejected. Instead, particular associations may be freely organized as their members wish, and they may have their members have a real choice of whether to continue their affiliation. The law protects the right of sanctuary in the sense that apostasy is not recognized, much less penalized, as a legal offense, any more than is having no religion at all. In these ways the state upholds moral and religious liberty. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Liberty of conscience is limited, everyone agrees, by the common interest in public order and security. This limitation itself is readily derivable from the contract point of view. First of all, acceptance of this limitation does not imply that public interests are in any sense superior to moral and religious interests; nor does it require that government view religious matters as things indifferent or claim the right to suppress philosophical beliefs whenever they conflict with affairs of state. The government has no authority to render associations either legitimate or illegitimate any more than it has the authority in regard to art and science. These matters are simply not within its competence as defined by a just constitution. Rather, given the principles of justice, the state must be understood as the association consisting of equal citizens. It does not concern itself with philosophical and religious doctrine but regulates individuals’ pursuit of their moral and spiritual interests in accordance with principles to which they themselves would agree in an initial situation of equality. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
By exercising its powers in this way the government acts as the citizens’ agent and satisfies the demands of their public conception of justice. Therefore the notion of the omnicompetent laicist state is also denied, since from the principle of justice it follows that government has neither the right nor the duty to do what it or a majority (or whatever) wants to do in questions of morals and religion. Its duty is limited to underwriting the conditions of equal moral and religious liberty. Granting all this, it now seems evident that, in limiting liberty reference to the common interest in public order and security, the government acts on a principle that would be chosen in the original position. For in this position each recognizes that the disruption of these conditions is a danger for the liberty of all. This follows once the maintenance of public order is understood as a necessary condition for everyone’s achieving one’s ends whatever they are (provided they lie within certain limits) and for one’s fulfilling one’s interpretation of one’s moral and religious obligations. To retrain liberty of conscience at the boundary, however inexact, of the state’s interest in public order is a limit derived from the principle of the common interest, that is, the interest of the representative equal citizen. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
If the government is to carry out its duty of impartially supposing the conditions necessary for everyone’s pursuit of their interests and living up to their obligations as they understand them, the government’s right to maintain public order and security is an enabling right, a right which the government must have. Furthermore, only when there is a reasonable expectation that not doing so will damage the public order which the government should maintain, is it acceptable for liberty of conscience to be limited. This expectation must be based on evidence and ways of reasoning acceptable to all. It must be supported by ordinary observation and modes of thought (including the methods of rational scientific inquiry where these are not controversial) which are generally recognized as correct. Now this reliance on what can be established and known by everyone is itself founded on the principles of justice. It implies no particular metaphysical doctrine or theory of knowledge. For this criterion appeals to what everyone can accept. It represents an agreement to limit liberty only by reference to a common knowledge and understanding of the World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Adopting this standard does not infringe upon anyone’s equal freedom. On the other hand, a departure from generally recognized ways of reasoning would involve a privileged place for the views of some over others, and a principle which permitted this could not be agreed to in the original position. Furthermore, in holding that the consequences for the security of public order should not be merely possible or in certain cases even probable, but reasonably certain or imminent, there is again no implication of a particular philosophical theory. Rather this requirement expresses the high place which must be accorded to liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. We may note at this point an analogy with the method of making interpersonal comparisons of well-being. These are founded on the index of primary goods that one my reasonably expect, primary goods being those which everyone is presumed to want. This basis of comparison is one to which the parties can agree for the purposes of social justice. It does not require subtle estimates of human’s capacity for happiness much less of the relative worth of their plans of life. We need not question the meaningfulness of these notions; but they are inappropriate for designing just institutions. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Similarly, the parties consent to publicly recognized criteria to determine what counts as evidence that their equal liberty is pursued in ways injurious to the common interest in public order and to the liberty of others. These principles of evidence are adopted for the aims of justice; they are not intended to apply to all questions of meaning and truth. How far they are valid in philosophy and science is a separate matter. The characteristic feature of these arguments for liberty of conscience is that they are based solely on a conception of justice. Toleration is not derived from practical necessities or reasons of state. Moral and religious freedom follows from the principle of equal liberty; and assuming the priority of this principle, the only ground for denying the equal liberties is to avoid an even greater injustice, an even greater loss of liberty. Moreover, the argument does not rely on any special metaphysical or philosophical doctrine. It does not presuppose that all truths can be established by ways of thought recognized by common sense, a logical construction out of what can be observed or evidenced by rational scientific inquiry. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The appeal is indeed to common sense, to generally shared ways of reasoning and plain facts accessible to all, but it is framed in such a way as to avoid these larger presumptions. Nor, on the other hand, does the case for liberty imply skepticism in philosophy or indifference to religion. Perhaps arguments for liberty of conscience can be given that have one or more of these doctrines as a premise. There is no reason to be surprised at this, since different arguments can have the same conclusion. However, we need not pursue this question. The case for liberty is at least as strong as its strongest argument; the weak and fallacious ones are best forgotten. Those who would deny liberty of conscious cannot justify their action by condemning philosophical skepticism and indifference to religion, nor by appealing to social interests and affairs of state. Only when it is necessary for liberty itself, to prevent an invasion of freedom that would be still worse is the limitation of liberty is justified. The parties in the constitutional convention, then, must choose a constitution that guarantees an equal liberty of conscience regulated solely by forms of argument generally accepted, and limited only when such argument establishes a reasonably certain interference with the essentials of public order. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Liberty is governed by the necessary conditions for liberty itself. Now by this elementary principle alone many grounds of intolerance accepted in past ages are mistaken. Thus, for example, Dr. Aquinas justified the death penalty for heretics on the ground that is it a far graver matter to corrupt the faith, which is the life of the soul, than to counterfeit money which sustains life. So if it is just to put to death forgers and other criminals, heretics may a fortiori be similarly dealt with. However, the premises on which Aquinas relies cannot be established by modes of reasoning commonly recognized. It is a matter of dogma that faith is the life of the soul and that the suppression of heresy, that is, departures from ecclesiastical authority, is necessary for the safety of souls. Again, the reasons given for limited toleration often run afoul of this principle. Thus Dr. Rousseau thought that people would find it impossible to live in peace with those whom they regarded as damned, since to love them would be to hate God who punishes them. Dr. Rousseau believed that those who regard others as damn must either torment or convert them, and therefore sects preaching this conviction cannot be trusted to preserve civil peace. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Dr. Rousseau would not, then, tolerate those religions which say that outside the church there is no salvation. However, the consequences of such dogmatic belief which Dr. Rousseau conjectures are not borne out by experience. A priori psychological argument, however plausible, is not sufficient to abandon the principle of toleration, since justice holds that the disturbance to public order and to liberty itself must be securely established by common experience. There is, however, an important difference between Dr. Rousseau and Dr. Locke, who advocated a limited toleration, and Dr. Aquinas and the Protestant Reformers who did not. Dr. Locke and Dr. Rousseau limited liberty on the basis of what they supposed were clear and evident consequences for the public order. If Catholics and atheists were not to be tolerated, it was because it seemed evident that such persons could not be relied upon to observe the bonds of civil society. Presumably a greater historical experience and a knowledge of the wider possibilities of political life would have convinced them that they were mistaken, or at least that their contentions were true only under special circumstances. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
However, with dr. Aquinas and the Protestant Reformers the grounds of intolerance are themselves a matter of faith, and this difference is more fundamental than the limits actually drawn to toleration. For when the denial of liberty is justified by an appeal to public order as evidenced by common sense, it is always possible to urge that the limits have been drawn incorrectly, that experience does not in fact justify the restriction. Where the suppression of liberty is based upon theological principles or matters of faith, no argument is possible. The one view recognizes the priority of principles which would be chosen in the original position whereas the other does not. The power of life in Christ is seldom realized, but spiritual formation in Him, carried to fulfillment, would mean that the church as the body of Christ, and the members are nourishing one another with the transcendent power that raised up Christ from the dead and is not following through each of its members. That is what produces the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The visible church, which anyone can look at if one wills, is—with all her imperfections—the outward manifestation in history and society of the invisible church, which God sees alone. The spiritual unity of the Church is a primal synthesis willed by God. It is not a relationship that has to be established, but one that is already posited (iustitia passive), and remains invisible. It is not made possible by concord, similarity or affinity between souls, nor should it be confused with unity of mood. Instead it is real just where seemingly the most intractable outward opposition prevail, where each human leads one’s quite individual life, and it is perhaps absent where it seems to prevail most. It can shine more brightly in the conflict between wills than in concord. Into this church, the invisible body of her risen Lord, we come when we place our confidence in Jesus. He takes us in and forms a circle of sufficiency that is real and ultimate. It is first in relation to Christ that we begin to know about connecting; and we can then begin to see how the flow of loving presence from Christ extends through others to us and from us to others. This must happen within the imperfect communities and congregations available to us now. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
However, the new life can and must eventually transform the entire social dimension of ourself toward the Heavenly future in which we shall know as we are now known by God—where every boo shall lie open to one another. John’s Gospel informs us that when Jesus completed His baptizing ministry in Jueda and decided to return to Galilee, He deemed it necessary to go through Samaria, which brought him to the ancient town of Sychar. Specifically, John tells us that “Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour,” reports John 4.6. The sixth hour was noon, midday, time for a meal. So the Lord sent His disciples into town for groceries while He wearily sat sown by the well for some needed rest. The words “tired as he was” seem to indicate that he sat down just as a tired man collapses in motionless heap after a hard day’s work. He was exhausted, and for good reason. A glance at the Gospels revels that Jesus rarely had any time for Himself unless he stole away. When not being pressed by the multitude, He was ministering to the Twelve or the inner circle of three to irrepressible Peter. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
And Jesus was always on the dusty road. At one point He had Himself said, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head,” reports Matthew 8.20. No wonder Jesus was more weary than His disciples, for when mental fatigue and physical wariness meet, there you find an exhausted man. So Jesus plopped down motionless. It was so nice to be alone in the warm sun and not moving. It is quite possible that the Lord has His eyes closed when He heard approaching steps and looked up to see a Samaritan woman. It would have been so easy for Jesus to sleepily close his eyes, saying to Himself, “I have been ministering to thousands…she is alone…just one person. And I have got to relax. If I do not take care of My body, who will?” However, not Jesus! Our Lord went for her heart in one of the grandest cases of spiritual aggression ever recorded. Jesus’s heart was so given to the care of souls that He mustered up the strength to minister even when He was at the edge of His physical capacity. People who share the disciplines of Christ’s heart will likewise reach out even when exhausted. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
It has been said that the World is run by tired humans, and it is true, for we daily see that America is run by tired political leaders—and that wars are now won with exhausted generals—and that peace is secured by tired diplomats—and that peace is secured by tired diplomats—and that great legislation is accomplished by weary legislators. The reason for this is that such leaders are willing to put themselves out whenever necessary in order to accomplish their noteworthy tasks. Likewise, the Christian World is ministered to by tired people. Eastern Europe is being evangelized by tired missionaries who are making the most of the fleeting day of opportunity. Show me a great church and I will show you some tired people, both up front and behind the scenes, because greatness depends on a core of people who are willing to put out the situation demands. Humans, even when bone tired, we have to understand that we will never do great things for God without the willingness to extend ourselves for the sake of the gospel. Christ’s example teaches us that a ministering heart must of necessity be a labouring heart. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
The Apostle Paul had a heart like that: “Surely you remember, brothers,” he says, “our toil and hardship; we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you,” reports 1 Thessalonians 2.9. This apostolic work ethic is a prominent theme with Paul: “I have laboured and toiled,” he told the Corinthians, “and have often gone without sleep,” reports 2 Corinthians 11.27. The fact is, anyone who has ever done anything for God has had a labouring heart—no exceptions. Dr. Luther is said to have worked so hard that he often fell into bed. D.L. Moody’s bedtime prayer on one occasion, as he rolled his bulk into bed, was, “Lord, I am tired! Amen.” Big heart, the enlarged hearts that God uses, are labouring hearts which, though weary, will willingly be expended as necessary. You may fancy that you have a ministering heart, but if you are not labouring for the gospel in the place God where has put you, and do not find yourself being inconvenienced by your commitment, you are deluding yourself. Ministering hearts are disciplined to labour, for they regularly move beyond their comfort zones, they put themselves in vulnerable spots, they makes commitments which cost, they get tired for Christ’s sake, they pay the price, the encounter rough seas. However, their sails billows full of God’s spirit. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
This play of opposites exists not only in Nature but also in human destiny. We observe repeatedly how fortune and misfortune are either intermingled or follow one another in phases. The modern Italian writer Cesare Pavese received in 1950 the highest literary praise of his country, yet before the year came to its end, he took his own life. There are two principles which are fundamental in the operations of our Universe, even though they are opposed to one another. We humanly label one good and the other bad, not seeing how one is necessary to the existence of the other and both to the Universe. A World without pain, without suffering, is a utopian, impossible World. Geometrical patterns and designs not only symbolize the Universe’s structure and nature, process and operation; they also show its harmonies and symmetries, conflicts and oppositions, its lights and shadows. Both forces—the static and the dynamic—are present in existence, in Nature and human life. In the Universe everything has its opposite; the one cannot exist unless at some point in time the other also exists. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“The manner which the disciples, who were called the elders of the church, ordained priests and teachers—after they had prayed unto the Father in the name of Christ, they laid their hands upon the, and said: In the name of Jesus Christ I ordain you to be a priest (of if he be a teacher, I ordain you to be a teacher) to preach repentance and remission of sins through Jesus Christ, by the endurance of faith on his name to the end. Amen. And after this manner did they ordain priests and teachers, according to the gifts and callings of God unto humans; and they ordained them by the power of the Holy Ghost, which was in them,” reports Moroni 3.1-4. The feast of bread we celebrate with bread baked and on our table to be shared among us, but first to be shared with the Lord of Grain. And so I break off this piece and pass it among you. Bless it, each who is here, that it may be the holy which we share with the holy, placing it in the [field/garden]; and sharing the rest, eating together with the Holy One. And this second loaf we give, turning it over wholly, after blessing it, each one of us, separating it out for him alone. And then we will place it, as well, in the [field/garden]. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
We are grateful to you, Grain God, we send you our blessings. Please look kindly on us, King of bread, and continue to send us blessings in return. O Lord our God, please be gracious unto Thy people of America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and receive in love the supplications of America; and may the worship of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. O may our eyes witness Thy return to American. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who restorest Thy divine presence unto America. We thankfully acknowledge Thee, O Lord our God, our fathers’ God to all eternity. Our Rock art Thou, our Shield that saves through every generation. We give Thee thanks and we declare Thy praise for all Thy tender care. Our lives we trust into Thy loving hand. Our souls are ever in Thy charge; Thy wonders and Thy miracles are daily with us, evening, morn and no one. O Thou who art all-good, whose mercies never fails us, Compassionate One, whose loving kindnesses never cease, we every hope in Thee. “And at that every hour there was a severe Earthquake and a tenth of the city collapsed. Seven thousand people were killed in the Earthquake, and the survivous were terrified and gave glory to the God of Heaven. The second woe has passed; the third woe is coming soon,” reports Revelation 11.13-14. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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The Fateful Call Came During Dinner with All My Family as Witnesses!
