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The Apfelstrudel Which I Ate After the Training Session Was Marvelous!
The ultimate mystery is one’s own self. Many people believe that children who are loved and have a normal upbringing and who are involved in activities will turn out to be normal, but that is not always the case. Sometimes there are crucial elements that are still missing, which go beyond mental health. Children may sometimes lack a male role model and look for a source of masculine authority in the wrong place. No matter how loving a mother it, it may not be enough to create a balanced human being. Also, children who do not show any signs of sadism in their youth can grow up to become sadist because of a lack of something in their childhood development. Heinrich Himmler was a normal middle-class youth, who had a stable family home, and was active in college and social, but he still went on to admire Adolph Hitler and become the “bloodhound of Europe.” Many people wonder, how could this happen? Well, there are some key factors, including the economy that may have contributed to this behaviour. Mr. Himmler’s submission to a strong fatherly figure was accompanied by a deep and intense dependence on his mother, who loved hum and doted on this son. Mr. Himmler certainly did not suffer from a lack of love from his mother—a cliché to be found in a number of books and articles written about him. One might say, however, that her love was primitive; it lacked insight or vision into what the growing boy needed; it was the love a mother has for an infant, and it did not change its quality as the boy grew up. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Thus Mr. Himmler’s love spoiled him and blocked his growth and made him dependent on her. However, Mr. Himmler, as in so many others, the need for a strong father is generated by his helplessness, which in turn is generated by his remaining a little boy who longs for his mother (or a mother figure) to love him, protect him, comfort him, and not to demand anything from him. Thus he feels not like a man but like a child: weak, helpless, without will or initiative. Hence he will often look for a stronger leader to whom he can submit, who gives him a feeling of strength, and who—in an imitating relationship, becomes a substitute for the qualities he likes. There was a physical and mental flabbiness in Mr. Himmler that is frequently fund in such “mother’s boys” and that he tried to overcome by “practicing his will power”—but mainly by harshness and inhumanity. To him control and cruelty became the substitutes for strength; yet this attempt had to fail since no weakling becomes strong by being cruel; he only hides his weakness temporarily from himself and others, as long as he has the power to control them. There is abundant evidence to show that Mr. Himmler was a typical “mother’s boy.” At the age of seventeen when he was in military training, away from his parents, he wrote in the first month twenty-three letters home, and though he received ten or twelve in reply, he continually complained that the family did not write enough. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The first sentence of his letter on 24 January 1917 is typical: “Dear Mommy, Many thanks for your dear letter. Finally I received something from you.” Two days later, having received another note from home, he starts off in the same vein and adds, “I have waited a painfully long time for it.” And two letters in three days did not stop him from lamenting on the 29th, “again today I got nothing from you.” His early letter combined pleas for mail with complaints about his living conditions: his room barren and cold, mold grew in the closets, condensations built up on the windows, it was drafty, the carpet was old, the walls were paper thin, and he suffered from the attentions of bedbugs; he found food sparse and uninviting and pleaded for packages of food and enough money to allow him to eat at the canteen or the beer-hall restaurant in town. Trivial mishaps, such as the inadvertent picking up of the wrong clothes at the bath, assumed the dimensions of minor tragedies and were reported in detail to the family. In part these complaints and lamentations were appeals for help from Frau Himmler. In response, his mother dispatched a succession of money orders and of parcels containing food, extra bedding, insect powder, and clean laundry. Apparently much advice and many expressions of worry accompanied the provisions that arrived from Landshut. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Under the impact of these messages, Heinrich, aware that he must maintain his stance as a brave soldier, would sometimes try to react the complaint that had set the whole operation in motion. However, he always waited until he received the package before changing his tune, and his reverse never lasted long. In the matter of food he was completely unashamed and his letters are filled with appreciative remarks about his mother’s cooking (“the Apfelstrudel which I ate after the training session was marvelous”) and with requests for snacks such as apples and cookies. As time went by, Mr. Himmler’s letters home became somewhat less frequent—although never falling below three a week—yet his requests for mail were as insistent as ever. Sometime he could get quite unpleasant when his mother did not write him as much as expected. “Dear Mother,” he began a letter of 23 March 1917, “Many thanks for your nice news (which I didn’t get). It is really mean of you not to have written. This need to share everything with his parents, especially with his mother, remained the same when he worked as a Praktikant (a student of agriculture who does practical work on a farm). Then nineteen years old, he sent home at least eight letters and cards in the first three and half weeks, although he often noted that he was too busy to write. When he fell sick with paratyphoid fever his mother was reduced almost to frenzy; on recovery, he spent a good deal of time in writing her all the details about his state of health, his temperature, bowel movements, aches, and pains. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