You really have to experience the feeling of being with the president in the oval office. If he hears the lark singing and notes its joy, he hears also the captured prey of hawk and owl and notes their screams. If he admires the beauty of the Himalaya, he remembers the large number of living creatures buried at its upheaval. When it comes to equal liberty, one might say that those who hold this belief regard themselves as having moral or religious obligations which they must keep themselves free to honour. Of course, from the standpoint of justice as fairness (a society of free citizens holding equal basic rights and cooperating within an egalitarian economic system), these obligations are self-imposed; they are not bonds laid down by this conception of justice. The point is rather that the persons in the original position (which focuses on the concept of what is fair in terms of social cooperation for free and equal citizens) are not to view themselves as single isolated individuals. To the contrary, they assume that they have interests which they must protect as best they can and that they have ties with certain members of the next generation who will also make similar claims. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Once the parties consider these matters, the case for the principles of justice (reconciliation of liberty and equality that is meant to apply to the basic structure of a well-ordered society) is very much strengthened. The question of equal liberty of conscience is settled. It is one of the fixed points of our considered judgments of justice. However, precisely because of this fact it illustrates the nature of the argument for the principle of equal liberty. The reasoning in this case can be generalized to apply to other freedoms, although not always with the same force. Turning then to liberty of conscience, it seems evident that the parties must choose principles that secure the integrity of their religious and moral freedom. They do not know, of course, what their religious or moral convictions are, or what is the particular content of their moral or religious obligations as they interpret them. Indeed, they do not know that they think of themselves as having such obligations. The possibility that they do suffices for the argument, although I shall make the stronger assumption. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Further, the parties do not know how their religious or moral views fares in their society, whether, for example, it is in the majority or the minority. All they know is that they have obligations which they interpret in this way. The question they are to decide is which principle they should adopt to regulate the liberties of citizens in regard to their fundamental religious, moral, and philosophical interests. Now it seems that equal liberty of conscience is the only principle that the persons on the original position can acknowledge. If wishes be, they cannot take chances with their liberty by permitting the dominant religious or moral doctrine to persecute or to suppress others. Even granting (what may be questioned) that it is more probable than not that one will turn out to belong to the majority (if a majority exists), to gamble in this way would show that one did not take one’s religious or moral convictions seriously, or highly value the liberty to examine one’s beliefs. Nor on the other hand, could the parties consent to the principle of utility. If, in this case, it would lead to a greater net balance of satisfaction, their freedom would be subject to the calculus of social interests and they would be authorizing its retraction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Of course, as we have seen, a utilitarian (a view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good) may try to argue from the general facts of social life that when properly carried out the computation of advantages never justifies such limitations, at least under reasonably favourable conditions of culture. However, even if the parties were persuaded of this, they might as well guarantee their freedom straightway by adopting the principle of equal liberty. There is nothing gained by not doing so, and to the extent that the outcome of the actuarial calculation is unclear a great deal may be lost. Indeed, if we give a realistic interpretation to the general knowledge available to the parties, they are forced to reject the utilitarian principle. These considerations have all the more force in view of the complexity and vagueness of these calculations (if we can so describe them) as they are bound to be made in practice. Moreover, the initial agreement on the principle of equal liberty is final. An individual recognizing religious and more obligations regards them as binding absolutely in the sense that one cannot qualify one’s fulfillment of them for the sake of greater means for promoting one’s other interests. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Greater economic and social benefits are not a sufficient reason for accepting less than equal liberty. Only if there is a threat of coercion which it is unwise to resist from the standpoint of liberty itself, then it seems possible to consent to an unequal liberty. For example, the situation may be one in which a person’s religion or one’s moral view will be tolerated provided that one does not protest, whereas claiming an equal liberty will bring greater repression that cannot be effectively opposed. However, from the perspective of the original position there is no way of ascertaining the relative strength of various doctrines and so these considerations do not arise. The veil of ignorance leads to an agreement on the principle of equal liberty; and the strength of religious and moral obligations as humans interpret them seems to require that the two principles be put in serial order, at least when applied to freedom of conscience. It may be said against the principle of equal liberty that religious sects, say, cannot acknowledge any principle at all for limiting their claims on one another. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
The duty to religious and divine law being absolute, no understanding among persons of different faiths is permissible from a religious point of view. Certainly humans have often acted as if they held this doctrine. It is unnecessary, however, to argue against it. It suffices that if any principle can be agreed to, it must be that of equal liberty. A person may indeed think that others ought to recognize the same beliefs and first principles that one does, and that by not doing so they are grievously in error and miss the way to their salvation. However, an understanding of religious obligation and of philosophical and moral first principles shows that we cannot expect others to acquiesce in an inferior liberty. Much less can we ask them to recognize us as the proper interpreter of their religious duties or moral obligations. We should now observe that these reasons for the first principle receive further support once the parties’ concern for the net generation is taken into account. Since they have a desire to obtain similar liberties for their descendants, and these liberties are also secured by the principle of equal liberty, there is no conflict of interests between generations. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Moreover, only if the prospects offered by some other conception, say that of utility or perfection, were so attractive that the persons in the original position must not have properly considered their descendants wen they rejected it, the next generation could object to the choice of this principle. We can express this by nothing that were a father, for example, to asset that one would accept the principle of equal liberty, a son could not object that were he (the father) to do so he would be neglecting his (the son’s) interests. The advantages of the other principles are not this great and appear in fact uncertain and conjectural. The father could reply that when the choice of principles affects the liberty of others, the decision must, if possible, seems reasonable and responsible to them once they come of age. Those who care for others must choose for the in the light of what they will want whatever else they want once they reach maturity. Therefore following the account of primary goods, the parties presume that their descendants will want their liberty protected. At this point we touch upon the principle of paternalism that is to guide decisions taken on behalf of others. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
If they were at the age of reason and deciding rationally, we must choose for others as we have reason to believe they would choose of themselves. Trustees, guardians, and benefactors are to act in this way, but since they usually know the situation and interests of their way, but since they usually know the situation and interests of their wards and beneficiaries, they can often make accurate estimates as to what is or will be wanted. The persons in the original position, however, are prevented from knowing any more about their descendants than they do about themselves, and so in this case too they must rely upon the theory of primary goods. Thus, if he were not to guarantee the rights of his descendants by adopting the principle of equal liberty, the father can say that he would be irresponsible. From the perspective of the original position, one must assume that this is what they will come to recognize as for their good. By taking liberty of conscious as an example, this shows how justice as fairness provides strong arguments for equal liberty. The same kind of reasoning applies, I believe, in other cases, though it is not always so convincing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
I do not deny, however, that persuasive arguments for liberty are forthcoming on other views. As understood by Dr. Mill, the principle of utility often supports freedom. Dr. Mill defines the concept of value by reference to the interests of humans as progressive beings. By this idea he means that interest men would have and the activities they would rather pursue under conditions encouraging freedom of choice. Dr. Mill adopts, in effect, a choice criterion of value: if it is preferred by those who are capable of both and who have experience each of them under circumstances of liberty, one activity is better than another. Using this principle Dr. Mill adduces essentially thee grounds for free institutions. For one thing, they are required to develop human’s capacities and powers, to arouse strong and vigorous natures. Unless their abilities are intensely cultivated and their abilities are intensely cultivated and their natures enlivened, humans will not be able to engage in and to experience the valuable activities of which they are capable. Secondly, if human’s preferences among different activities are to be rational and informed, the institutions of liberty and the opportunity for experience which they allow are necessary, at least to some degree. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Human beings have no other way of knowing what things they can do and which of them are most rewarding. Thus if the pursuit of value, estimated in terms of the progressive interests of humankind, is to be rational, that is, guided by a knowledge of the human capacities and well-formed preferences, certain freedoms are indispensable. Otherwise society’s attempt to follow the principle of utility proceeds blindly. The suppression of liberty is always likely to be irrational. Even if the general capacities of humankind were known (as they are not), each person has still to find oneself, and for this freedom is a prerequisite. Finally, Dr. Mill believes that human beings prefer to live under institutions of liberty. Historical experience shows that humans desire to be free whenever they have not resigned themselves to apathy ad despair; whereas those who are free never want to abdicate their liberty. Although humans may complain of the burdens of freedom and culture, they have an overriding desire to determine how they shall live and to settle their own affairs. Thus by Dr. Mill’s choice criterion, free institutions have value in themselves as basic aspects of rationally preferred forms of life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
These are certainly forceful arguments and under some circumstances anyway they might justify many if not most of the equal liberties. They clearly guarantee that in favourable conditions a considerable degree of liberty is a precondition of the rational pursuit of value. However, even Dr. Mill’s contentions, as cogent as they are, will not, it seems, justify an equal liberty for all. We still need analogues of the standard utilitarian assumptions. One must suppose a certain similarity among individuals, say their equal capacity for the activities and interests of humans as progressive beings, and in addition a principle of the diminishing marginal value of basic rights when assigned to individuals. In the absence of these presumptions the advancement of human ends may be compatible with some persons’ being oppressed, or at least granted but a restricted liberty. Whenever a society sets out to maximize the sum of intrinsic value or the net balance of satisfaction of interests, it is liable to find that the denial of liberty for some is justified in the name of this single end. When founded upon teleological principles, the liberties of equal citizenship are insecure. The argument for them relies upon precarious calculations as well as controversial and uncertain premises. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Moreover, as if they were part of utility, nothing is gained by saying that persons are of equal intrinsic value unless this is simply a way of using the standard assumptions. That is, as if these assumptions were true, one applies this principle. Doing this certainly has the merit of recognizing that we have more confidence in the principle of equal liberty than in the truth of the premises from which a perfectionist or utilitarian view would derive it. The grounds for this confidence, according to the contract view, is that the equal liberties have a different basis altogether. They are not a way of maximizing them sum of intrinsic value or of maximizing the sum of intrinsic value or of achieving the greatest net balance of satisfaction. The notion of maximizing a sum of value by adjusting the rights of individuals does not arise. Rather, when each is fairly represented as a moral person, these rights are assigned to fulfill the principles of cooperation that citizens would acknowledge. The conception defined by these principles is not that of maximizing anything, except in the vacuous sense of best meeting the requirement of justice, all things considered. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Now, here in America we pledge our allegiance to a flag that represents “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” However, who has any idea of what this would mean for real life on the street and how it applies to them? And the biblical vision of human unity under God is even more so one that few people today can even imagine, much less regard as realistically possible for themselves or others. Only the message and people of Jesus Chris can give it substance. Perhaps someone with no real knowledge of Christ could imagine that kind of “communal solidarity” for a few people, carefully selected—people of “the right kind.” However, certainly not for people generally, and especially not for those imposed upon us by “accidents” of birth, and thereby of history and society. Sin structures embedded deeply in our souls and bodies have almost totally disabled us for those relationships to others that our hearts desire and that were meant by God to be—relationships that our public discourse in American idealizes without understanding what they are. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
When two people connect, when their beings intersect as closely as the clouds and the sky on a rainy day, something is poured out of one and into the other that has power to heal the soul of its deepest wounds and restore it to health. The one who receives the experiences the joy of being healed. The one who gives knows the even greater joy of being used to heal. Something good is in the heart of each of God’s children that is more powerful than everything bad. It is there, waiting to be released, to work its magic, but it rarely happens. For people who claim the name of Christ, there are two distinct courses of life available. One is to cultivate a small heart. This by far seems the safest way to go because it minimizes the sorrows of life. If our ambition is to dodge the troubles of human existence, the formula is simple: avoid entangling relationships, do not give yourself to others, and be sure not to seriously embrace elevated and noble ideals. If we do this, we will escape a host of afflictions. This life principle bears out in other logics of life as well. Cultivated deafness and we will be spared hearing the discords of life. Cultivate blindness and we will be shielded from seeing ugliness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
If we want to get through life with a minimum of trouble, all we have to do is wear blinders. This is how many people, even those who profess to be Christians, get through life with such ease—they have successfully nurtured smallness of heart. The other path is to cultivate a ministering heart. Open yourself to others, and you will become susceptible to an index of sorrows scarcely imaginable to a shriveled heart. Enlarge and ennoble your ideals, and your vulnerability will increase proportionately. In the shape of converts I have seen no result. “I have not, as far as I am aware, seen anyone who even wanted to be a Christian.” Painful words. However, the depth of this pain can only be seen dimly until one turns to the opening words of his diary, written when I first arrived in Sacramento: “Several beautiful, expansive, custom homes, with green laws and three slots for a garage, maybe one is the laundry room, even a mail box for the Sacramento Bee Newspaper on the lawn. I wonder what these people in this peaceful community do for a living? O Lord, suggest by the Spirit how I should come among them, and in preparing myself to teach the life and love of Christ Jesus.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
“Most of the people have changed so much, I have not, as far as I am aware, seen anyone who even wanted to be a Christian.” His throbbing words ooze his life’s blood. We naturally think “poor Dallas.” However, in truth the case lay in Dallas himself, for he had a “problem”—an enlarged heart. If he had not cared, Dallas would never have penned those pathos filled lines. If he had not cultivated a ministering heart, if he had not cared. If he had listened to the counsel of his friends, he would have remained in comfortable England instead of going to that hostile land. Enlarge your heart, cultivate your heart, discipline yourself for ministry, and you will enlarge your experience of pain. This is an irrefragable spiritual axiom. No one has ever cultivated a ministering heart and lived to tell of a life of ease. Of course, the effects of these two kinds of hearts are drastically different. Little hearts, though safe and protected, never contribute anything. No one benefits from their restricted sympathies and vision. On the other hand, hearts that have embraced the disciplines of ministry—though they are vulnerable—are also the hearts which possess the most joy and leave their heart print on the World. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Cultivate deafness and we will never hear discord, but neither will we hear the glorious strains of a great symphony. Cultivate blindness as we will never see ugliness, but we also will never hit a home run in the bottom of the nineth with bases loaded to win the game! Never climb a mountain and you will never get banged up on the mountain’s side, but you will also never stand on an alpine peak exulting in abundant natural beauty. Years ago I experience the grand reality of this principle. My wife, Bianca, informed me that she had received a call from our local youth soccer league, with which my boys were signed up to play, notifying her there were a shortage of coaches and that some boys would have to be left out—unless some fathers (like me!) would take a team. Bianca indicated I might be interested. My response was that I was too busy and that she would have to tell them so. She replied that I could do it myself, and that a call was coming that evening. I said, “Fine, no problem.” The fateful call came during dinner with all my family as witnesses. As the caller explained the league’s plight, I found myself nodding assent and committing myself to be coach of the Las Plumas Thunderbirds Varsity Soccer. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
The Scriptures wisely say, “If the trumpet does not sound a clear call, who will get ready for battle?” reports 1 Corinthians 14.8—and that was the initial experience of my poor Thunderbirds. I did not even know what a fullback was, the offside rule remained inscrutable for most of the season, and we got clobbered in our first few games. Humbled and desperate, I checked out soccer films and spent some evenings late in frantic reading. I also recruited a retired Scotsman who has once played professionally and persuaded another father to assist me. We discovered we had some good athletes, and we began to win. We did so well that we went to the play-offs. And it was here that I had one of the great experience in my life when I played Nick Oliver’s team in the opening round. Mr. Oliver was the founder of the league, at the time, and a perennial winner. However, miracles of miracles, we were ahead 1.0 at halftime. In the third quarter Mr. Oliver’s team tied it up, and the 1-1 tie held deep into the fourth quarter. Five minutes were left—then three—then one—thirty seconds—ten—two—and we scored just before time ran out! There is no describing the thrill of that moment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Never coach soccer and you will never know the ignominy of being the league doormat, but you will never know the thrill of beating Mr. Oliver either! Cultivate a small heart and life may be smooth sailing, but you will never know the heady wind of the Holy Spirit in your sails and the exhilaration of being used by God. Cultivate a small heart and you will never be the heroic likes of Dallas Brunton, and you will certainly never have the heart God desires for you. We only have to glance at a newspaper to be reminded that we live in a time when there is an urgent need for enlarged, caring hearts which are disciplined for ministry. Some of you are experiencing the elevating, frightening stirrings which accompany the enlarging of the heart, and you need to be encouraged to cultivate your expanding sympathies and broadening horizons. If so, the Biblical account we are about to consider—the story of Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well—is for you because it brilliantly showcases Jesus’ own discipline of ministry, one we are to imitate as His followers. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
God wills His own goodness necessarily, even as we will our own happiness necessarily, and as any other faculty has necessary, and as any other faculty has necessary relation to its proper and principal object, for instance the sight to colour, since it tends to it by its own nature. However, God wills things apart from Himself in so far as they are ordered to His own goodness as their end. Now in willing an end we do not necessarily will things that conduce to it, unless they are such that the end cannot be attained without them; as, we will take food to preserve life, or to take ship in order to cross the sea. However, we do not necessarily will things without which the end is attainable, such as a horse for a journey which we can take on foot, for we can make the journey without one. The same applies to other means. Hence, since the goodness of God is perfect, and can exist without other things inasmuch as no perfection can accrue to Him from them, it follows that His willing things apart from Himself is not absolutely necessary. Yet it can be necessary by supposition, for supposing that God wills a thing, then He is unable not to will it, as His will cannot change. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
God wills from eternity whatever He wills, it does not follow that He wills it necessarily; except by supposition. God of Liberty, we pray to you today. Please grant freedom to all your children, no matter their country. We take time today to remember the examples of freedom we have seen in our time. We think of the citizens of America, who are locked in their homes and being forced out of work and out of business, and unable to pay their rents and mortgages and car notes, unable to buy food and pay the electricity bill, kids who are unable to attend school, college, and medical school and wish for them to experience a Christmas blessing and have a financial miracle. We remember how people have burned the America flag, that stands for freedom, but refuse to leave the country, as people have been deployed to fight for their freedom. And remember those who struggled and failed, such as the martyrs in America in 2020, who have demanded freedom and equality. We remember those who lost their lives on September 9, 2001 in the towers, on the planes, and on the streets or in their homes, and the first responders who lost their lives that day and due to subsequent injuries. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Please, Lord, give us the courage to earn our freedom and to regain it as it has been stolen. We ask this of you, Who are the source of all freedom. And may the tears from Heaven rain down on us, soaking the Earth so we have a pleasant spring and summer. American, your beacon of hope shines undimmed by the years. If our eyes have lost sight of you, it is our fault and not yours. We have turned our vision away from being “One Nation Under God with Liberty and Justice for All,” including all Americans, and we are missing the heights from which your streets paved with gold shine, and seen only that which divides us. Be our beacon, Father God of our nation, and show us the way again. Father of the Peoples, please unite your scattered children unto one tribe, one people, one country. “The words of Christ, which he spake unto his disciples, the twelve whom he had chosen, as he laid his hands upon them—and he called them by name, in mighty prayer; and after he have done this ye shall have power that to one upon whom ye shall lay your hands, ye shall give the Holy Ghost; and in my name shall ye give it, for thus do mine apostles. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
“Now Christ spake these words unto them at the time of his first appearing; and the multitude heard it not, but the disciples heard it; and on as many as they laid their hands, fell the Holy Ghost,” reports Moroni 2.1-3. Revere the Lord, all that inhabit the Earth; the World is firmly established that it cannot be moved. Let the Heavens be glad, and the Earth rejoice; let them declare among the nations: “The Lord reigneth.” Let the sea roar and all within it give praise; let the field, and all within it exult. Then shall the trees of the forest sing before the Lord, as He cometh to judge the Earth. O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good; for His lovingkindness endureth forever. And say: “Save us, O God of our salvation, please gather us and deliver us from among the nations, that we may give thanks unto Thy holy name, and find honour in praising Thee.” Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting even to everlasting. And all the people said: “Amen,” and praised the Lord. Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at His footstool; holy is He. Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at His holy mountain; for the Lord our God is holy. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Are Not Our Fates All Cast? Why Stand We Here?
To treat comrades like enemies is to go over to the stand of the enemy. It is evident that some sort of framework is needed to simplify the application of the two principles of justice. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all. Social and economic inequalities are t be arranged so that they are both: to the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings, and attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. One must judge the justice of legislation and social policies. However, one also knows that one’s opinions will not always coincide with those of others, since human’s judgments and beliefs are likely to differ especially when their interests are engaged. Therefore, a citizen must decide which constitutional arrangements are just for reconciling conflicting opinions of justice. We may think of the political process as a machine which makes social decision when the views of representatives and their constitutions are fed into it. A citizen will regard some ways of designing this machine as more just than others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
So a complete conception of justice is not only able to assess laws and policies but it can also rank procedures for selecting which political opinion is to be enacted into law. There is still another problem. The citizen accepts a certain constitution as just, and one thinks that certain traditional procedures are appropriate, for example, the procedure of majority rule duly circumscribed. Yet since the political process is at best one of imperfect procedural justice, one must ascertain when the enactments of the majority are to be complied with and when they can be rejected as no longer binding. In short, one must be able to determine the grounds and limits of political duty and obligation. Thus a theory of justice has to deal with at least three types of questions, and this indicates that it may be useful to think of principles as applied in a several-stage sequence. The original position is designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice. Yet, an elaboration of the original position is necessary. So far I have supposed that once the principles of justice are chosen the parties return to their place in society and henceforth judge their claims on the social system by these principles. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
However, if several intermediate stages are imagined to take place in a definite sequence, this sequence may give us a schema for sorting out the complications that must be faced. Each stage is to represent an appropriate point of view from which certain kinds of questions are considered. Thus I suppose that after the parties have adopted the principles of justice in the original position, they move to a constitutional convention. Here they are to decide upon the justice of political forms and choose a constitution: they are delegates, so to speak, to such a convention. Subject to the constraints of the principles of justice already chosen, they are to design a system for the constitutional powers of government and the basic rights of citizens. It is at this stage that they weigh the justice procedures for coping with diverse political views. Since the appropriate conception of justice has been agreed upon, the veil of ignorance is partially lifted. The persons in the convention have, of course, no information about particular individuals: they do not know their own social position, their place in the distribution of natural attributes, or their conception of the good. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
However, in addition to an understanding of the principles of social theory, they now know the relevant general facts about their society, that is, its natural circumstances and resources, its level of economic advance and political culture, and so on. They are no longer limited to the information implicit in the circumstances of justice. Given their theoretical knowledge and the appropriate general facts about their society, they are to choose the most effective just constitution, the constitution that satisfies the principles of justice and is best calculated to lead to just and effective legislation. At this point we need to distinguish two problems. Ideally a just constitution would be a just procedure arranged to insure a just outcome. The procedure would be the political process governed by the constitution, the outcome of the body of enacted legislation, while the principles of justice would define an independent criterion for both procedure and outcome. In pursuit of this ideal of perfect procedural justice, the first problem is to design a just procedure. To do tis the liberties of equal citizenship must be incorporated into and protected by the constitution. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
These liberties include those of liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, liberty of the person, and equal political rights. If it did not embody these liberties, the political system, which I assume to be some form of constitutional democracy would not be a just procedure. Clearly any feasible political procedure may yield an unjust outcome. In fact, there is no scheme of procedural political rules which guarantees that unjust legislation will not be enacted. In the case of a constitutional regime, or indeed of any political for, the ideal of perfect procedural justice cannot be realized. The best attainable scheme is one of imperfect procedural justice. Nevertheless some schemes have a greater tendency than others to result in unjust laws. The second problem, then, is to select from among the procedural arrangements that are both just and feasible those which are most likely to lead to a just and effective legal order. Once again this is Dr. Bentham’s problem of the artificial identification of interest, only here the rules (just procedure) are to be framed to give legislation (just outcome) likely to accord with the principles of justice rather than the principle of utility. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
To solve this problem intelligently requires a knowledge of the beliefs and interest that humans in the system are liable to have and of the political tactics that they will find it rational to use given their circumstances. The delegates are assumed, then, to know these things. Provided they have no information about particular individuals including themselves, the idea of the original position is not affected. In framing a just constitution I assume that the two principles of justice already chosen define an independent standard of the desired outcome. If there is no such standard, the problem of constitutional design is not well posed, for this decision is made by running through the feasible just constitutions (given, say, by enumeration on the basis of social theory) looking for the ne that in the existing circumstances will most probably result in effective and just social arrangements. Now at this point we come to the legislative stage, to take the next step in the sequence. The justice of laws and policies is to be assessed from this perspective. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
Proposed bills are judged from the position of a representative legislator who, as always, does not know the particulars about oneself. Statues must satisfy not only the principles of justice but whatever limits are laid down in the constitution. By moving back and forth between the stages of the constitutional convention and the legislature, the best constitution is found. Now the question whether legislation is just or unjust, especially in connection with economic and social policies, is commonly subject to reasonable differences of opinion. In these cases judgment frequently depends upon speculative political and economic doctrines and upon social theory generally. Often the best that we can say of a law of policy is that it is at least not clearly unjust. The application of the difference principle in a precise way normally requires more information than we can expect to have and, in any case, more than the application of the first principle. It is often perfectly plain and evident when the equal liberties are violated. These violations are not only unjust but can be clearly seen to be unjust: the injustice is manifest in the public structure of institutions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
However, this state of affairs is comparatively rare with social and economic policies regulated by the difference principle. I imagine then a division of labour between stages in which each deals with different questions of social justice. This division roughly corresponds to the two parts of the basic structure. This division roughly corresponds to the two parts of the basic structure. The first principle of equal liberty is the primary standard for the constitutional convention. Its main requirements are that the fundamental liberties of the person and the liberty of conscience and freedom of thought be protected and that the political process as a whole be a just procedure. Thus the constitution establishes a secure common status of equal citizenship and realized political justice. The second principle comes into play at the stage of the legislature. It dictates that social and economic policies be aimed at maximizing the long-term expectations of the least advantaged under conditions of fair equality of opportunity, subject to the equal liberties being maintained. At this point the full range of general economic and social facts is brought to bear. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
The second part of the basic structure contains the distinctions and hierarchies of political, economic, and social forms which are necessary for efficient and mutually beneficial social cooperation. Thus the priority of the first principle of justice to the second is reflected in the priority of the constitutional convention to the legislative stage. The last stage is that of the application of rules to particular cases by judges and administrators, and the following of rules by citizens generally. At this stage everyone has complete access to all the facts. No limits on knowledge remain since the full system of rules has now been adopted and applies to persons in virtue of their characteristics and circumstances. However, it is not from this standpoint that we are to decide the grounds and limits of political duty and obligation. This third type of problem belongs to partial compliance theory, and its principles are discussed from the point of view of the original position after those of ideal theory are chosen. Once these are on hand, we can view our particular situation from the perspective of the last stage, as for example in the cases of civil disobedience and conscientious refusal. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
The availability of knowledge in the four-stage sequence is roughly as follows. Let us distinguish between three kinds of facts: the first principles of social theory (and other theories when relevant) and their consequences; general facts about society, such as its size and level of economic advance, its institutional structure and natural environment, and so on; and finally, particular facts about individuals such as their social position, natural attributes, and peculiar interests. In the original position the only particular facts known to the parties are those that can be inferred from the circumstances of justice. While they know the first principles of social theory, the course of history is closed to them; they have no information about how often society has taken this or that form, or which kinds of societies presently exist. In the next stages, however, the general facts about their society are made available to them but not the particularities of their society are made available to them but not the particularities of their own condition. Since the principles of justice are already chosen, limitations on knowledge can be relaxed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
The flow of information is determined at each stage by what is required in order to apply these principles intelligently to the kind of question of justice at hand, while at the same time any knowledge that is likely to give rise to bias and distortion and to set humans against one another is ruled out. The notion of the rational and impartial application of principles defines the kind of knowledge that is admissible. At the last stage, clearly, there are no reasons for the veil of ignorance in any form, and all restrictions are lifted. It is essential to keep in mind that the four-stage sequence is a device for applying the principles of justice. This scheme is part of the theory of justice as fairness and not an account of how constitutional conventions and legislatures actually proceed. It sets out a series of points of view from which the different problems of justice are to be settled, each point of view inheriting the constraints adopted at the preceding stages. Thus a just constitution is one that rational delegates subject to the restrictions of the second stage would adopt for their society. And similarly just laws and policies are those that would be enacted at the legislative stage. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Of course, this test is often indeterminate: it is not always clear which of several constitutions, or economic and social arrangements, would be chosen. However, when this is so, justice is to that extent likewise indeterminate. Institutions within the permitted range are equally just, meaning that they could be chosen; they are compatible with all the constraints of the theory. Thus on many questions of social and economic policy we must fall back upon a notion of quasi-pure procedural justice: laws and policies are just provided that they lie within the allowed range, and the legislature, in ways authorized by a just constitution, has in fact enacted them. This indeterminacy in the theory of justice is not in itself a defect. It is what we should expect. If it defines the range of justice more in accordance with our considered judgments than do existing theories, and if it singles out with greater sharpness the graver wrongs a society should avoid, justice as fairness will prove a worthwhile theory. “The works, and the designs, and the purposes of God cannot be frustrated, neither can they come to naught. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
For God doth not walk in crooked paths, neither doth he turn to the right hand nor to the right hand nor to the left, neither doth he vary from that which he hath said, therefore his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round. Remember, remember, that it is not the works of Gd that is frustrated, but the work of humans; for although a human may have many revelations, and have power to do many might works, yet if one boasts in one’s own strength, and sets at naught the counsels of God, and follows after the dictates of one’s own will and carnal desires, one must fall and incur the vengeance of a just God upon one. For, behold, you should not have feared humans more than God. Although humans set at naught the counsels of God, and despise God’s words—yet you should have been faithful; and God would have extended His arm and supported you against all the fiery darts of the adversary; and God would have been with you in every time of trouble. However, remember, God is merciful; therefore, repent of that which thou hast done which is contrary to the commandment which I gave you, and thou art still chosen, and art again called to work,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 3.1-4, 7-8, 10. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
Once of the basic concepts of forgiveness is that one must be truly repentant, having satisfied justice before forgiveness can take place. There should be no license for sin, but mercy should go hand and hand with reproof. There are many people who seem to rely solely on the Lord’s mercy rather than on accomplishing their own repentance. The Lord may temper justice with mercy, but he will never supplant it. Mercy can never replace justice. God is merciful, but he is also just. An eternal aspect of justice has been decreed by divine law, that “God is not mocked: for whatsoever a human soweth, that shall one also reap,” reports Galatians 6.7. The gospel of Jesus Christ is founded on law for the salvation and blessing of its people. For every law the Lord give us, there is also a penalty for its violation. The prophet Alma explained this very plainly: “Now,” he said, “how could a human repent expect one should sin? If there was no law, how could one sin? How could there be a law save there was a punishment?” reports Alma 42.17. The Saviour Himself declared that He came to fulfill the law, not to do away with it, but with the law Jesus brought the principle of mercy to temper its enforcement, and to bring hope and encouragement to the offenders for forgiveness through repentance. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Liberty can always be explained by a reference to three items: the agents who are free, the restrictions or limitations which they are free from, and what it is that they are free to do or not to do. Complete explanations of liberty provide the relevant information about these three things. Very often certain matter are clear from the context and a full explanation is unnecessary. The general description of liberty, then, has the following form: this or that person (or persons) is free (or not free) from this or that constraint (or set of constraints) to do (or not to do) so and so. Associations as well as natural persons may be free or not free, and constraints may range from duties and prohibitions defined by law to the coercive influences arising from public opinion and social pressure. When we consider liberty in connection with constitutional and legal restrictions, in these cases liberty is a certain structure of institutions, a certain system of public rules defining rights and duties. Set in this background, liberty always has the above three-part form. Moreover, just as there are various kinds of agents who may be free—persons, associations, and states—so there are many kinds of conditions that constrain them and innumerable sorts of things that they are or are not fee to do. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
In this sense there are many different liberties which on occasion it may be useful to distinguish. Yet these distinctions can be made without introducing different senses of liberty. Thus when their doing something or not doing something is protected from interference by other persons, persons are at liberty to do it. If, for example, we consider liberty of conscience as define by law, then individuals have this liberty when they are free to pursue their moral, philosophical, or religious interests without legal restrictions requiring them to engage or not to engage in any particular form of religious or other practice, and when other humans have a legal duty not to interfere. A rather intricate complex of rights and duties characterize any particular liberty. Not only must it be permissible for individuals to do or not to do something, but government and other persons must have a legal duty not to obstruct. I shall not delineate these rights and duties in any detail, but shall suppose that we understand their nature well enough for our own purposes. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
First of all, it is important to recognize that the basic liberties must be assessed as a whole, as one system. That is, the worth of one liberty normally depends upon the specification of the other liberties, and this must be taken into account in framing a constitution and in legislation generally. While it is by and large true that a greater liberty is preferable, this holds primarily for the system of liberty as a whole, and not for each particular liberty. Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another. To illustrate by an obvious example, certain rules of order are necessary for intelligent and profitable discussion. Without the acceptance of reasonable procedures of inquiry and debate, freedom of speech loses its value. It is essential in this case to distinguish between rules of order limit own freedom, since we cannot speak whenever we please, they are required to gain the benefits of this liberty. Thus the delegates to a constitutional convention, or the members of the legislature, must decide how the various liberties are to be specified so as to yield the best total system of equal liberty. They have to balance one liberty against another. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
The best arrangement of the several liberties depends upon the totality of limitations to which they are subject, upon how they hang together in the whole scheme by which they are defined. While the equal liberties may, therefore, be restricted, these limits are subject to certain criteria expressed by the meaning of equal liberty and the serial order of the two principles of justice. Offhand there are two ways of contravening the first principle. Liberty is unequal as when one class of persons has a greater liberty than another, or liberty is less extensive than it should be. Now all the liberties of equal citizenship must be the same for each member of society. Nevertheless some of the equal liberties may be more extensive than others, assuming that their extensions can be compared. More realistically, if it is supposed that at best each liberty can be measured on its own scale, then the various liberties can be broadened or narrowed according to how they affect one another. When lexical order holds, a basic liberty covered by the first principle can be limited only for the sake of liberty itself, that is, only to insure that the same liberty or a different basic liberty is properly protected and to adjust the one system of liberties in the best way. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
The adjustment of the complete scheme of liberty depends solely upon the definition and extent of the particular liberties. Of course, this scheme is always to be assessed from the standpoint of the representative equal citizen. From the perspective of the constitutional convention or the legislative stage (as appropriate) we are to ask which system it would be rational for one to prefer. A final point. The inability to take advantage of one’s rights and opportunities as a result of poverty and ignorance, and a lack of means generally, is sometimes counted among the constraints definitive of liberty. I shall not, however, say this, but rather I shall think of these things as affecting the worth of liberty, the value to individuals of the rights that the first principle defines. With this understanding, and assuming that the total system of liberty is drawn up in the manner just explained, we may not that the two-part basic structure allows a reconciliation of liberty and equality. Thus liberty and the worth of liberty are distinguished as follows: liberty is represented by the complete system of the liberties of equal citizenship, while the worth of liberty to persons and groups is proportional to their capacity to advance their ends within the framework the system defines. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
Freedom as equal liberty is the same for all; the question of compensating for a lesser than equal liberty does not arise. However, the worth of liberty is not the same for everyone. Some have greater authority and wealth, and therefore greater means to achieve their aims. The lesser worth of liberty is, however, compensated for, since the capacity of the less fortunate members of society to achieve their aims would be even less were they not to accept the existing inequalities whenever the difference principle is satisfied. However, compensating for the lesser worth of freedom is not to be confused with making good an unequal liberty. Taking the two principles together, the basic structure is to be arranged to maximize the worth to the least advantaged of the complete scheme of equal liberty shared by all. This defined the end of social justice. These remarks about the concept of liberty are unhappily abstract. At this stage it would serve no purpose to classify systematically the various liberties. Instead I shall assume that we have a clear enough idea of the distinctions between them, and that in the course of taking up various cases these matters will gradually fall into place. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
When does repentance become effective? When are the demands of justice satisfied? When does the principle of mercy take over? I suppose the answer as clear as that given by Alma: “For behold, justice exerciseth all his demands, and also mercy claimeth all which is her own; and thus, none but truly penitent are saved. What do ye supposed that mercy can rob justice? I say unto you, Nay; not one whit. If so, God would cease to be God,” reports Alma 42.24-25. This is possible and can be actual for each of us because of what God, the source and governor of all, is. “God is Love.” Yes. However, we must not miss the essential point. The profound good news is not just that he loves us, as is often said. A pretty mean person can love someone for special reasons. “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than other? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect,” reports Matthew 5.46-48. God is Love and sustains His love for us from His basic reality as Love, which dictates his Trinitarian nature. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
God is in Himself a sweet society of love, with a first, second, and third person to complete a social matrix where not only is there love and being loved, but also shared love for another, the third person. Community is formed not by mere love and requited love, which by itself is exclusive, but by shared love for another, which is inclusive. And within the Trinity there is, I believe, not even a thought of “First, Second, and Third.” There is no subordination within the Trinity, not because of some profound metaphysical fact, but because the members of the Trinity will not have it. The nature of personality is inherently communal, and only the Trinity does justice to what personality is. Aristotle, pagan but profound, says of human personality: The individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing, and therefore one is like a part in relation to the whole. However, whoever is unable to live in society, or who has no need of it because one is sufficient for oneself, must be either a beast a god. However, this fundamental fact about human personality is rooted in the nature of its Creator, and the writers of the Bible were well aware of it long before Aristotle. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
We are told on the earliest pages of the Bible that “it is not good that the man should be alone,” and so God decided to make “a helper to be a match for him,” reports Genesis 2.18. Centuries later Paul pointed out that “not one of us lives unto oneself and not one dies unto oneself,” reports Romans 14.7. Paul knew something that Aristotle could not know, however: “whether we live or die we are the Lord’s,” reports Romans 14.8. And for this purpose, “Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living,” reports Romans 14.9. Human beings are really together only in God, and all other ways of “being with” fall short of the needs of basic human nature. The secret of all life-giving relations to others, and of all that is social, lies in the fact that the primary other for a human being, whether one wants it or not, is always God. All human kind is of one Author, and is one volume; when one human dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language, and every chapter must be translated. God employs several translators: some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
However, God’s hand is in every translation, and His hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that liberty where every book shall be open to one another. “Now I, Moroni, after having made an end of abridging the account of the people of Jared, I had supposed not to have written more, but I have not as yet perished; and I make not myself known to the Lamanites lest they should destroy me. For behold, their wars are exceedingly fierce among themselves; and because of their hatred they put to death every Nephite that will not deny the Christ. And I, Moroni, will not deny the Christ; wherefore, I wander withthersoever I can for the safety of mine own life. Wherefore, I write a few more things, contrary to that which I had supposed; for I had supposed not to have written any more; but I write a few more things, that perhaps they may be worth unto my brethren, the Lamanites, in some future day, according to the will of the Lord,” reports Moroni 1.1-5. God of planting and grown, please bless my work today. Please bring together water and soil and seed, please bring to the abundant rain, snow, light, and air. Please stir life up with them. Please provide rain and snow so my garden will have prosperous growth in the spring and summer. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
The covenant which God made with Abraham, and His pledge unto Isaac, which God established unto Jacob as a statute, unto Israel for an everlasting covenant; Saying: “Unto you will I give the land of Canaan, as the portion of your inheritance.” When you were but few in number, yea, very few, mere sojourners in the land, wandering from people to people, and from one kingdom to another, God permitted no human to oppress you; yea, for your sake God reproved kings, saying: “Touch not Mine anointed and do My prophets no harm.” Sing unto the Lord, all the Earth; proclaim His salvation from day to day. Declare God’s glory among the nations, His marvellous works among all the peoples. For great is the Lord, and highly to be praised; He is to be revered above all who are worshipped as gods. The gods of the heathens are things of nought; but the Lord made the Heavens. Honour and majesty are before God; strength and gladness are in His abode. Ascribe unto the Lord, O families of humankind, ascribe unto the Lord glory and strength. Render unto the Lord the glory due unto His name; with offerings of homage come into His courts; worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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My Heart is Gladder than All these Because My Love is Come to Me!
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love. The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love. Individuation denotes the process by which a person becomes a psychological “in-dividual,” that is, a separate, indivisible unity or “whole.” It is generally assumed that consciousness is the whole of the psychological individual. However, knowledge of the phenomena that can only be explained on the hypothesis of the unconscious psychic process makes it doubtful whether the ego and its contents are in fact identical with the “whole.” If unconscious processes exist at all, they must surely belong to the totality of the individual, even though they are not components of the conscious ego. If they were part of the ego they would necessarily be conscious, because everything that is directly related to the ego is conscious. Conscious can even be equated with the relation between the ego and the psychic contents. However, unconscious phenomena are so little related to the ego that most people do not hesitate to deny their existence outright. Nevertheless, they manifest themselves in an individual’s behaviour. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
An attentive observer can detect the ego and psychic content without difficulty, while the observed person remains quite unaware of the fact that one is betraying one’s most secret thoughts or even things that one has never thought consciously. It is, however, a great prejudice to suppose that something we have never thought consciously does not exist in the psyche. There is plenty of evidence to show that consciousness is very far from covering the psyche in its totality. Many things occur semiconsciously, and a great many more remain entirely unconscious. Thorough investigation of the phenomena of dual and multiple personalities, for instance, has brought to light a mass of material with observations to prove this point. (I would refer the reader to the writings of Pierre Janet, Theodore Flournoy, Morton Prince, and others.) The importance of such phenomena has made a deep impression on medical psychology, because they give rise to all sorts of psychic and physiological symptoms. In these circumstances, the assumption that the ego expresses the totality of the psyche has become untenable. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
It is, on the contrary, evident that the whole must necessarily include not only consciousness but the illimitable field of unconscious occurrences as well, and that the ego can be no more than the center of the field of conscious. You will naturally ask whether the unconscious possesses a center too. I would hardly venture to assume that there is in the unconscious a ruling principle analogous to the ego. As a matter of fact, everything points to the contrary. If there were such a center, we could expect almost regular signs of its existence. Cases of dual personality would then be frequent occurrences instead of rare curiosities. As a rule, unconscious phenomena manifest themselves in fairly chaotic and unsystematic form. Dreams, for instance, show no apparent order and no tendency to systematization, as they would have to do if there were a personal consciousness at the back of them. The philosophers Carus and von Hartmann treat the unconscious as a metaphysical principle, a sort of universal mind, without any trace of personality or ego-consciousness, and similarly Schopenhauer’s “Will” is without ego. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
Modern psychologist, too, regard the unconscious as an egoless function below the threshold of consciousness. Unlike the philosophers, they tend to derive its subliminal functions from the conscious mind. Dr. Janet thinks that there is certain weakness of consciousness which is unable to hold all the psychic process together. Dr. Freud, on the other hand, favours the idea of conscious factors that suppress certain incompatible tendencies. Much can be said for both theories, since there are numerous cases where a weakness of consciousness actually causes certain contents to fall below the threshold, or where disagreeable contents are repressed. It is obvious that such careful observations as Dr. Janet and Dr. Freud would not have constructed theories deriving the unconscious mainly from conscious sources had they been able to discover traces of an independent personality or of an autonomous will in the manifestations of the unconscious. If it were true that the unconscious consists of nothing but contents accidentally deprived of consciousness but otherwise indistinguishable from the conscious material the one could identify the ego more or less with the totality of the psyche. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
However, actually the situation is not quite so simple. Both theories are based mainly on observations in the field of neurosis. Neither Dr. Janet nor Dr. Freud had any specifically psychiatric experience. If they had, they would surely have been struck by the fact that the unconscious displays some contents that are utterly different from conscious ones, so strange, indeed, that nobody can understand them, neither the patient oneself nor one’s doctors. The patient is inundated by a flood of thoughts that are as strange to one as they are to a normal person. That is why we call one “crazy”: we cannot understand one’s ideas. Only if we have the necessary premises for doing so, can we understand something. However, where the premises are just as remote from our consciousness as they were from the mind of the patient before one went made. Otherwise one would have never become insane. There is, in fact, no field directly known to us from which we could derive certain pathological ideas. It is not a question of more or less normal contents that became unconscious by accident. They are, on the contrary, products whose nature is at first baffling. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
The contents differ in every respect from neurotic material, which cannot be said at all bizarre. The material of a neurosis is understandable in human terms, but that of a psychosis is not. (By this I mean only certain cases of schizophrenia.) This peculiar psychotic material cannot be derived from the conscious mind, because the latter lack the premises which would help to explain the strangeness of the ideas. Neurotic contents can be integrated without appreciable injury to the ego, but psychotic ideas cannot. They remain inaccessible, and ego-consciousness is more or less swamped by them. They even show a distinct tendency to draw the ego into their “system.” Such cases indicate that under certain conditions the unconscious is capable of taking over the role of the ego. The consequence of this exchange is insanity and confusion, because the unconscious is not a second personality with organized and centralized functions but in all probability a decentralized congeries of psychic processes. However, nothing produced by the human mind lies absolutely outside the psychic realm. Even the craziest idea must correspond to something in the psyche. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
We cannot suppose that certain minds contain elements that do not exist at all in other minds. Nor can we assume that the unconscious is capable of becoming autonomous only in certain people, namely in those predisposed to insanity. It is very much more likely that the tendency to autonomy is more or less general peculiarity of the unconscious. Mental disorder is, in a sense, only one outstanding example of a hidden but none the less general condition. This tendency to autonomy shows itself above all in affective states, including those of normal people. When in a state of violent affect one says or does things which exceed the ordinary. Not much is needed: love and hate, joy and grief, are often enough to make the ego and the unconscious change places. Very strange ideas indeed can take possession of otherwise healthy people on such occasions. Groups, communities, and even whole nations can be seized in this way by psychic epidemics. The autonomy of the unconscious therefore begins where emotions are generated. Emotions are instinctive, involuntary reactions which upset the rational order of conscious by their elemental outburst. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
Affects are not “made” or willfully produced; they simply happen. In a state of affect a trait of character sometimes appears which is strange even to the person concerned, or hidden contents may irrupt involuntarily. The more violent an affect the closer it comes to the pathological, to a condition in which the ego-consciousness is thrust aside by autonomous contents that were unconscious before. So long as the unconscious is in a dormant condition, it seems as if there were absolutely noting in this hidden region. Hence wen something unknow suddenly appears “from nowhere,” we are continually surprised. Afterwards, of course, the psychologist comes along and shows that things had to happen as they did for this or that reason. However, who could have said so beforehand? The experience of the harmonious interpenetrating mix-up was “a paradise in the womb.” This paradise is destroyed by the discovery that firm independent objects exist. From then on, the existence of objects with their resistant, aggressive and ambivalent qualities must be accepted. The moment of this discovery does not coincide with the birth of the body: it marks a rather later moment: the beginning of the individual personality, of the self (called ego). #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
The encounter with something so definitely other that it cannot be controlled is what starts the individual on the process of individuation. Two reactions may come from this discovery. They are called ocnophilic and philobatic. We shall call them home-loving (homebodies) and space-loving (spacebats), which keeps much of the meaning and also most of the letters from the proper titles, so as to minimize confusion. A homebody’s reaction to the discover of the “other” is to create a World based on phantasy that other people and things are useful, reliable, and kind; that they will always be there when needed; and that they will never mind being used as needed. By contrast, a spacebat rection is to create a phantasy World which goes back to a time when there were no others, no obstacles/things, people, only limitless power. A spacebat lives as far as possible in a phantasy of a still existing unity and harmony of limitless contourless expanses. When other people of things cannot be ignored, they are experienced either as dangerous unpredictable obstacles and hazards (of which the autistic child’s reaction is an extreme example) or as emotionally uninteresting equipment to be used as convenient. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
On the other hand, homebodies’ reaction to the discovery that there are others, people and things, which resist them and which they cannot control, is to turn strongly to these others, to whom they then attribute the power to look after them in this dangerous World. This development leads them to the cultivation of strong relationships with others and to mistrust of their own independent individual endeavours. In these relationships the object is felt as a vitally important support. Any threat of being separated from it creates intense anxiety, and the most frequently used defence against this is clinging. On the other hand, the object becomes so important that no concern or consideration can be given to it. It must have no separate interests from the individual’s, it must simply be there and, in fact, it is taken for granted. The consequences of this type of relationship are an over-valuation of the object and a comparative inhibition against developing personal skills which might make the individual independent from one’s objects. A homebody’s World consists of people and things separated by horrid empty spaces. Homebodies live from person to person, cutting short their time in the empty spaces as far as possible. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
When separated from their attachment figures, homebodies are frightened; when attachment figure rejoin them, their fear is allayed. Homebodies hold on to people (parents, friends, anyone) or things (toys, clothes, rooms, home-towns) or ideas (in art, philosophy, science, or politics). In the World of ideas they need certainty. Uncertainty and ambiguity are experienced as uncomfortable and somehow wrong. They imagine that as long as they are in touch with a safe attachment-figure they themselves are safe. Spacebats, on the other hand, have the illusion that all they need is the proper equipment. They do not need people, certainly not one particular person. In fact, people are avoided as principal sources of danger. Provided the elements are not too inclement, the pilot is safe in the skies, the sailor on the high seas, the skier on the slopes, the driver on the open read, the parachutist in the air. The spacebat fears danger only from other things and people, which have to be “negotiated”: the pilot has to land, the skier has to skim round trees and rocks, a boss has to be impressed, a lover pleased. The spacebat’s World is one of friendly expanses dotted with dangerous and unpredictable things and people. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
Spacebats cultivate their skills and ego-functions so that they can look after themselves. Thereafter they can put their trust in the assurance that they can cope, keeping also always a fascination for (but wary mistrust of) the environment (including the people) they were not able to control until they had cultivated the skills to do so. These skills they will continue to test and confirm throughout life, often through deeds of risk and derring-do. Such people’s World is coloured by an unjustified optimism, which actually has its roots in the earlier World of Primary Love when all was well—this memory enables them to hold on to the belief that their skills and equipment will be sufficient to cope with anything as long as they can avoid the hazardous obstacles. Fairground please differ accordingly. The homebodies go for the simple human aggression of the rifle range or the greedy indulgence of hamburgers and candyfloss. Spacebat go for the non-attached thrills of the Big Wheel, the roundabouts, and the dodgems, which over and over assure them of their ability to survive. They look for danger which can be overcome with skill. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
From them, thrill goes with skill. These thrills are to do with leaving a safe place for somewhere where there is nothing to hold on to, with perhaps the danger of collision, and then a safe return home. This hypothesis is that this is where the fear of separateness (the loss of an attachment figure) could be mastered in play. It is a regression—to that moment when the infant experienced itself as on its own, unattached and unsupported. They very language of caring and relating is permeated by these two contrasting stances: “we are contrasting the World of skin-contact with the World of the more distal sense of vision.” Home-loving relationships are more tactile: homebodies use tact, they like to be in touch, ideas are grasped and comprehended, stories grip them. Speacebat relationships are eye-to-eye, spacebat look after people and tings, they have regard for them, consideration, concern. The three synonymous words: concern, consideration, and regard came from Norman French into English…in their original meaning they all describe a state of intense looking at an object from a distance. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
To sum up: Homebodies need to feel in turn with their chosen person (attachment figure), presume that they can win the favour of their chosen person, need to be in contact (close, attached); they keep in touch with people. Spacebats need to feel in tune wit the whole World, presume that they can conquer the World without relying on anyone’s favour need to be on the watch (distant, eyes and ears alert); they relate to people by making them safe through the use of interpersonal skills. Most intrepid spacebats hold on to something: skiers to sticks, tightrope-walkers to poles, lion-tamers to whips, and all have to be taught not to tense and hold on with their muscle in the supreme moment of tension. I think this must be the same process as that which Dr. Tustin had in mind when she noticed how autistic children hold on to what she called an auto-sensuous object; she thought it likely that by holding hard on to this, the defenceless and frightened child gave itself a sense that the whole body had something hard to protect it. This is a similar paradox about homebodies. By clinging one gets father and father away from the satisfaction of the original need, which was to be held safely. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
The profoundly tragic situation is that the more efficiently one clings, the less one is held by the object. This ever-repeated experience during analytic treatment had a large share in building up our theories of ambivalence and frustration. Both home-loving and space-loving are reactions to the emergence of self from (m)other. Both reaction involve the disappearance of something from which separation had been inconceivable. The home-loving reaction would be to cling so closely to the attachment figure that vision, which normally gives a sense of distance, is blurred and obscured and the gap between self and other acutely. The space-loving reaction makes the other dwindle out of sight so that one ceases to be reminded of the separation. Both reactions provide a ready foundation for ambivalence. The home-loving side, so dependent for well-being on the closeness of the others, may make us suspicious, mistrustful, disappointed in the failings of the people we cling to; the space-loving side may make us feel superior and condescending to the very people we need to cooperate with. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
Both of them are in constant danger of marring or even destroying their relationships to their love-objects by exactly the same methods by which they gained their favour: the ocnophil by too much clinging, the philobat by the use of too much superior skill. From this angle it would be equally correct to describe these two attitudes by words denoting hatred. Less frantically and more constructively, our home-loving side may enable us to cultivate a talent for psychological closeness and intimacy and tolerance, while the space-loving side may go exploring the great featureless expanses—a happy preparation for a safe return home. The teachings of Jesus are deeply rooted in our basic nature. Love expresses itself in the beautiful circles of sufficiency. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a goldfish. However, it is immortals whom we joke wit, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. All of us have a complex network of relationships built around four natural contacts: biological (relatives and family, and by extension church and family), geographical (where we live), vocational (who we work with), and recreational (where we play). We need to discover our networks, make a list of likely contacts, and begin to pray for them. Finally, as we pray, we must invest out time, talent, and treasure in relationships. Become personally involved in the lives of others. Plan to spend significant time wit those you would like to reach, and then make sure your plan is represented on your calendar. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
Invite your friends out for lunch or dinner, or to your home for coffee. Do things together. Attend plays, sporting events, art exhibits. Go fishing. Use special days to share your interests—birthday, graduations, holidays, weddings, births. Visit, call, or write a note. Join a service club such as Rotary, Kiwanis, or Lions. Join an interest club: gardening, hunting, cooking, woodworking. Volunteer to coach boys’ or girls’ athletic team, to be a teacher’s assistant, to give your time to the hospital or one of the many charitable organizations. Open your home to the neighbourhood. Be the most hospital home on the block to the people in your community. Spiritual formation, good or bad, is always profoundly social. You cannot keep it to yourself. Anyone who thinks of it as a merely private matter has misunderstood it. Anyone who says, “It is just between me and God,” or “What I do is my own business,” has misunderstood God as well as “me.” Strictly speaking there is nothing “just between me and God.” For all that is between me and God affect who I am; and that, in turn, modifies my relationship to everyone around me. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
My relationship to others also modifies me and deeply affects my relationship to God. Hence, if I am to be transformed, those relationships must be transformed. Therefore Jesus gave a sure mark of the outcome of spiritual formation under his guidance: we become people who love one another (John 13.35). And he does not leave “love,” that “many splendored thing,” unspecified. Instead he gives “a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another,” reports John 13.34. The age-old command to love is transformed, made a new command, by identification of the love in question with that of Jesus for us. “Anyone who does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because one has not believed the testimony God has given about his Son. And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is his Son. One who has the Son has life; one who does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he will hear us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him,” reports 1 John 5.10-12. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
Love of our human family is the supernatural way that allows us to know that we have passed out of death into life. We simply cannot love in that way unless we have a different kind of life in us. And the “love” here in question is identified as that which is in Christ because it is one that makes us ready to lay down our lives for the brethren. Failure to love others as Jesus loves us, on the other hand, chokes off the flow of the eternal kind of life that our whole human system cries out for. The old apostle minces no words: “One who does not love abides in death,” reports 1 John 3.14. Notice he did not say, “one who hates,” but simply, “one who does not love.” The mere absence of love is deadly. It is withdrawal. Notice that Jesus did not say, “One who is not loved,” though that also is true. That too is death, but our purpose cannot be to get others to love us. Love comes to us from God. That must be our unshakable circle of sufficiency. Our purpose must them be to become one who loves others with Christ’s agape. That purpose, when developed, will transform the social dimension of the human self and all of our relations to others. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
Love is not a feeling, or a special way of feeling, but the divine way of relating to others and oneself that moves through every dimension of our being and restructures our World for good. “And now there began to be a great curse upon all the land because of the iniquity of the people, in which, if a man should lay his tool or his sword upon his shelf, or upon the place wither he could keep it, behold, upon the morrow, he could not find it, so great was the cure upon the land. Wherefore every man did cleave unto that which was one’s own, with one’s hands, and would not borrow neither would he lend; and every human kept the hilt of his sword in his right hand, in the defence of his property and his own life and of his wives and children. And now, after the space of two years, and after the death of Shared, behold, there arouse the brother of Shared and he gave battle unto Coriantumr, in which Coriantumr did beat him and did pursue him to be the wilderness of Akish. And it came to pass that the brother of Shared did give battle unto him in the wilderness of Akish; and the battle became exceedingly sore, and many thousands fell by the sword. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
“And it came to pass that Coriantumr dwelt with is army in the wilderness for the space of two years, in which he did receive great strength to his army. Now the brother of Shared, whose name was Gilead, also received great strength to his army, because of secret combinations. And it came to pass that his high priest murdered him as he sat upon his throne. And it came to pass that one of the secret combinations murdered him in a secret pass, and obtained unto himself the kingdom; and his name was Lib; and Lib was a man of greater stature, more than any other man among all the people. And it came to pass that in the first year of Lib, Coriantumr came up unto the land of Moron, and gave battle unto Lib. And it came to pass that he forth with Lib, in which Lib did smite upon his arm that he was wounded; nevertheless, the army of Coriantumr did press forward upon Lib, that he fled to the borders upon the seashore. And it came to pass that Coriantumr pursued him; and Lib gave battle unto him upon the seashore. And it came to pass that Lib did smite army of Coriantumr, that they fled again to the wilderness of Akish. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
“And it came to pass that Lib did pursue him until he came to the plains of Agosh. And Coriantumr had taken all the people with him as he fled before Lib in that quarter of the land wither he fled. And when he had come to the plains of Agosh he gave battle unto Lib, and he smote upon him until he died; nevertheless, the brother of Lib did come against Coriantumr in the stead thereof, and the battle became exceedingly sore, in the which Coriantumr fled again before the army of the brother of Lib. Now the name of the brother of Lib was called Shiz. And it came to pass that Shiz pursued after Coriantumr, and he did overthrow many cities, and he did slay both women and children, and he did burn the cities. And there went a fear of Shiz throughout all the land; yea, a cry went forth throughout the land—Who can stand before the army of Shiz? Behold, he sweepeth the Earth before him! And it came to pass that the people began to flock together in armies, throughout all the face of the land. And they were divided; and a part of them fled to the army of Shiz, and a part of them fled to the army of Coriantumr. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
“And so great and lasting had been the war, and so long had been the scene of bloodshed and carnage, that the whole face of the land was covered with the bodies of the dead. And so swift and speedy was the way that there was none left to bury the dead, but they did march forth from the shedding of blood, leaving the bodies of both men, women, and children strewed upon the face of the land, to become a prey to the worms of the flesh. And the scent thereof went forth upon the face of the land, even upon all the face of the land; wherefore the people became troubled by day and by night, because of the scent thereof. Nevertheless, Shiz did not cease to pursue Coriantumr; for he had sworn to avenge himself upon Coriantumr of the blood of his brother, who has been slain, and the word of the Lord which came to Ether that Coriantumr should not fall by the sword. And thus we see that the Lord did visit them in the fulness of his wrath, and their wickedness and abomination had prepared a way for their everlasting destruction. And it came to pass that Shiz did pursue Coriantumr eastward, even to the borders by the seashore, and there he gave battle unto Shiz for the space of thee days. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
“And so terrible was the destruction among the armies of Shiz that the people began to be frightened, and began to flee before the armies of Coriantumr; and they fled to the land of Corihor, and swept off the inhabitants before them, all them that would not join them. And they pitched their tents in the valley of Corihor; and Coriantumr pitched his tents in the valley of Shurr. Now the valley of Shurr was near the hill Comnor; wherefore, Coriantumr did gather his armies together upon the hill Comnor, and did sound a trumpet unto the armies of Chiz to invite them forth to battle. And it came to pass that they came forth, but were driven again; and they came the second time, and they were driven again the second time. And it came to pass that they came again the third time, and the battle became exceedingly sore. And it came to pass that Shiz smote upon Coriantumr that he gave him many deep wounds; and Coriantumr, having lost his blood, fainted, and was carried away as though he were dead. Now the loss of men, women and children on both sides was so great that Shiz commanded his people that they should not pursue the armies of Coriantumr; wherefore they returned to their camp,” reports Ether 14.1-31. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
Blessed be God, wintertime King, blessed in all the signs of cold’s return, blessed in the scent of freezing Earth, His own true incense rising up in his Praise. Blessed be God who hath compassion upon His creatures. Blessed be God who bestoweth a good reward upon them that revere Him. Blessed be God who liveth forever and endureth to all eternity. Blessed be God who ransometh and delivereth; blessed be His name. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, O God, merciful Father, praised by Thy people, extolled and glorified by Thy servants, Thy faithful ones. With the psalms of David, Thy servant, we will praise Thee, O Lord our God; with hymns and songs we will extol and glorify Thee; with hymns and songs we will extol and glorify Thee; we will call upon Thy name and proclaim Thee our King. O Thou who art One, the life of the Universe, the King, who art praised and glorified, Thy great names endureth to all eternity. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, divine Ruler, extolled with psalms of praise. O give thanks unto the Lord, call upon His name; make known His deeds among peoples. Speak of al His marvellous works. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
Cresleigh Homes
Looking to mix up your decorations this year? 🎄 Check out today’s blog post to get some inspo! Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/blog/
Once More You Hover Near Me, Forms and Faces!
It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us. However, I could prove God statistically. As you can see, I too have had to refer to the “inner voice,” the vocation, and define it as a powerful objective-psychic factor in order to characterize the way in which it functions in the developing personality and how it appears subjectively. Mephistopheles, Amel, in Anne Rice’s novel, The Queen of the Damned, is not personified merely because this creates a better dramatic or theatrical effect, as though Queen Akasha were her own moralist and painted her private devil on the wall. The opening words in the theatrical version, spoken by Prince Lestat—“There comes a time for every vampire when the idea of eternity becomes momentarily unbearable. Living in the shadows, feeding in the darkness with only your own company to keep, rots into a solitary, hollow existence. Immortality seems like a good idea, until you realize you’re going to spend it alone. So I went to sleep, hoping that the sounds of the passing eras would fade out, and a sort of death might happen. But as I lay there, the World didn’t sound like the place I had left, but something different. Better. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
“It became worthwhile to rise again as new gods were born and worshipped. Night and day, they were never alone. I would become one of them,” are more than just an aesthetic flourish. Like the concretism of the devil, they are an admission of the objectivity of psychic experience, a whispered avowal that this was what actually happened, not because of subjective wishes, or fears, or personal opinions, but somehow quite of itself. Naturally only a dreamer thinks of vampires, but something like a primitive dreamer seems to lurk beneath the surface of our reasonable daytime consciousness. Hence the eternal doubt whether what appears to be the objective psyche is really objective, or whether it might not be imagination after all. However, then, the question arises: have I imagined such and such a thing on purpose, or has it been imagined by something in me? It is a similar problem to that of the neurotic who suffers from an imaginary carcinoma. One knows, and has been told a hundred times before, that it is all imagination, and yet one asks me brokenly, “But why do I imagine such a thing? I don’t want to do it!” To which the answer is: the idea of the carcinoma has imagined itself in him without his knowledge and without his consent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
The reason is that a psychic growth, a “proliferation,” is taking the place in his unconscious with his being able to make it conscious. In the face of this interior activity he feels afraid. But since he is entirely persuaded that there can be nothing in his own soul that he does not know about, he must relate his fear to a psychical carcinoma which he knows does not exist. And if he should still be afraid of it, there are a hundred doctors to convince him that his fear is entirely groundless. The neurosis is thus a defence against the objective, inner activity of the psyche, or an attempt, somewhat dearly paid for, to escape from the inner voice and hence from the vocation. For this “growth” is the objective activity of the psyche, which, independently of conscious volition, is trying to speak to the conscious mind through the inner voice and lead him towards wholeness. Behind the neurotic perversion is concealed his vocation, his destiny: the growth of personality, the full realization of the life-will that is born with the individual. It is the man without amor fati who is the neurotic; he, truly, as missed his vocation, and never will he be able to say, “Such reverence for mortals! Then you should have left me as one!” #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
To the extent that a human is untrue to the law of one’s being and does not rise to personality, one has failed to realize one’s life’s meaning. Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature never puts the fatal question so to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people. And where no one asks, no one needs to answer. The neurotic’s fear of carcinoma is therefore justified: it is not imagination, but the consistent expression of a psychic fact that exists in a sphere outside consciousness, beyond the reach of one’s will and understanding. If he withdrew into the wilderness and listened to his inner life in solitude, he might perhaps hear what the voice has to say. However, as a rule the miseducated, civilized human being is quite incapable of perceiving the voice, which is something not guaranteed by the current shibboleths. Primitive people have a far greater capacity in this respect; at least the medicine-people are able, as part of their professional equipment, to talk with spirits, trees, and animals, these being the forms in which they encounter the objective psyche or psychic non-ego. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
Because neurosis is a developmental disturbance of the personality, we physicians of the soul are compelled by professional necessity to concern ourselves with the problem of personality and the inner voice, however remote it may seem to be. In practical psychotherapy these psychic facts, which are usually so vague and have so often degenerated into empty phrases, emerge from obscurity and take visible shape. Nevertheless, it is extremely rare for this to happen spontaneously as it did with the Old Testament prophets; generally the psychic conditions that have caused the disturbance have to be made conscious with considerable effort. However, the contents that then come to light are wholly in accord with the inner voice and point to a predestined vocation, which, if accepted and assimilated by the conscious mind, conduces to the development of personality. Just as the great personality acts upon society to liberate, to redeem, to transform, and to heal, so the birth of personality in oneself has a therapeutic effect. It is as if a river that had run to waste in sluggish side-streams and marshes suddenly found its way back to its proper bed, or as if a stone lying on a germinating seed were lifted away so that the shoot could begin its natural growth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
The inner voice is the voice of a fuller life, of a wider, more comprehensive consciousness. That is why, in mythology, the birth of the hero or the symbolic rebirth coincides with sunrise, for the growth of personality is synonymous with an increase of self-consciousness. For the same most heroes are characterized by solar attributes, and the moment of birth of their greater personality is known as illumination. The fear that most people naturally have of the inner voice is not so immature as might be supposed. The contents that rise up and confront a limited consciousness are far from harmless, as is shown by the classic example of the temptation of Christ. In mainstream Christianity, the Devil (or Satan) is a fallen angel who rebelled against God (the most Supreme power ever). Satan was expelled from Heaven and sent to Earth. The Devil is often identified as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, whose persuasion led to the situation that Christian doctrine calls original sin and for which it sees Redemption by Jesus Christ (the Son of God) as the cure. Satan is also identified as the accuser of Job, the tempter of the Gospels, Leviathan and the dragon in the Book of Revelation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
As a rule, those legends signify the specific danger to which the person concerned is liable to succumb. If not actually evil, what the inner voice whispers to us is generally something negative. This must be so, first of all because we are usually not as unconscious of our virtues as of our vices, and then because we suffer less from the good than from the bad in us. The inner voice, as I have explained above, makes us conscious of the evil from which the whole community is suffering, whether it be the nation or the whole human race. However, it presents this evil in an individual form, so tat one might at first suppose it to be only an individual characteristic. The inner voice brings the evil before us in a very tempting and convincing way in order to make us succumb. If we do not partially succumb, nothing of this apparent evil enters into us, and no regeneration or healing can take place. (I say “apparent,” though this may sound too optimistic.) If we succumb completely, then the contents expressed by the inner voice act as so many devils, and a catastrophe ensues. However, if we can succumb only in part, and if by self-assertion the ego can save itself from being completely swallowed, then it can assimilate the vice, and we realize that the evil was, after all, only a semblance of evil, but in reality a bringer of healing and illumination. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
In fact, the inner voice is a “Lucifer” in the strictest and most unequivocal sense of the word, and it faces people with ultimate moral decision without which they can never achieve full consciousness and become personalities. The highest and the lowest, the best and the vilest, the truest and the most deceptive things are often blended together in the inner voice in the most baffling way, thus opening up in us an abyss of confusion, falsehood, and despair. It is naturally absurd for people to accuse the voice of Nature, the all-sustainer and all-destroyer, of evil. If she appears inveterately evil to us, this is mainly due to the old truth that the good is always the enemy of the better. If we did not cline to the traditional good for as long as possible, like the singer Aaliyah in the 2001 Blackground Records Music video We Need a Resolution, we would be foolish indeed. But as Prince Lestat says, “We are the powerful, we are the immortal! We should walk fearless in the open.” A good thing is unfortunately not a good forever, for otherwise there would be nothing better. If better is to come, good must stand aside. Therefore Meister Eckhart says, “God is not good, or else he could be better.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
There are times in the World’s history—and our own time may be one of them—when good must stand aside, so that anything destined to be better first appears in evil form. This shows how extremely dangerous it is even to touch these problems, for evil can so easily slip in on the plea that it is, potentially, the better! The problems of the inner voice are full of pitfalls and hidden snares. Treacherous, slippery ground, as dangerous and pathless as life itself once one lets go of the railings. However, one who cannot lose one’s life, neither shall one save it. The hero’s birth and the heroic life are always threatened. The serpents sent by Hera to destroy the infant Hercules, the python that tries to strangle Apollo at birth, the massacre of the innocents, all these tell the same story. To develop the personality is a gamble, and the tragedy is that the daemon of the inner voice is at once our greatest danger and an indispensable help. It is tragic, but logical, for it is the nature of things to be so. If they erect protective barriers, hold up wonder-working images, and point out the roads that wind safely past the abyss, can we, therefore, blame humanity, and all the well-meaning shepherds of the flock and worried fathers of the family? #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
However, in the end, the hero, the leader, the Saviour, is one who discovers a new way to greater certainty. Everything could be left undisturbed did not the new way demand to be discovered, and did it not visit humanity with all the plagues of Egypt until it finally is discovered. The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior way “Tao,” and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one’s destination reached, one’s mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things. Personality is Tao. The earlier non-existence of the cosmos is only physically and not metaphysically true. Even when its form was not developed, its essence was and shall ever be. Whether as hidden seed or grown plant, the appearance and dissolution of the cosmos is a movement without beginning and without end. Science established that the cosmos is in perpetual movement. Philosophy establishes what is the primal substance which is moving. Although the cosmos is a manifestation of World-Mind, it is not and never could be anything more than a fragmentary and phenomenal one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
The World-Mind’s own character as undifferentiated undergoes no essential change and no genuine limitation through such a manifestation as thoughts. This is a Universe of unceasing change, both within its atoms and within itself—here of unceasing movement in the same two categories. It is an active Universe. Yet at the heart of each atom there is quiescence, that mysterious stillness of the unseen Power which must be, and is, the Power of God. The new physics finds creation to be a continuous process, which has never had a dated beginning in the past. Its atoms and Universes appear and disappear. What does this indicate? That the unspaced untimed No-Thing out of which all this comes is itself the Reality, and the Universe a showing-forth. One certain thing about the Universe is change. This is because from the moment that Spirit began to go out into seeming time, place, form, relativity, and individual souls, it left behind the infinite stillness of Absolute Being, the motionless Void. The appearances taken could only be fleeting and changing and could only keep this same characteristic until they returned to the still Source. This restlessness was the inevitable consequence of consciousness’ becoming immersed in the unconscious, of Reality’s becoming the victim of illusion, of the Perfect’s becoming shrunk into the imperfection. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Reality can not be content to remain with such limitations. So desire for change begins but is never satisfied, is ever active but is ever changing its objects to new ones. Each thing is proceeding back to its origin. This is why change is incessant in the Universe, why only the Origin is without it, and to understand the Changeless is to be enlightened. Lao Tzu wrote: “I come back to the Beginning! I beat down to the very origin of things. It is astonishingly new. Yet it is also the End of all. It is both return and going-out. All begins in death.” There is a central clam behind the Universe’s agitation. The fluidity of human life, ever moving onward and onward and carrying us all with it, is a hint that it is not the ever-real. Energy radiates, whether in the form of continuous waves of disconnected particles—“moment to moment” Buddha called it. It is this cosmic radiation which becomes “matter.” Andrew from the Christian Bible, who met Christ personally and developed an intimate knowledge of Him, possessed an extraordinary heart that had been magnetized by Christ. He was so drawn to Christ, he was sure that if others could just once be exposed to Jesus, it would be enough. “The first thing Andrew did,” the Scriptures tells us, “was to find his brother Simon and tell him, ‘We have found the Messiah,’” reports John 1.41. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Certainly Andrew has the right idea! For unlike the caricatures of Christ, the Christ of Scriptures is so winsome, so radically different, so utterly unlike the stereotypes, that when He is truly seen, He draws the most resistant to Himself. Though men and women have always resisted Christ, and will continue to do so, there are untold thousands who will be magnetized to Him when they understand the truth about Him. If we want Andrew-like hearts, we must repeatedly expose ourselves to the raw realities of Christ as they are recorded in the Gospels. Magnetized hearts draw others to Christ. Most people know a great deal about being rejected, being left out, or just not received, not welcome, not acceptable. As the parent/child relationship is perhaps the most perfect illustration of a circle of sufficiency in human life, so it is also the place where the deepest and most lasting wounds can be given. If a child is totally received in its early years by its parents and siblings, it will very likely have a rootedness about it that enables it to withstand most forms of rejection that may come upon a human being in a lifetime. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
The child will carry its solid relationship to and from its family members throughout life, being sustained by them even long after those loved ones are dead. The child will receive a steady stream of rest and strength from them. By contrast, a small child not adequately received can actually die from not being held and loved; or if the child survives, the individual is likely to be incapable of giving and receiving love in decent human relationships for the rest of its life. If only in the child’s imagination, the delicate human being will be perpetually “left out.” And in this matter, imagination can have the force of reality. Thus the final words of the Old Testament speak of one who must come and “restore the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers” to avoid a curse coming to rest upon the land (Malachi 4.6). Of course severe wounds to our rootedness in others may also occur in later life. Failures of various kinds, real or imagined, can bring rejection or detachment from parents and other significant figures. Unfaithfulness is a mate, divorce, failure in career advancement, collapse of a profession, disloyalty of children, or just never making it “in,” wherever “in” may be—all of these break up our human circles of sufficiency. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Dysfunction, failure, and deviance in our lives may leave us unconnected to others at levels of our soul where lack of nourishment from deep connections with others means spiritual starvation and loss of wholeness in every dimension. Framing all the many human rejections and broken circles is real or imagined rejection by God because of sin, and a sense of worthlessness from moral failures, often too deep for conscious awareness or words. “My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God,” reports Psalms 83.3. Life is in the highest degree properly in God. In proof of which it must be considered that since a thing is said to live in so far as it operates of itself and not as moved by another, the more perfectly this power is found in anything, the more perfect is the life of that thing. “What was made, in Him was life,” reports John 1.3,4. However, all things were made, except God. Therefore all tings are life in God. In God to live is to understand. In God intellect, the thing understood, and the act of understanding, are one and the same. Hence whatever is in God as understood is the very living or life of God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
Now, wherefore, since all tings that have been made by God are in Him as things understood, it follows that all things in Hum are the divine life itself. Creatures are said to be in God in a twofold sense. In one way, so far they are held together and preserved by the divine power; even as we say that things that are in our power are in us. And creatures are thus said to be in God, even as they exist in their own natures. In this sense we must understand the words of the Apostle when he says, “In Him we live, move, and be”; since our being, living, and moving are themselves caused by God. In another sense things are said to be in God, as in Him who knows them, in which sense they are in God through their proper ideas, which in God are not distinct from the divine essence. Hence things as they are in God are the divine essence. And since the divine essence is life and not movement, it follows that things existing in God in this manner are not movement, but life. The thing modelled must be like the model according to the form, not the mode of being. For sometimes the form has being of another kind in the model from that which it has in the thing modelled. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Thus the form of a house has in the mind of the architect immaterial and intelligible being; but in the house that exists outside one’s mind, material and sensible being. Hence the ideas of things, though not existing in themselves, are life in the divine mind, as having a divine existence in that mind. “And it came to pass that the days of Ether were in the days of Coriantumr; and Coriantumr was king over all the land. And Ether was a prophet of the Lord; wherefore Ether came forth in the days of Coriantumr, and began to prophesy unto the people, for he could not be restrained because of the Spirit of the Lord which was in him. For he did cry from the morning, even until the going down of the sun, exhorting the people to believe in God unto repentance lest they should be destroyed, saying unto them that by faith all things are fulfilled—wherefore, whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better World, yea, even a place at the right hand of God, which hope cometh of faith, maketh an anchor to the souls of men, which would make them sure and steadfast, always abounding in good works, being led to glorify God. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
“And it came to pass that Ether did prophesy great and marvelous things unto the people, which they did not believe, because they saw them not. And now, I, Moroni, would speak somewhat concerning these things; I would show unto the World that faith is things which are hoped for and not seen; wherefore, dispute not because ye see not, for ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith. For it was by faith that Christ showed himself unto our father, after he had risen from the dead; and he showed not himself unto them until after they had faith him; wherefore, it must needs be that some had faith in him, for he showed himself not unto the World. However, because of the faith of men Christ has shown himself unto the World, and glorified the name of the Father, and prepared a way that thereby others might be partakers of the Heavenly gift, that they might hope for those things which they have not seen. Wherefore, if ye will but have faith, ye may also have hope, and be partakers of the gift. Behold it was by faith that they of old were called after the holy order of God. Wherefore, by faith was the law of Moses given. However, in the gift of his Son hath God prepared a more excellent way; and it is by faith that it hath been fulfilled. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
“For if there be no faith among the children of men, Hod can do no miracle among them; wherefore, he showed not himself until after their faith. Behold, it was the faith of Alma and Amulek that caused the prison to tumble to the Earth. Behold, it was the faith of Nephi and Lehi that wrought the change upon the Lamanites, that they were baptized with fire and with the Holy Ghost. Behold, it was the faith of Ammon and his brethren which wrought so great a miracle among the Lamanites. Yes, and even all they who wrought miracles wrought them by faith, even those who were before Christ and also those who were after. And it was by faith that the three disciples obtained a promise that they should not taste of death; and they obtained not the promise until after their faith. And neither at any time hath any wrought miracles until after their faith; wherefore they first believed in the Son of God. And there were many whose faith was so exceedingly strong, even before Christ came, who could not be kept from within the veil, but truly saw with their eyes the things which they had beheld with an eye of faith, and they were glad. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
“And behold, we have seen in this record that one of these was the brother of Jared; for so great was his faith in God, that when God put forth his finger he could not hide it from the sight of the brother of Jared, because of his word which he had spoken unto him, which word he had obtained by faith. And after the brother of Jared had behold the finger of the Lord, because of the promise which the brother of Jared had obtained by faith, the Lord could not withhold anything from sight; wherefore he showed him all things, for he could no longer be kept without the veil. And it is by faith that my fathers have obtained the promise that these things should come unto their brethren through the Gentiles; therefore the Lord hath commanded me, yes, even Jesus Christ. And I said unto him: Lord, the Gentiles will mock at these things, because of our weakness in writing; for Lord thou hast made us mighty in word by faith, but thou hast not made us mighty in writing; for thou hast made all this people that they could speak much, because of the Holy Ghost which thou hast given them; and thou hast made us that we could write but little, because of the awkwardness of our hands. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
“Behold, thou hast not made us mighty in writing like unto the brother of Jared, for thou madest him that the things which he wrote were mighty even as thou art, unto the overpowering of a man to read them. Thou hast also made our words powerful and great, even that we cannot write them; wherefore, wen we write we behold our weakness, and stumble because of the placing of our words; and I fear lest the Gentiles shall mock at our words. And when I had said this, the Lord spake unto me, saying: Floods mock, but they shall mourn; and my grace is sufficient for the meek, that they shall take no advantage of your weakness; and if humans come unto me I will show unto them their weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all humans that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them. Behold, I will show unto the Gentiles their weakness, and I will show unto them that faith, hope and charity bringeth unto me—the fountain of all righteousness. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
“And I, Moroni, having heard these words, was conformed, and said: O Lord, thy righteous will be done, for I know that thou workest unto the children of men according to their faith; for the brother of Jared said unto the mountain Zerin, Remove—and it was removed. And if he had no had faith it would not have moved; wherefore thou workest after men have faith. For thus didst thou manifest thyself unto thy disciples; for after they had faith, and did speak in thy name, thou didst show thyself unto them in great power. And I also remember that thou hast said that thou hast prepared a house for man, yea, even among the mansions of thy Father, in which man might have a more excellent hope; wherefore man must hope, or one cannot receive an inheritance in the place which thou hast prepared. And again, I remember that thou hast said that thou hast loved the World, even unto the laying down of thy life for the World, that thou mightest take it again to prepare a place for the children of men. And now I know that this love which thou hast had for the children of men is charity; wherefore, except men shall have charity they cannot inherit that place which thou hast prepared in the mansions of thy Father. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
“Wherefore, I know by this thing which thou hast said, that if the Gentiles have not charity, because of our weakness, that thou wilt prove them, and take which they have received, and given unto them who shall more abundantly. And it came to pass that I prayed unto the Lord that he would give unto the Gentiles grace, that they might have charity. And it came to pass that the Lord said unto me: If they have not charity it mattereth not unto thee, thou hast been faithful; wherefore, thy garments shall be made clean. And because thou hast seen thy weakness thou shalt be made strong, even unto the siting down in the place which I have prepared in the mansion of my Father. And now I, Moroni, bid farewell unto the Gentiles, yea, and also unto my brethren whom I love, until we shall meet before the judgment-seat of Christ, where all men shall know that my garments are not spotted with your blood. And then shall ye know that I have seen Jesus, and that he hath talked with me face to face, and that he told me in plain humility, even as a man telleth another in mine own language, concerning these things; and only a few have I written, because of my weakness in writing. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
“And now, I would commend you to seek this Jesus of whom the prophets and apostles have written, that the grace of God the Father, and also the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost, which beareth record of them, may be and abide in your forever. Amen,” reports Ether 12.1-41. Dear Lord in Heaven, please let down from your place on high, and fitting a shaft to your bow, let loose your bowstring. Please sink in deep into the sky the shaft of lighting and cause the clouds to burst soaking the World, please bring the Winter’s rain that we so desperately need. The snow skinks back into the Earth, there to nourish the sleeping life that waits patiently for its time to come. God of Winter, you will preform this miracle through many ages. Please transform, again, this dry dusty ground into the frozen white so we may have the pliant green in the summer and spring. Please work, again, the ancient magic, and bring a cold and wet winter to our land. We sing praises unto you Lord, we are Your faithful ones, and give thanks to Your holy name. For while God’s anger is but for a moment, His favour is for a lifetime; weeping many tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
I have said in my security: “I shall never be disturbed.” O Lord, in Thy favour, Thou didst set up for me mountains of strength; but when Thou didst turn away from me, I was affrighted. Unto Thee, O Lord, did I call, and unto the Lord I made supplication: “What profit is there in my death, in my going down to the nether World? Can the dust praise Thee? Can it declare Thy truth? Hear, O Lord, and be gracious unto me; Lord, be Thou my helper.” Then Thou didst turn my mourning into dancing; Thou didst loose my sackcloth, and gird me with gladness, so that my soul might continually sing praise to Thee and not be silent; O Lord my God, I will give thanks unto Thee forever. Magnified and sanctified by 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 Israel, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. May God’s 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 25 of 25
Dear Lord Jesus, I confess that I am a guilty sinner and that I need to be saved. I believe that you died on the cross to pay my sin debt. Please forgive my sins, come into my heart, and save my soul. I turn my life over to you. Please help me to live for you from now on. Amen.
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Where Forces Rules, there is No Love, and where Love Reigns Force Does Not Count!
When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as one’s own satisfaction or security, then the state of loves exists…Under no other circumstances is a state of love present, regardless of the popular usage of the word. But what has the individual personality to do with the plight of the many? In the first place one is part of the people as a whole, and is as much at the mercy of the power that moves the wholes as anybody else. The only thing that distinguishes one from all the others is one’s vocation. One has been called by that all-powerful, all-tyrannizing psychic necessity that is one’s own and one’s people’s affliction. If one hearkens to the voice, one is not once set apart and isolated as one has resolved to obey the law that commands one from within. “One’s own law!” everybody will cry. However, one knows better: it is the law, the vocation for which one is destined, no more “one’s own” than the lion that fells one, although it is undoubtedly this particular lion that kills one and not any other lion. Only in this sense is one entitled to speak of “one’s” vocation, “one’s” law. With the decision to put one’s way above all other possible ways one has already fulfilled the greater part of one’s vocation as a redeemer. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
One has invalidated all other ways for oneself, exalting one’s law above convention and thus making a clean sweep of all those things that not only failed to prevent the great danger but actually accelerated it. For conventions in themselves are soulless mechanisms that can never understand more than the mere routine of life. Creative life always stands outside convention. That is why, when the mere routine of life predominated in the form of convention and tradition, there is bound to be a destructive outbreak of creative energy. Only when it is a mass phenomenon, is this outbreak is a catastrophe, but never in the individual who consciously submits to these higher powers and serves them with all one’s strength. The mechanism of convention keeps people unconscious, for in that state they can follow their accustomed tracks like blind brutes, without the need for conscious decision. This unintended result of even the best conventions is unavoidable but is no less a terrible danger for that. For when new conditions arise that are not provided for under the old conventions, then, just as with animals, panic is liable to break out among human beings kept unconscious by routine, and with equally unpredictable results. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Personality, however, does not allow itself to be seized by the panic terror of those who are just waking to consciousness, for it has put all its terrors behind it. It is able to cope with the changing times, and has unknowingly and involuntarily become a leader. All human beings are much alike, otherwise they could not succumb to the same delusion, and the psychic substratum upon which the individual consciousness is based is universally the same, otherwise people could never reach a common understanding. So, in this sense, personality and its peculiar psychic make-up are not something absolutely unique. The uniqueness holds only for the individual nature of the personality, as it does for every individual. To become a personality is not the absolute prerogative of the genius, for a human may be a genius without being a personality. In so far as every individual has the law of one’s life inborn in one, it is theoretically possible for any human to follow this law and so become a personality, that is, to achieve wholeness. However, since life only exists in the form of living unite, id est, individuals, the law of life always tends towards a life individual lived. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
So although the objective psyche can only be conceived as a universal and uniform datum, which means that all humans share the same primary, psychic condition, this objective psyche must nevertheless individuate itself if it is to become actualized, for there is other way in which it could express itself except through the individual human being. When the psyche seizes hold of a group, in which case it must, of its own nature, precipitate a catastrophe, because it can only operate unconsciously and is not assimilated by any consciousness or assigned its place among the existing conditions of life, this is the only exception. Only the human who can consciously assent to the power of the inner voice becomes a personality; but if one succumbs to it one will be swept away by the blind flux of psychic events and destroyed. That is the great and liberating thing about any genuine personality: If it were lived unconsciously by the group, one voluntarily sacrifices oneself to one’s vocation, and consciously translates into one’s own individual reality what would only lead to ruin. One of the most shining examples of the meaning of personality that history has preserved for us is the life of Christ. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
In Christianity, which, be it mentioned in passing, was the only religion really persecuted by the Romans, there rose up a direct opponent of the Caesarean madness that afflicted not only the emperor, but every Roman as well: civis Rmanus sum. The opposition showed itself wherever the worship of Caesar clashed with Christianity. However, as we know from what the evangelists tell us about the psychic development of Christ’s personality, this opposition was fought out just as decisively in the soul of its funder. The story of the Temptation clearly reveals the nature of the psychic power with which Jesus came into collision: it was the power-intoxicated devil of the prevailing Caesarean psychology that led him into dire temptation in the wilderness. As if it were trying to make a Caesar of him, this devil was the objective psyche that held all the peoples of the Roman Empire under its sway, and that is why it promised Jesus all the kingdoms of the Earth. Obeying the inner call of his vocation, Jesus voluntarily exposed himself to the assaults of the imperialistic madness that filled everyone, conqueror and conquered alike. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
In this way, by exposing himself to the World’s suffering, Christ recognized the nature of the objective psyche which had plunged the whole World into misery and had begotten a yearning for salvation that found expression even in the pagan poets. Far from suppressing or allowing oneself to be suppressed by this psychic onslaught, Christ let it act on him consciously, and assimilated it. Thus was World-conquering Caesarism transformed into spiritual kingship, and the Roman Empire into the universal kingdom of God that was not of this World. While the whole Jewish nation was expecting an imperialistically minded and politically active hero as a Messiah, Jesus fulfilled the Messianic mission not so much for one’s own nation as for the whole Roman World, and pointed out to humanity the ancient truth that where force rules there is no love, and where love reigns force does not count. The religion of love was the exact psychological counterpart to the Roman devil-worship of power. This Roman devil-worship of force and power has its grip on Americans, especially those in California. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
However, the example of Christianity is perhaps the best illustration of the previous abstraction argument. This apparently unique life became a sacred symbol because it is the psychological prototype of the only meaningful life, that is, of a life that strives for the individual realization—absolute and unconditional—of its own particular law. Well may we exclaim with Tertullian: anima naturaliter christiana! (A natural Christian soul.) The deification of Jesus, as also of the Buddha, is not surprising, for it affords a striking example of the enormous valuation that humanity places upon the ideal of personality. Though it seems at present as if the blind and destructive dominance of meaningless collective forces would thrust the ideal of personality into the background, yet this is only a passing revolt against the dead weight of history. Once the revolutionary, unhistorical, and therefore uneducated inclinations of the rising generation have had their fill of tearing down tradition, new heroes will be sought and found. Even the Bolseviks, whose radicalism leaves nothing to be desired, have embalmed Lenin and made a saviour Karl Marx. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The ideal of personality is one of the ineradicable needs of the human soul, and the more unsuitable it is the more fanatically it is defended. Indeed, the worship of Caesar was itself a misconceived cult of personality, and modern Protestantism, whose critical theology has reduced the divinity of Christ to vanishing point, has found its last refuge in the personality of Jesus. Yes, this thing we call personality is a great and mysterious problem. Everything that can be said about it is curiously unsatisfactory and inadequate, and there is always a danger of the discussion losing itself in pomposity and empty chatter. They very idea of personality is, in common usage, so vague and ill-defined that one hardly ever finds two people who take the word in the same sense. If I put forward a more definite conception of it, I do not imagine that I have uttered the last word. I should like to regard all I say here only as a tentative attempt to approach the problem of personality without making any claim to solve it. Or rather, I should like my attempt to be regarded as a description of the psychological problems raised by personality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
All the usual explanations and nostrums of psychology are apt to fall short here, just as they do with the human of genius or the creative artist. Inferences from heredity or from environment do not quite come off; inventing fictions about childhood, so popular today, ends—to put it mildly—in unreality; explanations from necessity—“he had no money,” “he was a sick man,” et cetera—remain caught in externals. There is always something irrational to be added, something that simply cannot be explained, a deus ex machina or an asylum ignorantiae, that well-known sobriquet for God. The problem thus seems to border on the extrahuman realm, which always been known by a divine name. Wherever we look or search, probe or analyse in this Universe, we find nothing that is permanent. Everything is moving slowly or swiftly to change of condition, whether this be growth or deterioration, and moves in the end to complete disintegration. There is no stability anywhere but only the show of it. Whether it be human’s fortunes or a mountain’s surface, everything is evanescent. Only the rate of this evanescence differs but the fact of it does not. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Throughout all things in the Universe and not only in the plant and animal kingdoms, we find the presence of growth and decay, and ripe and rot. There are no golden ages, no utopias, no Heavens on Earth. This World is a scene of continuous process, or diversification—which means it is an ever-changing scene. Sometimes it is better, sometimes it is worse—if looked at from a human standpoint—but none these two conditions remains forever fixed. Only romantic dreamers or pious, wishful thinkers look or wait for one that is. If fortunate, what we may reasonably look for and, hope to find, is an inner equilibrium within ourselves which will yield a peace or a presence. Let us not lessen what we are by refusing to accept the responsibility, by practising self-pity, or by blaming environments. They have their place and may make their contribution, but in the end it is our own ignorance of our own possibilities which is the basic cause. Whatever is done to improve human affairs and arrangements will not last. When it will need to be improved again, the time will come. In just the same way even the planet itself changes its features, turns tropical zones to temperate ones and great seas to sandy deserts. Only in the Void is there no activity, no change. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
If anything is perfect it cannot be improved. Whoever therefore demands perfection must understand that one is demanding finality. Perhaps that is why, even at an approximate 24,000 square feet (which is at least ten times larger than most homes), Sarah Winchester’s Mansion was never completed, even though it is one of the largest and most unique estates in the World! Could there be such a thing in this ever-changing World as perfection? There are no permanent solutions because there are no permanent problems. Millions of animal and human bodies have entered the Earth’s composition through drowning in vast floods or dying in droughts, famines, and epidemics, through earthquakes and eruptions. It has been an immense graveyard and crematorium. Yet equally it has brought into living existence millions of new beings. Men and women terrify themselves with mental pictures of age, of its diseases and infirmities, its growing cancers and shrinking arteries. Yet they seldom relate their personal experience to the wider scheme of things, to the Universe as a whole. If they did, they would soon see that not only are decay and disintegration everywhere in nature, but brutality and murder are there also on an appalling scale. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Millions of animals, insects, birds, fish, and sometimes humans, attack, deform, mutilate or kill other creatures. Civilizations do not progress; they grow, but they crumble by their own weight, or, rather, overweight. If anything every impressed me with the truth of civilization’s transformatory nature it was my reading of the Frenchman Volney’s book The Ruins of Empires, together with my visit to the remains of two cities. One, Anuradhapura in Ceylon, sixteen miles long and sixteen miles wife stretching in the sunshine with thousands of golden and sliver pillars, was eaten up by jungle growth or dissolved into dust! The other, Angkor in Cambodia, displayed huge temples rising out of the thick clogging undergrowth and broken, weather-beaten states of Buddhas tangled with, root-bound in, gnarled wrinkled trees. If it was in Beijing or Shanghai, maybe X’ian, possibly Hangzhou, I cannot recall. However, something else I found fascinating was in China, they have statues of God carved into the mountain and they must be 100 feet tall, and one of them even had brown skin. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Despite the ever-confronting evidence that change is ceaseless throughout the Universe and throughout human experience, we persistently get the feeling of solidity in the Universe and permanency in experience. Is this only an illusion and the World merely a phantasm? The answer that there IS something unending behind both. There is no stability anywhere in the Universe, given enough time, and there is none in human life. Yet the craving for it exists. That there is a metaphysical meaning behind this phenomenon. It exists because THAT which is being the craving person is the only stable thing there is, or rather no-thing, because IT has no shape, no colour, is soundless and invisible and beyond the grasp of ordinary thoughts. It is this hidden contact, or connection, which keeps humans seeking for what one never finds, hoping for what one never attains, refusing to accept the message of ceaseless change which Nature and Life continue to utter in one’s ears, and opposing the adjustments that experience and events demand periodically from one. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
There is no permanency anywhere except in ourselves. And even there it is so deep down, and so hard to find, that most people accept the mistaken idea that their ego’s ever-changing existence is the only real existence. The communities of God, to which Christ has become teacher and guide, are, in comparison with communities of the pagan people among whom they live as strangers, like Heavenly lights in the World. “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. One who does not love abides in death,” reports 1 John 3.14. Now, if we are to be spiritually formed in Christlikeness, we must find out what our relationships to others must be like. The natural condition of life for human beings is one of reciprocal rootedness in others. As firmness of footing is a condition of walking and secure movement, so assurance of others being for us is the condition of stable, healthy living. There are many ways this can be present in individual cases, but it must be there. If it is not, we are but walking wounded, our life more or less a shambles until we die. When the required type of “for-ness” is adequately present, human “circles of sufficiency” emerge. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The most fundamental form of a circle of sufficiency is that of a mother and child (the Virgin Mary and Jesus). Then perhaps mother and child and father. (What some more modern spiritualist consider the “Holy Trinity.”) Then there are young lovers, reciprocally absorbed, as well as mature mates. Of course numerous forms of human association can take on some degree of this “sufficiency,” and always with a distinctive character arising out of the precise nature of the relationships involved. These circles of sufficiency, natural and essential to the human condition and so profoundly beautiful to behold, are always illusory at the merely human level, and even the illusion itself is terrifyingly fragile. To assure an anxious child we may say, “Everything is okay now.” However, it never is. In this World it is never true that everything is okay, and perhaps it is least true in those very situations where we feel the need to say it. Every human circle presupposes for its “really being okay” a larger context or circle that supports it. The mother and child, for example, presuppose the larger family that cares for and sustains them, making it possible for them to be absorbed in one another as they need to be, ignoring all else. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
These larger circles also depend upon yet larger circles, which, while ever less intimate, are still crucial to making the inner circles possible. That is just how human life is. The togetherness of the mother and child may be drastically affected by economic conditions on the other side of the Earth. Ultimately, if it is not caught up in the life of the only genuinely self-sufficient circle of sufficiency, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, every human circle is doomed to dissolution. Only when rooted in that divine Trinitarian circle can the broken individuals from the broken circles recover from the wounds received in their circles of origin and find wholeness on their long journey from the womb to the eternal City of God. Of course it was never God’s intention that the natural human circles of sufficiency, or reciprocal rootedness, would be illusory, fragile, and eventually broken; and if they were lived within his kingdom, they would not be. “And there came also in the days of Com many prophets, and prophesied of the destruction of the great people except they should repent, and turn unto the Lord, and forsake their murders and wickedness. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
“And it came to pass that the prophets were rejected by the people, and they fled unto Com for protection, for the people sought to destroy them. And they prophesied unto Com many things; and he was blessed in all the remainders of his days. And he lived to a good old age, and begat Shiblom; and Shiblom reigned in his stead. And the brother of Shiblom rebelled against him, and there began to be an exceedingly great war in all the land. And it came to pass that the brother of Shiblom caused that all the prophets who prophesied of the destruction of the people should be put to death; And there was great calamity in all the land, for they had testified that a great curse should come upon the land, and also upon the people, and that there should be a great destruction among them, such an one as never had been upon the face of the Earth, and their bones should become as heaps of Earth upon the face of the land except they should repent of their wickedness. And they hearkened not unto the voice of the Lord, because of their wicked combinations; wherefore, there began to be wars and contentions in all the land, and also many famines and pestilences, insomuch that there was a great destruction. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“The destruction was so great that is was such an one as never had been known upon the face of the Earth; and all this came to pass in the days of Shiblom. And the people began to repent of their iniquity; and inasmuch as they did the Lord did have mercy on them. And it came to pass that Shiblom was slain, and Seth was brought into captivity, and did dwell in captivity all his days. And it came to pass that Ahah, his son, did obtain the kingdom; and he did reign over the people all his days. And he did do all manner f iniquity in his days, by which he did cause the shedding of much blood; and few were his days. And Ethem, being a descendant of Ahah, did obtain the kingdom; and he also did do that which was wicked in his days. And it came to pass that in the days of Ethem there came many prophets, and prophesied again unto the people; yea, they did prophesy that the Lord would utterly destroy them from off the face of the Earth except they repented of their iniquities. And it came to pass that the people hardened their hearts, and would not hearken unto their words; and the prophets mourned withdrew from among the people. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
“And it came to pass that Ethem did execute judgment in wickedness all his days; and he begat Moron. And it came to pass that Moron did reign in his stead; and Moron did that which was wicked before the Lord. And it came to pass that there arose another mighty man; and he was a descendant of the brother of Jared. And it came to pass that he did overthrow Moron and obtain the kingdom; wherefore, Moron dwelt in captivity all the remainder of his days; and he begat Coriantor. And it came to pass that Coriantor dwelt in captivity all his days. And in the days of Coriantor there also came many prophets, and prophesied of great and marvelous things, and cried repentance unto the people, and except they should repent the Lord God would execute judgment against them to their utter destruction; and that the Lord God would send or bring forth another people to possess the land, by his power, after the manner by which be brought their fathers. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“And they did reject all the words of the prophets, because of their secret society and wicked abominations. And it came to pass that Coriantor begat Ether, and he died, having dwelt in captivity all his days,” reports Ether 11.1-23. Lord, our hearth, God who guards the heart of our home, threefold flame who shines in the center: we honour and praise you, we offer you our words of worship. King of Poets, may our lives be creative. King of Smithers, may our lives be useful. King of healers, may our lives be healthy. Your family is standing before you here, confident you will do what is right. May the snow start falling to create the waters of the Earth, so it can soak deep into the Earth, and conceive a healthy environment. Being to birth the cold and rainy days. And be God’s treasured people in His hand, a diadem His kingly brow to band. By God, we were uplifted, carried, crowned, thus honoured inasmuch as precious found. God’s glory is on me, and mine on Him. And when I call God is not far or dim. God loves His folks; the meek will glorify, and, shrined in prayer, draw their rapt reply. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Truth is Thy primal word; at Thy behest the generations pass—O assist our quest for Thee, and set my host of song on high, and let my psalmody come very nigh. My praises as a coronal account, and let my prayer as Thine incense mount. Deem precious unto Thee the poor man’s song, as those that to Thine altar did belong. Rise, O my blessing, to the lord of birth, the breeding, quickening, righteous force of Earth. Do Thou receive it with acceptant nod, my choicest incense offered to my God. And let my meditation grateful be, for all my being is athirst for Thee. Thine, O Lord, is the greatness and the power, the glory and victory and the majesty; for all that is in the Heaven and on the Earth is Thine. Thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and Thou art exalted supreme above all. Who can recount the mighty acts of the Lord? Who can proclaim all His full praise? I will extol Thee, O Lord, for Thou hast raised me up, and hast not allowed mine enemies to rejoice in triumph over me. O Lord, my God, I cried unto Thee, and Thou didst heal me; O Lord, Thou savest me from the peril of death; Thou didst keep me alive, that I should not go down to the grave. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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A Person that Does Not Have Any Tears Does Not Have Any Heart!
To have no friends at all is the worst state of humans. To have only one good friend is enough. You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. Our personality develops in the course of our life from germs that are hard or impossible to discern, and it is only our deeds that reveal who we are. We are like the sun, which nourishes the life of the Earth and brings forth every kind of strange, wonderful, and evil thing; we are like the mothers who bear in their wombs untold happiness and suffering. At first we do not know what deeds or misdeeds, what destiny, what good and evil we have in us, and only the autumn can show what spring has engendered, only in the evening will it be seen what the morning began. Personality, as the complete realization of our whole being, is an unattainable ideal. However, unattainability is no argument against the ideal, for ideals are only signposts, never the goal. Just as the child must develop in order to be educated, so the personality must begin to sprout before it can be trained. And this is where the danger begins. For we are handling something unpredictable, we do not know how and in what direction the budding personality will develop, and we have learned enough of nature and the World to be somewhat chary of both. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
On top of that, we were brought up in the Christian belief that human nature is intrinsically evil. However, even those who no longer adhere to the Christian teaching are by nature mistrustful and not a little frightened of the possibilities lurking in the subterranean chambers of their being. Even enlightened psychologists like Dr. Freud give us an extremely unpleasant picture of what lies slumbering in the depths of the human psyche. So it is rather a bold venture to put in a good word for the development of personality. Human nature, however, is fully of the strangest contradictions. We praise the “sanctity of motherhood,” yet would never dream of holding it responsible for all the human monsters, the homicidal maniacs, dangerous lunatics, epileptics, idiots, and physically disabled of every description who are born every day. At the same time, when it comes to allowing the free development of personality, we are tortured with doubts. “Anything might happen then,” people say. Or they dish up the old, feeble-minded objection to “individualism.” However, individualism is not and never has been a natural development; it is nothing but an unnatural usurpation, a freakish, impertinent pose that proves its hollowness by crumpling up before the least obstacle. What we have in mind is something very different. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
Clearly no one develops one’s personality because somebody tells one that it would be useful or advisable to do so. Nature has never yet been taken in by well-meaning advice. The only thing that moves nature is causal necessity, and that goes for human nature, too. Without necessity nothing budges, the human personality least of all. It is tremendously conservative, not to say torpid. Only acute necessity is able to rouse it. The developing personality obeys no caprice, no command, no insight, only brute necessity; it needs the motivating force of inner or outer fatalities. Any other development would be no better than individualism. That is why when flung at the natural development of personality, the cry of “individualism” is a cheap insult. The words “many are called, but few are chosen” are singularly appropriate here, for the development of personality from the germ-state to full consciousness is at once a charisma and a curse, because its first fruit is the conscious and unavoidable segregation of the single individual from the undifferentiated and unconscious herd. This means isolation, and there is no more comforting word for it. Neither family nor society nor position can save one from this fate, nor yet the most successful adaptation to one’s environment, however smoothly one fits in. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
The development of personality is a favour that must be paid for dearly. However, the people who talk most loudly about developing their personalities are the very ones who are lest mindful of the results, which are such as to frighten away all weaker spirits. Yet the development of personality means more than just the fear of hatching forth monsters, or of isolation. It also means fidelity to the law of one’s own being. For the word “fidelity” I should prefer, in this context, the Greek word used in the New Testament, which is erroneously translated “faith.” It really means “trust,” “trustful loyalty. Fidelity to the law of one’s own being is a trust in this law, a loyal perseverance and confident hope; in short, an attitude such as a religious human should have towards God. It can now be seen how portentous is the dilemma that emerges from behind our problem: personality can never develop unless the individual chooses one’s own way, consciously and with moral deliberation. Not only the causal motive—necessity—but conscious moral decision must lend its strength to the process of building personality. If the first is lacking, then the alleged development is a mere acrobatics of the will; if the second, it will get stuck in unconscious automatism. However, if one holds one’s own way to be the best, a human can make a moral decision to go that way. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
The other ways are conventionalities of a moral, social, political, philosophical, or religious nature. The fact that the conventions always flourish in one form or another only proves that the vast majority of humankind do not choose their own way, but convention, and consequently develop no themselves but a method and a collective mode of life at the cost of their own wholeness. Just as the psychic and social life of humankind at the primitive level is exclusively a group life with a high degree of unconsciousness among the individuals composing it, so the historical process of development that comes afterwards is in the main collective and will doubtless remain so. That is why I believe convention to be a collective necessity. It is a stopgap and not an ideal, either in the moral or in the religious sense, for submission to it always means renouncing one’s wholeness and running away from the final consequences of one’s own being. To develop one’s own personality is indeed an unpopular undertaking, a deviation that is highly uncongenial to the herd, an eccentricity smelling of the cenobite, as it seems to the outsider. Small wonder, then, that from earliest times only the chosen few have embarked upon this strange adventure. Had they all been fools, we would safely dismiss them as mentally “private” persons who have no claim on interest. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
However, unfortunately, these personalities are as a rule the legendary heroes of humankind, the very ones who are looked up to, loved, and worshipped, the true sons of God whose names perish not. They are the flower and the fruit, the ever fertile seeds of the tree of humanity. This allusion to historical personalities makes it abundantly clear why the development of personality is an ideal, and why the cry of individualism is an insult. Their greatness has never lain in their abject submission to convention, but on the contrary, in their deliverance from convention. They towered up like mountain peaks above the mass that still clung to its collective fears, its beliefs, laws, and systems, and boldly chose their own way. To the man in the street it has always seemed miraculous that anyone should turn aside from the beaten track with its known destinations, and strike out on the steep and narrow path leading into the unknown. Hence, if not actually crazy, it was always believed that such a human was possessed by a daemon or a god; for the miracle of a human being able to act otherwise than as humanity has always acted could only be explained by the gift of daemonic power or a divine spirit. How could anyone but a god counterbalance the dead weight of humanity in the mass, with its everlasting convention and habit? #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
From the beginning, therefore, the heroes were endowed with godlike attributes. According to the Nordic view they had snake’s eyes, and there was something peculiar about their birth or descent; certain heroes of ancient Greece were snake-souled, others had a personal daemon, were magicians or the elect of God. All these attributes, which could be multiplied at will, show that for the ordinary human the outstanding personality is something supernatural, a phenomenon that can only be explained by the intervention of some daemonic factor. What is it, in the end, that induces a human to go one’s own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise. What is it then, that inexorable tips the scales in favour of the extra-ordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a human to emancipate oneself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in God, despite its being, as the ordinary human would say, only a personal feeling. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
However, vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. The fact that many a human who goes one’s own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation. One must obey one’s own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to one of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears that voice of the inner human: one is called. That is why the legend say that one possesses a private daemon who counsels one and whose mandates one must obey. The best known example of this is Faust, and an historical instance is provided by the daemon of Socrates. Primitive medicine-humans have their snake spirits, and Aesculapius, the tutelary patron of physicians, has for ones emblem the Serpent of Epidaurus. He also has, as his private daemon, the Cabir Telesphoros, who is said to have dictated or inspired his medical prescriptions. Nonetheless, always choose a vocation where you will be happy. You will spend at least eight hours a day or more at it through all the foreseeable future. Choose something that you enjoy doing. The original meaning of “to have a vocation” is to be addressed by a voice.” The clearest examples of this are to be found in the avowals of the Old Testament prophets. That it is not just a quaint old-fashioned way of speaking is proved by the confessions of historical personalities such as Goethe and Napoleon, to mention only two familiar examples, who made no secret of the feeling of vocation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
When it comes to a vocation, income is important, but you do not need to be a multimillionaire or a billionaire to be happy. In fact, if wealth becomes your only objective, you are more likely to be unhappy. You will become a slave t it. It will colour all your decisions. You need enough to get along on. You need enough to provide well for your family. Vocation, or the feeling of it, is not, however, the prerogative of great personalities; it is also appropriate to the small ones all the way down to humble personalities, but as the size decreases the voice become more and more muffled and unconscious. It is as if the voice of the daemon within were moving further and further off, and spoke more rarely and more indistinctly. The smaller the personality, the dimmer and more unconscious it becomes, until finally in merges indistinguishably with the surrounding society, thus surrendering its own wholeness and dissolving into the wholeness of the group. In the place of the inner voice there is the voice of the group with its conventions, and vocation is replaced by collective necessities. However, even in this unconscious social condition there are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feelings themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
In the most cases it is impossible to explain to others what has happened for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. “You are no different from anybody else,” they will chorus, or, “there is no such thing,” and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as “morbid” and “most unseemly.” For it is “a monstrous presumption to suppose anything of that sort could be of the slightest significance” –it is “purely psychological.” This last objection is extremely popular nowadays. It stems from a curious underestimation of anything psychic, which people apparently regard as personal, arbitrary, and therefore completely futile. And this, paradoxically enough, despite their enthusiasm for psychology. The unconscious, after all, is “nothing but fantasy.” We “merely imagined” so and so, et cetera. People think themselves magicians who can conjure the psyche hither and thither and fashion it to suit their moods. They deny what strikes them as inconvenient, sublimate anything nasty, explain away their phobias, correct their faults, and feel in the end that they have arranged everything beautifully. In the meantime they have forgotten the essential point, which is that only the tiniest fraction of the psyche is identical with the conscious mind and its box of magic tricks. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
The much greater part of the mind is sheer unconscious fact, hard and immitigable as granite, immovable, inaccessible, yet ready at any time to come crashing down upon us at the behest of unseen powers. The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another World war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern humans are battered by the elemental forces of one’s own psyche. This is the World Power that vastly exceeds all other powers on Earth. The Age of Enlightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul. If anywhere, fear of God is justified in face of the overwhelming supremacy of the psychic. However, all this is so much abstraction. Everyone knows that the intellect, that clever jackanapes, can put it this way or any other way one pleases. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
When the psyche, as an objective fact, hard as granite and heavy as lead, confronts a human as an inner experience and addresses one in an audible voice, saying, “This is what will and must be,” it is a very different thing. Then one feels oneself called, just as the group does when there is a war on, or a revolution, or any other madness. It is not for nothing that our age calls for the redeemer personality, for the one who can emancipate oneself from the inescapable grip of the collective and save at least one’s own soul, who lights a beacon of hope for others, proclaiming that here is at least one person who has succeeded in extricating oneself from that fatal identity with the group psyche. For the group, because of its unconsciousness, has no freedom of choice, and so psychic activity runs on it like an uncontrolled law of nature. There is thus set going a chain reaction that comes to a stop only in catastrophe. When they feel the danger of psychic forces, the people always long for a hero, a slayer of dragons; hence the cry for personality. We know that God is our ultimate Saviour. Sabbath fulfilled in human life is really celebration of God. Sabbath is inseparable from worship, and, indeed, genuine worship is Sabbath. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
As the fourth commandment, Sabbath is the fulfillment in practice of the first three. When we come to the place where we can joyously “do no work” it will be because God is so exalted in our minds and bodies that we can trust him with our life and our World and can take our hands off of them. Now, for most of us Sabbath is first to be achieved in the practice of solitude and silence. Thee must be carefully sought, cultivated, and dwelt in. When they become established in our soul and our body, they can be practiced in company with others. However, the body must be weaned away from its tendencies to always take control, to run the World, to achieve and produce, to attain gratification. These are its habitual tendencies learned in a fallen World. Progress in the opposite direction can only be made in solitude and silence, for they “take our hands off our World” as nothing else does. And that is the meaning of Sabbath. Rest is one primary mark of the condition of sabbath in the body, as unrest is a primary mark of its absence. So if we really intend to submit our bodies as living sacrifices to God, our first step well might be to start getting enough sleep. Sleep is a good first use of solitude and silence. It is also a good indicator of how thoroughly we trust in God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
The psalmist, who knew danger and uncertainty well, also slept well: “I lay down and slept; I awoke, for the LORD sustains me” (3.5-6), he said, and “In peace I will both lie down and sleep, for Thou alone, O LORD, dost make me to dwell in safety,” (4.8). Of course we do not mean that we can just seep our way to sainthood. Sometimes people sleep because they are depressed, or are sad, or have a physical condition, or are just evading reality. Nor do we mean that really godly people—call them saints—do not work hard and are never exhausted. However, the saints who have separated their bodies to God have resources not at the disposal of the ordinary person running on fumes and promises, where so many of us find ourselves today. We have to learn how to get where those resources are and to take our bodies into the rest of God. If we are not rested, on the other hand, the body moves to the center of our focus and makes its presence more strongly felt, and the tendencies of its parts call out more strongly for gratification. He sensual desires and ego demands will have greater power over us through our desperate body and its parts. In addition, our awareness of what it is doing—it is very subtle—and what is happening around us will be less sharp and decisive. Confusion is the enemy of spiritual orientation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Rest, properly taken, gives clarity to the mind. Weariness, by contrast can make us seek gratification and energy from food or drugs, or from various illicit relationships, or from egoistic postures that are, in Paul’s words, “upon the Earth.” They pull us away from reliance upon God and from living in his power. Much more could be said of the role of spiritual disciplines on behalf of the spiritual formation of the body. A full discussion of disciplines focused on the body would have to deal with how exercise and diet can contribute to easing the influence of the “sin that is in our members.” As finite, bodily creature we cannot ignore such things. In particular, specific disciplines go far in retraining particular parts of our body away from the specific tendencies to sin that are localized in them. They enable us to stop the practice and remove the tendency in question by entering special contrary practices and circumstances, and thereby breaking the force of habit that has us in bondage. God has made every provision for the body we actually have to serve us and him well for his purposes in putting us here on Earth. There may be severe problems with our bodies, at least from the human point of view. We do not mean to deny or disregard that. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
However, as Peter said to women apprentices of his day (and of course it applies equally well to men), the real power of life lies in who we are as redeemed people and how our behaviour is caught up in that. So we should “not let [our] adornment be merely external—braiding the hair, and wearing gold jewelry, or putting on dresses; but let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God,” reports 1 Peter 3.3-4. This is no legalistic ban on jewelry and so on—though such things can be wrongly used, and perhaps nearly always are. However, it is a clear indication of where genuine beauty, health, and strength of the body come from and what incredible grace lies in the spiritual transformation of the body. “And it came to pass that Sez, who was a descendant of Heth—for Heth had perished by the famine, and all his household save it were Shez—wherefore, Shez began to build up again a broken people. And it came to pass that Shez did remember the destruction of his fathers, and he did build up a righteous kingdom; for he remembered what the Lord had done in bringing Jared and his brother across the deep; and he did walk in the ways of the Lord; and he begat sons and daughters. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
“And his eldest son, whose name was Shez, did rebel against him; nevertheless, Shez was smitten by the hand of a robber, because of his exceeding riches, which brought peace again unto his father. And it came to pass that his father did build up many cities upon the face f the land, and the people began again to spread over all the face of the land. And Shez did live to an exceedingly old age; and he begat Riplakish. And he died, and Riplakish reigned in his stead. And it came to pass that Riplakish did not do that which was right in the sight of the Lord, for he did have many wives and concubines, and did lay that upon most men’s shoulders which was grievous to be borne; yea, he did tax them with heavy taxes; and with the taxes he did build many spacious buildings. And he did erect him an exceedingly beautiful throne; and he did build many prisons, and whoso would not be subject unto taxes he did cast into prison; and whoso was not able to pay taxes did cast into prison; and he did cause that they should labour continually for their support; and whoso refused to labour he did cause to be put to death. Wherefore he did obtain all his fine work, yea, even his fine gold he did cause to be refined in prison; and all manner of fine workmanship he did cause to be wrought in prison. And it came to pass that the did afflict the people with his whoredoms and abominations. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
“And when he had reigned for the space of forty and two years the people did rise up in rebellion against him; and there began to be war again in the land, insomuch that Riplakish was killed, and his descendants were driven out of the land. And it came to pass that after the space of many years, Morianton (he being a descendent of Riplakish) gathered together an army of outcasts, and went forth and gave battle unto the people; and he gained power over many cities; and the war became exceedingly sore, and did last for the space of many years; and he did gain power over all the land, and did establish himself king over the land. And after that he had established himself king he did ease the burden of the people, by which he did gain favour in the eyes of the people, and they did anoint him to be their king. And he did do justice unto the people, but not unto himself because of his many whoredoms; wherefore e was cut off from the presence of the Lord. And it came to pass that Morianton built up many cities, and the people became exceedingly rich under his reign, both in buildings, and in gold and silver, and in raising grain, and in flocks, and herds, and such things which has been restored unto them. And Morianton did live to an exceedingly great age, and then he begat Kim. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
“And Kim did reign in the stead of his father; and he did reign eight years, and his father died And it came to pass that Kim did not reign in righteousness, wherefore he was not favoured of the Lord. And his brother did raise up in rebellion against him, by which he did bring him into captivity; and he did remain in captivity all his days; and he begat sons and daughters in captivity, and in his old age he begat Levi; and he died. And it came to pas that Levi did serve in captivity after the death of his father, for the space of forty and two years. And he did make war against the king of the land, by which he did obtain unto himself the kingdom. And after he had obtained unto himself the kingdom he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord; and the people did prosper in the land; and he did live to a good old age, and begat sons and daughters; and he also begat, Corom, whom he anointed king in his stead. And it came to pass that Corom did that which was good in the sight of the Lord all his days; and he begat many sons and daughters; and after he had seen many days he did pass away, even like unto the rest of the Earth; and Kish reigned in his stead. And it came to pass that Kish passed away also, and Lib reigned in his stead. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
“And it came to pass that Lib also did that which was good in the sight of the Lord. And in the days of Lib the poisonous serpents were destroyed. Wherefore they did go into the land southward, to hunt food for the people of the land, for the land was covered with animals of the forest. And Lib also himself became a great hunter. And they built a great city by the narrow neck of the land, by the place where the sea divides the land. And they did preserve the land southward for a wilderness, to get game. And the whole face of the land northward was covered with inhabitants. And they were exceedingly industrious, and they did buy and sell and traffic one with another, that they might get gain. And they did work in all manner of ore, and they did make gold, and silver, and iron, and brass, and all manner of metals; and they did dig it out of the Earth; wherefore, they did cast up mighty heaps of Earth to get ore, of gold, and of silver, and of iron, and of copper. And they did work all manner of fine work. And they did have silks, and fine-twined linen; and they did work all manner of cloth, that they might clothe themselves from their nakedness. And they did make all manner of tools to till the Earth, both to plow and to sow, to reap and to hoe, and also to thrash. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
“And they did make all manner of tools which they did work their beasts. And they did make all manner of weapons of war. And they did work all manner of work exceedingly curious workmanship. And never could be a people more blessed than were they, and more prospered by the and of the Lord. And they were in a land that was choice above all lands, for the Lord has spoken it. And it came to pass that Lib did live many years, and begat sons and daughters; and he also begat Hearthom. And it came to pass that Hearthom reigned in the stead of his father. And when Hearthom had reigned twenty and four years, behold, the kingdom was taken away from him. And he served many years in captivity, yea, even all the remainder of his days. And he begat Heth, and Heth lived in captivity all his days. And Heth begat Aaron, and Aaron dwelt in captivity all his days; and he begat Amnigaddah, and Amnigaddah also dwelt in captivity all his days; and he begat Coriantum, and Coriantum dwelt in captivity all his days; and he begat Com. And it came to pass that Com drew away the half of the kingdom. And he reigned over the half of the kingdom forty and two years; and he went to battle against the king, Amgid, and they fought for the space of many years, during which time Com gained power over Amgid, and obtained power over the remainder of the kingdom. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
“And in the days of Com there began to be robbers in the land; and they adopted the old plans, and administered oaths after the manner of the ancients, and sought again to destroy the kingdom. Now Com did fight against them much; nevertheless, he did not prevail against them,” reports Ether 10.1-34. Dear Lord in Heaven, as we approach this New Year, may it be born from You; praise, blessings, and honours are due for this gift! Please hear my words, Lord, as you give birth to everything. A newly born year will take its place among your wonders, one more thing for which You might rightly be praised. Sweet hymns shall be my chant and women songs, for Thou art all for which my spirit longs—to be within the shadow of Thy hand, and all Thy mystery to understand. The while Thy glory is upon my tongue, my inmost heart with love is of Thee is wrung. So though Thy mighty marvels I proclaim, these songs of love wherewith I greet Thy name. I have not seen Thee, yet I tell Thy praise, nor known Thee, yet I imagine forth Thy ways. For by Thy seers’ and servants’ mystic speech Thou didst Thy sov’ran splendor darkly teach, and from the grandeur of Thy work they drew the measure of Thy inner greatness, too. They told of Thee, but not as Thou must be, since from Thy work they tried to body Thee. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
To countless visions did their pictures run, behold through all the visions Thou art One. I glorify Him, for He joys in me, my crown of beauty He shall ever be! His head is like pure gold: His forehead’s flame is graven glory of His holy name. And with that lovely diadem this graced, the coronal His people there have placed. Like Nature, the World, I myself, all of existence is subject to change. It is inevitable. What can we do except accommodate ourselves to this inexorable law? If there is any law which governs human existence it is the law of change. We forget it at our peril. Most ancient societies forgot it and suffered. For they cannot escape change, nor the sorrow that change bring, nor the loss of individual existence which is also brings. Such is the universal law which dominates all things and all creatures. When we try to press a permanent happiness out of this World of impermanent things, we are deceiving ourselves. Whether one comes to this truth near the end of a lifetime after long and varied experience or early in it by intuition, the effect is salutary, if saddening: perfect and continual happiness would include perfect and continual functioning of the body, good health, oral hygiene, good vision, good digestion, and all of the rest. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
How many of the saints and the wise in history’s records had excellent bodily condition until the end? Nothing remains; everything is subject to change. Whether you rebel against this stark fact or resignedly accept it, it stares you in the face unaffected by your personal attitude. Jesus said: “This World will pass away.” It is hard to bear the remembrance that whatever else may happen change is certain, in one way or another, at some time or another. This is the “eternal flow” of ancient Greek thinkers. Not only is everything subject to change but everything also exists in relation to something else. Thus change and relativity dominate the World scene. Even Nature, used to existences extending through millions of years, is itself subject to this ever-changing process. What chance is then is there for the creations of humans? How could they hope to endure? We may think of the Sphinx and the Pyramid as likely to outlast the hours—but stay! Look at their neighbour, Sahara: today a vast sea of sand, but formerly a vast sea of water. So we must conclude that all is perishable—yet, to complete the picture, we must admit also that all is renewable. The one feature of life and thus Universe which does not change is change itself! It is an inexorable law. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the World. Time is not the fourth dimension, and should not be so identified. Time is only a relative observation. Existentialism of Personalism embraces interconnected attitudes of aesthetic, sacred consciousness with social, political awareness. Transpersonal and existential realities are captured in the sacred and profane events of life. The ecstasy and numinous awesomeness of an I-and-Thou encounter with the Supreme Personality can be experienced in any time and in any place and through any object, person, or event. It is not limited to an inner, individualistic mysticality, nor is it particular to community worship and ceremony. The personal relationship with Supreme Personality creates a “sense of being” and “becoming” that is spontaneous and goes on ceaselessly in a constant dialogue with self, other, and nature. It is contained in form and is experienced in existential, concrete, everyday life. Flora Jones, Wintu medicine woman, speaks about the spirits like they are living personalities in a partnership of existence with human beings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 27
Witness the following statement from Flora Jones: “This is what the spirit tells me—get my people together. Whoever has sacred places must wake them up, the same as I am doing here—to keep my old World within my heart and with the spiritual. For them to help me and for me to help my people.” The personalism expressed by Flora Jones is the basis of most Victorian, African-American and American-Indian traditions. All of these cultures have a dual theme of Being-in-the World and Being-beyond-the-World. The Supreme Personality is experienced as an integrated intelligence and love that is expressed through the archetypes of mythologies, rituals, worship, dreams, and visions. The archetypal spirituality of the meeting in the Between confirms that the Supreme Personality lies within the human personality and in the meeting as he Ground of Being. The Supreme Personality, as a living personality, offers love, knowledge, mystery, gift giving, and sharing in relationship with the human person. The I-and-Thou encounter bring to “awareness” constellations of fascination and fear, destiny and freedom, death and life, anxiety and joy, interest and surprise, love and shame, and guilt and excitement. #RandolphHarris 2 of 27
Existentialism of Personalism came out of my practice and theory in a circle of understanding and interpretation through dialogue with American Indians, Victorian people, and African-Americans. Alex Haley in his book Roots (1976) describes how the father of Kunta Kinte presented his infant son to the Universe. He writes, “Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the Heavens, and said softly….Behold—the only thing greater than yourself” (p.13). Haley is showing that the living Universe is the father/mother of Kunta Kinte and that the child’s personality is sacred. In the Navajo tradition, the man who holds his infant up to Father Sun and says, “Father Sun, this is your child,” is expressing that the Universe is personal and loving. The Navajo infant is a direct descendant of the living Universe, and, therefore, its personality is sacred. American-American, Victorian, and American Indian traditions demonstrate a continual dialogue between the human personality and the Supreme Personality that reveals the sacred and the profane as not separated but forming an interconnected metaphysical reality that is remythologized in every I-and-Thou meeting. #RandolphHarris 3 of 27
However, philosophy does not accept the Semitic belief in a World created for the first time by a personal creator, and this is as true of the highest Greek philosophy as expressed, for instance, in Aristotle’s work on metaphysics as in the highest Asiatic philosophy associated with Buddhism and Hinduism. The word “creation” is inadmissible here for it signifies producing something out of nothing. No one, not even God himself, can produce something out of nothing. Therefore, the orthodox Christian idea of a mysterious creation is completely untenable. That the existence of manufactured things indicates a manufacturer is sound logic, but to apply the same analogy to the World is not. For the World is something quite other than them; it is in a category not only altogether apart from them but altogether by itself. There was never a time when the Universe was created or fabricated by a Creator or Maker. This is a case of man making God in his own image. Through successive cycles of the Universe comes and goes, is born and dies, as the World-Mind rethinks the World-Idea or lets it lapse. #RandolphHarris 4 of 27
The Universe was never created for the first time for it has always and incessantly appeared and disappeared, activated and rested, come forth, evolved, and retreated into latency. There has never been a time when there was not a Universe, by which I do not mean our own. There is nothing arbitrary in this “creation.” It is really self-determined. Everything brings itself into existence under the necessity of its own being and the laws of its own possibilities. Where a circle begins it also ends; the Universe is like that: it has n real beginning or ending. It is not a creation in the Biblical sense but an intermittent continuation. Aristotle: “The Universe unfolds out of its own essence, not being made.” We could add that its pattern unfolds too out of the World-Idea. The Universe has never had a beginning, and cannot have an end, but its forms and states may change and therefore must have a beginning and end. It is more correct to speak of the Universe’s birth, not of its creation. The Universe was not made, in a workshop sense; it was emanated. It flowed out of the Original Source and it will flow back there at the appointed time. The cosmos is neither a phantom to be disdained nor an illusion to be dismissed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 27
The cosmos is more of a remote expression in time and space and individuality of that which is timeless, spaceless, and infinite. If it is not the it is not the Reality in its ultimate sense, it is an emanation of the Reality. Hence it shares in some way the life of its source. To find that point of sharing is the true object of incarnation for all creates within the cosmos. The World of external Nature, being eternal, is not brought into existence by an act of sudden creation out of nothing. Furthermore, this World is rooted in the divine substance and is consequently not an empty illusion but an indirect manifestation of divine reality. A thought exists in intimate relation with the World-Mind, God. The World is not bereft of reality although it does not possess ultimate reality. The World is neither a trap nor an illusion, neither a degradation of the divine essence nor an indication of the divine absence. What is the meaning of the World? If it is nothing more than an illusion, it can have no real meaning at all. However, if it is an expression of the infinite intelligence it must everywhere pervaded by immense meaning. #RandolphHarris 6 of 27
The truth is ever here, whether unwritten and bodiless or scripted and described. The image of it can be looked at by other generations long afterwards, but the reality of it remains always in the World-Idea and is never lost. If the World is sheer illusion, how could man—himself a part of this illusion—ever know the Real? Were humans merely an illusion man and woman could see only further illusions. Were one part of the Real one could see only further reality. Since our experience of illusion is itself in accordance with the World-idea, why should we be afraid of admitting its existence? What we should be afraid of is letting it blot out Reality. The whole Universe is a symbol, whose meaning can be read only when we have learned the alphabet of philosophic laws and experiences. Our World is but a fleeting symbol, yet we may not disdain it. For it is the arched entrance under which we must pass through to the infinite life. The World is a spectacle presented for our meditation in depth. It is a clue, a pointing sign, and even a mystery play. What is the Universe but a gigantic symbol of God? Its infinite variety hints at the infinite endless of the Absolute itself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 27
The World stands for something else: it is, first, a token that God exists, second, an image of God’s being. The Universe is a cipher which needs to be decoded. The scientist does this on one level of investigation, the metaphysician on a different level; the religionist does not attempt the effort but reveres the cipher’s Author. Was it not Goethe who wrote: “Everything which happens is only a symbol”? Is not the whole gigantic cosmic effect in the end only a symbolic expression indicating that paradoxically it is and is not? The more we learn about the Universe, the more mysterious it becomes. Once, in America, I was consulted by a business man about twenty-five, whose case is a good illustration of the sublimation of free energies. He was a typical American self-made man who had worked his way up from a novice to an expert. He had been very successful and had founded an immense business. He has also succeeded in organizing it in such a way that he was able to think of retiring. Two years before I saw him, he had in fact taken his farewell. #RandolphHarris 8 of 27
Until then he had lived entirely for his business and concentrated all his energies on it with the incredible intensity and one-sidedness peculiar to successful American business men. He had purchased a splendid estate where he thought of “living,” by which he meant horse, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Rolls Royce, Bentley, Porsche, golf, tennis, parties and what not. However, he had reckoned without his host. The energy which should have been at his disposal would not enter into these alluring prospects, but went capering off in quite another direction. A few weeks after the initiation of the longed-for life of bliss, he began brooding over peculiar, vague sensations in his body, and a few weeks more sufficed to plunge him into a state of extreme hypochondria. He had a complete nervous collapse. From a healthy man, of uncommon physical strength and abounding energy, he became a peevish child. That was the end of all his glories. He fell from one state of anxiety to the next and worried himself almost to death with hypochondriacal mopings. He then consulted a famous specialist, who recognized at once that there was nothing wrong with the man but lack of work. The patient saw the sense of this, and returned to his former work. #RandolphHarris 9 of 27
However, to his immense disappointment, no interest in the business could be aroused. Neither patience nor resolution was of any use. His energy could not by any means be forced back into the business. His condition naturally became worse than before. All that had formerly been living, creative energy in him now turned against him with terrible destroying force. His creative genius rose up, as it were, in revolt against him; and just as before he had built up great organizations in the World, so now his daemon spun equally subtle systems of hypochondriacal delusion that completely annihilated him. When I saw him, he was already a hopeless moral ruin. Nevertheless I tried to make clear to him that though such a gigantic energy might be withdrawn from the business, the question remained, were should I go? The finest horses, Porches, Mercedes and farms, even the most amusing parties may very likely fail to allure the energy, although it would be rational enough to think that a man who had devoted his whole life to serious work had a sort of natural right to enjoy himself. Yes, if fate behaved in a humanly rational way, it would certainly be so: first work, then well-earned rest. #RandolphHarris 10 of 27
However, fate behaves irrationally, and the energy of life inconveniently demands a gradient agreeable to itself; otherwise it simply gets dammed up and turns destructive. It regresses to former situations—in the case of this man, to the memory of an internal inflammatory condition of the medical nature. Yet even this was only a stage on the way to the resuscitation of infantile reminiscences which had all but vanished in the meantime. It was the original relation to his mother that mapped the course of his symptoms: there were an “arrangement” whose purpose it was to compel the attention and interest of is long-dead mother. Nor was this stage the last; for the ultimate goal was to drive him back, as it were, into his own body, after he had lived since his youth only in his head. He had differentiated one side of his being; the other side remained in an inert physical state. He would have needed this other side in order to “live.” The hypochondriacal “depression” pushed him down into the body he had always overlooked. Had he been able to follow the direction indicated by his depression and hypochondriacal illusion, and make himself conscious of the fantasies which proceed from such a condition, that would have been the road to my salvation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 27
My argument naturally met with no response, as was to be expected. A case so far advanced can only be cared for until death; it can hardly be cured. This example clearly shows that it does not lie in our power to transfer “disposable” energy at will to a rationally chosen object. The same is true in general of the apparently disposable energy which is disengaged when we have destroyed its unserviceable forms through the corrosive of reductive analysis. This energy, as we have said, can at best be applied voluntarily for a short time. However, in most cases it refuses to seize hold, for any length of time, of the possibilities rationally presented to it. Psychic energy is a very fastidious thing which insists on fulfillment of its own conditions. However much energy may be present, we cannot make it serviceable until we have succeeded in finding the right gradient. The question of the gradient is an eminently practical problem which crops up in most analyses. For instance, when in a favourable case the disposable energy, the so-called libido (psychic energy, which is equivalent to the intensity with which psychic contents are charged), does seize hold of a rational object, we think we have brought about the transformation through conscious exertion of the will. #RandolphHarris 12 of 27
However, we are deluded, because even the most strenuous exertions would not have sufficed had there not been present at the same time a gradient in that direction. How important the gradient is can be seen in the cases when, despite the most desperate exertions, and despite the fact that the object chosen or the form desired impresses everybody with its reasonableness, then transformation still refuses to take place, and all that happens is a new repression. It has become abundantly clear to me that life can flow forward only along the path of the gradient. However, there is no energy unless there is tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind. It is interesting to see how this compensation by opposites also plays its part in the historical theories of neurosis: Dr. Freud’s theory espoused Eros, Dr. Adler’s the will to power. Logically, the opposite of love is hate, and of Eros, Phobos (fear); but psychologically it is the will to power. Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other: the human who adopts the standpoint of Eros finds one’s compensator opposite in the will to power, and that of the human who puts the accent on power is Eros. #RandolphHarris 13 of 27
Seen from the one-sided point of view the conscious attitude, the shadow is an inferior component of the personality and is consequently repressed through intensive resistance. However, the repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward moment is possible. The conscious mind is on top, the shadow underneath, and just as high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which it is domed to stagnation, congestion, and ossification. Life is born only of the spark of opposites. It was a concession to intellectual logic on the one had and to psychological prejudice on the other that impelled Dr. Freud to name the opposite of Eros the destructive or death instinct. For in the first place, Eros is not equivalent to life; but for anyone who thinks it is, the opposite of Eros will naturally appear to be death. And in the second place, we all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any beneficial life-force; hence we avoid and fear it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 27
Before there are any outward disciplines of giving, there must be a disciplined understanding of giving. First, you must bear in mind that giving is not a meritorious work which will enhance your position before God. Similarly, giving will not make you better than other Christians. Second, you need to understand that while giving will not gain favour with God, giving does bring blessing! Jesus said: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you,” reports Luke 6.38. Correspondingly, Paul wrote: “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously,” reports 2 Corinthians 9.6. Admittedly these blessings are essentially spiritual. However, which would you rather have—a spiritual blessing or a bigger bank and bigger Benz (The bigger the bank, the bigger the Benz, the better the chance I have to get close to his rich friends, bank accounts in the Philippines, blank note to take everything! )—inner contentment or a new yacht? Third, you must keep in mind that giving which pleases God is generous and sacrificial. As we have seen, the Macedonians gave out of their deep poverty. #RandolphHarris 15 of 27
We can also profitably reflect on what Jesus said about the poor widow who humbly gave only a fraction of a penny: “I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others,” reports Mark 12.43. Fourth, you must understand that what you give is to be determined between you and God. Giving should never be decided casually or flippantly, but through serious prayer—asking God what He wants you to give. With the mental disciplines of giving firmly in mind, the way is ready for the act of giving. To begin with, the act of giving should be accompanied by offering oneself to the Lord, just as did the Macedonians who “gave themselves first to the Lord,” reports 2 Corinthians 8.5. This should be done silently, not so someone will see out pious act of worship. And giving oneself to God is need worship. “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship,” reports Romans 12.1. Second, it is strongly recommended, in light of the great giving requirements imposed on God’s ancient people Israel, that everyone should at least consider the first 10 percent as a starting point in giving—a minimum. #RandolphHarris 16 of 27
And in the case of the Macedonians’ grace giving, the amount must have been way over 10 percent because a tenth of their “extreme poverty” (1 Corinthians 8.2) would not have helped anyone. Third, your giving ought to be regular. Paul advised this same Corinthians church on another occasion, “On the first day of every week, each one of your should set aside a sum of money in keeping with one’s income, saving it up, so that when I come no collections will have to be made,” report 1 Corinthians 16.2. The apostle knew that regular, systematic giving would help the people meet their regular obligations and most emergencies. Fourth, you must begin giving now. The natural tendency is to put giving off until you feel able to give. Such thinking keeps many from ever giving. A preacher came to see a farmer and asked him, “If you had $2,00.00, would you give $1,000.00 or it to the Lord?” “I would.” “If you have two Ultimate Driving Machines, would you give one of them to the Lord?” “Sure.” “If you had two Cresleigh Homes, would you give one of them to the Lord?” The farmer said, “Now that is not fair! You know I have two Cresleigh Homes.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 27
Giving should not only be regular, but responsive to need, spontaneous, like that of the Macedonians and Mary of Bethany who in anointing Jesus so lavishly poured out her resources. High Heaven rejects the lore of nicely calculated les and more. Finally, your giving should be joyous—“for God loves a cheerful giver,” reports 2 Corinthians 9.7. As we have been so often reminded, “cheerful” can be translated “hilarious,” suggesting a joy which leaps over all restraints. The act of giving is a blessed state. We do well to remember that our Lord Jesus Himself said, “It is more blessed to give then to receive,” reports Acts 20.35. May we be faithful and disciplined in giving ourselves and all we have to God! What does the phrase “grace giving” mean to you? What does grace have to do with giving? When you give to the church or various Christian ministries, do you generally do so out of obligation or willingness? How much of your income do you believe God wants you to give to Him? Support your answers with Scripture; then ask God in prayer whether He agrees. “Will a human rob god? Yet you rob me. But you ask, ‘How do we rob you?’ In tithes and offerings. You are under a curse—the whole nation of you—because you are robbing me. #RandolphHarris 18 of 27
“Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of Heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it. I will present pests from devouring your crops, and the vines in your fields will not cause their fruit,” says the LORD Almighty. “Then all the nations will call you blessed, for yours will be a delightful land,” says the LORD Almighty,” reports Malachi 3.8-12. What did God speak to you about most specifically, most powerfully in this essay? Talk to Him about it right now! The World-idea has been represented by Churches and statues, and stained-glass windows. They are seen as places and refuge and the images tell a story. There are pictorial stories because people could not always read and also because they wanted the stories to pass on for generations. The statues also serve a purpose. The World-Mind has been embodied in images and idols. These things can be and are used in religious worship and mystic meditation. The idols act as reminders to its devotees; one is not a fool to confuse a piece of stone with the power of God. #RandolphHarris 19 of 27
We live in what appears as a multiverse, a timed and spaced existence—in a short, a finite one. However, those who can pierce through to its secret—and some have done so—find that it is actually the Unconditioned revealing itself as if it were the Conditioned. This Universe appearing in time and space under innumerable forms, its particles and planets ever in motion, hides as its supreme secret THAT which is timeless and placeless, without shape, intangible and immobile. Is this not the greatest paradox, this solid something whose essence is Nothing? Few humans know God even when they see Him, as they are unrealizingly do when they look around at the World or even when they merely look at it. “And now I, Moroni, proceed to give the record of Jared and his brother. For it came to pass after the Lord had prepared the stones which the brother of Jared had carried up into the mount, the brother of Jared came down out of the mount, and e did put forth the stones into the vessels which were prepared, one in each end thereof; and behold, they did give light unto the vessels. And thus the Lord caused stones to shine in darkness, to give light unto men, women, and children, that they might not cross the great waters in darkness. #RandolphHarris 20 of 27
“And it came to pass that when they had prepared all manner of food, that thereby they might subsist upon the water, and also food for their flocks and herds, and whatsoever beast or animal or fowl that they should carry with them—and it came to pass that when they had done all these things they got aboard of their vessels or barges, and set forth into the sea, commending themselves unto the Lord their God. And it came to pass that the Lord God caused that there should be a furious wind blow upon the face of the waters, towards the promised land; and this they were tossed upon the waves of the seas before the wind. And it came to pass that they were many times buried in the depths of the sea, because of the mountain waves which broke upon them, and also the great and terrible tempests which were caused by the fierceness of the wind. And it came to pass that when they were buried in the deep there was no water that could hurt them, their vessels being tight like unto a dish, and also they were tight like unto the ask of Noah; therefore when they were encompassed about by many waters they did cry unto the Lord, and he did bring them forth again upon the top of the waters. #RandolphHarris 21 of 27
“And it came to pass that the wind did never cease to blow towards the promised land while they were upon the waters; and thus they were driven forth before the wind. And they did sing praises unto the Lord; yea, the brother of Jared did sing praises unto the Lord, and he did thank and praise the Lord all the day long; and when the night came, they did not cease to praise the Lord. And thus they were driven forth; and no monster of the sea could break them, neither whale that could mar them; and they did have light continually, whether it was above the water or under the water. And thus they were driven forth, three hundred and forty and four days upon the water. And they did land upon the shore of the promised land. And when they had set their feet upon the shores of the promised land they bowed themselves down upon the face of the land, and did humble themselves before the Lord, and did shed tears of joy before the Lord, because of the multitude of his tender mercies over them. And it came to pass that they went forth upon the face of the land, and began to till the Earth. #RandolphHarris 22 of 27
“And Jared had four sons; and they were called Jacom, and Gilgah, and Maha, and Orihah. And the brother of Jared also begat sons and daughters. And the friends of Jared and his brothers were in number about twenty and two souls; and they also begat sons and daughters before they came to the promised land; and therefore they began to be many. And they were taught to walk humbly before the Lord; and they were also taught from on high. And it came to pass that they began to spread upon the face of the land, and to multiply and to till the Earth; and they did wax strong in the land. And the brother of Jared began to be old, and saw that he must soon go down to the grave; wherefore he said unto Jared: Let us gather together our people that we may number them, that we may know of them what they will desire of us before we go down to our graves. And accordingly the people were gathered together. Now the number of the sons and daughters of the brothers of Jared were twenty and two souls; and the number of sons and daughters of Jared were twelve, he having four sons. And it came to pass that they did number their people; and after that they had numbered them, they did desire of them the things which they would that they should do before they went down to their graves. #RandolphHarris 23 of 27
“And it came to pass that the people desired of them that they should anoint one of their sons to be a king over them. And now behold, this was grievous unto them. And the brother of Jared said unto them: Surely this thing leadeth into captivity. However, Jared said unto his brother: Suffer them that they may have a king. And therefore he said unto them: Choose ye out from among our sons a king, even whom ye will. And it came to pass that they chose even the firstborn of the brother of Jared; and has name was Pagag. And it came to pass that he refused and would not be their kind. And the people would that his father should constrain him, but his father would not; and he commanded them that they should constrain no human to be their king. And it came to pass that they chose all the brothers of Pagag, and they would not. And it came to pass that neither would the sons of Jared, even all save it were one; and Orihah was anointed to be king over the people. And he began to reign, and the people began to prosper; and they became exceedingly rich. And it came to pass that Jared died, and his brother also. #RandolphHarris 24 of 27
“And it came to pass that Orihah did walk humbly before the Lord, and did remember how great things the Lord had done for his father, and also taught his own people how great things the Lord had done for their fathers,” reports Ether 6.1-30. Winter is not just a single day. It takes time. Pay attention to its different stages, and adjust your prayers accordingly. As the cold time begins, I turn toward it with courage, knowing I do not face it alone. All the Holy Ones are with me; we will face it together. The leaves may fall, the grass may die, but the Land Spirits live, and to them I pray. Though some may sleep, others awake to face the cold, to bless the Earth with the gifts only they can give. Spirit of rock and tree, Spirits of running and still water, Spirits of Earth and sky: to the ones who now go to sleep, farewell until the warm time. To those who now awake, once again I greet you, as the Earth once again enters Winter. Cry the Winter rains to prepare the way, to mourn the darkness now enfolding. Cry the Winter rains to prepare the way, to wash pure the World as it lies here waiting. Cry the Winter rains, sky overarching, but soon the sorrows’ tears will turn to joy. Light will return to the covered Earth. #RandolphHarris 25 of 27
Cry, rain spirits, as this time demands. The sickle of reaping is low in the sky in the period just before down. The Sun’s halo soon will hide it, but it will be there, at the back of my mind, at the bottom my heart, poised to perform its acts of loving mercy. Waning Moon, passes over me, and pass on by. Please grant me your wisdom, but withhold your power. Sing joyously unto God our strength; sing along unto the God of Jacob. Take up the melody, and sound the timbrel, the sweet harp with the psaltery. Blow the Shofar at the New Moon, at the full Moon for our festival. For it is a statute for Israel, an ordinance of the God of Jacob, when God made a testimony for Joseph, when Her went forth against the land of Egypt. I hear a mysterious voice: “I, the Lord, removed the burden from your shoulder; your hands were freed from the heavy hod. O Israel, you called, and I delivered you; I answered you in the thunder; I tested you are the waters of Meribah, saying: ‘Hear, O My people, and I will admonish you; O America, if you would only Hearken unto Me! There shall be no strange god in your midst; nor shall you worship any foreign god. I am the Lord your God, Who brought you up out of the land of Egypt; open you mouth, and I will grant you of My bounty.’ #RandolphHarris 26 of 27
“But my people hearkened not to My Voice; and American would not obey. So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart. Let them walk in their own evil counsels! Oh that My people would hearken unto Me, that America would walk in My ways! I would soon subdue their enemies, and place My hand upon their adversaries. The enemies of the Lord would cringe before Him, and their doom would be everlasting. However, you would I feed with the fat of wheat; and with the honey out of the rock would I satisfy you.” So the two brothers and their murdered man rode past fair Florence, to where Arno’s stream gurgles through straitened banks, and still doth fan itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream keeps head against the freshest. Sick and wan the brothers’ faces in the ford did seem, Lorenzo’s flush with love. They passed the water into a forest quiet for the slaughter. There was Lorenzo slain and buried in, there in that forest did his great love cease; ah! when a soul doth thus its freedom win, it aches in loneliness—is ill at peace as the break-covert blood-hounds od such sin: They dipped their swords in the water, and did tease their horses homeward, with convulsed spur, each richer by his being a murderer. #RandolphHarris 27 of 27
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Randolph Harris II International 