At the same time, Mr. Himmler was clever enough not to want to give the impression that he was a crybaby, interspersing his reports with reassurances that he was fine and chiding his mother for worrying. He even began his letters with three or four items of general interest and then added: “Now as to how it goes with me I can see you, dear mother, fidgeting with impatience.” This may have been true, but the sentence is one example of a method Mr. Himmler used throughout his life—to project his desires and fears on others. Thus far we have made the acquaintance of an obsessively orderly, hypochondriacal, opportunistic, narcissistic young man who felt like an infant and yearned for motherly protection while simultaneously attempting to follow and imitate a father image. Undoubtedly Mr. Himmler’s dependent attitude, partly generated by his mother’s overindulgent attitude toward him, was increased by certain real weakness, both physical and menta. Physically, Mr. Himmler was not a very strong child and suffered from ill health from the age of three. At that time he contracted a serious respiratory infection that seems to have settled in his lungs and from which some children have died. His parents were frantic and brought the physician who had delivered the child all the way from Munich to Passau to treat him. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
To give the child the best care, Frau Himmler went with him to a place with a better climate, and the father visited when he could take time from his work. In 1904 the whole family moved back to Munich for the sake of the child’s health. It is worth nothing that the father approved of all these measures, which were costly and inconvenient for him, apparently without protesting. (This is another factor that makes me assume that the father was not such a harsh and frightening disciplinarian as he is sometimes painted.) At the age of fifteen Mr. Himmler had began to have stomach trouble, which was to plague him for the rest of his life. From the whole picture of this illness it is likely that there was a strong psychogenic factor present. While he resented this stomach trouble as a symptom of weakness, it gave him the chance of being constantly occupied with himself and having people around him who listened to his complaints and fussed over him. (When he was in power Mr. Himmler found such a figure in Dr. Kersten, who seems to have had some influence on him, which is not surprising, considering Dr. Kersten’s function as a mother figure.) Another illness of Mr. Himmler’s was an alleged heart trouble that was supposed to have been the result of his work on the farm in 1919. The same Munich physician who had treated him for paratyphoid fever now made the diagnosis of a hypertrophied (enlarged) heart due to overexertion during his military service. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
It was also reported that Mr. Himmler suffered from exertion in the war, and insufficient nourishment and the aftermath of the paratyphoid fever. However, Mr. Himmler’s physical weakness went beyond these three groups of illnesses—lung, stomach, and heart. He had a soft and flabby appearance and was physically awkward and clumsy. For instance, when we got on a bicycle and could accompany his brother Gebhard on his outings, “Heinrich had a penchant for falling off his machine, tearing his clothes, and suffering other mishaps.” The same physical awkwardness showed in school and was probably even more humiliating. When G.W.F. Hallgarten, who later became an out standing historian, and was a co-student with Mr. Himmler during his school years, heard of his rise to power he could hardly imagine that this was the same person who had been his classmate. Mr. Hallgarten describes Mr. Himmler as an extraordinarily milk-faced, plump boy who already wore glasses and often showed a “half-embarrassed, half-vicious smile.” Mr. Himmler was very popular with all teachers and was an exemplary pupil during his school years, with the best qualifications in all essential subjects. In class he was considered to be overambitious (a Streber). There was only one subject in which Mr. Himmler was deficient, and that was gymnastics. Mr. Hallgarten describes in detail how humiliated Mr. Himmler was when he was not able to do relatively simple exercises, and was exposed not only to the ridicule of the teacher but also to that of his classmates, who were happy to see this ambitious boy in a position of inferiority. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
In spite of his orderliness, however, Mr. Himmler lacked discipline and initiative. He was a talker, and he knew it, berated himself for it, and tried to overcome it. Most of all, he almost completely lacked strength of will; thus, not surprisingly, he praised a strong will and hardness as ideal virtues, but never acquired them. He compensated for his lack of willpower by his coercive power over others. Mr. Himmler’s father required him to keep a daily diary and the young man was obsessively clean, consistently bathing. An illustration of his own awareness of his submissiveness and lack of will is an entry in his diary on 27 December 1919: “God will bring everything to a good end but I shall not submit without will, to fate but street it myself as best I can.” This sentence is rather tortuous and contradictory. He starts out acknowledging God’s will (at that time he was still a practicing Catholic); then he asses that he “will not submit,” but qualifies it by adding “without will”—thus solving the conflict between his actual submissiveness and his ideal of having a strong will by the compromise that he will submit but with his will; then he promises himself to steer his own fate, but qualified this “declaration of independence” with the lame addition of “as best I can.” Quite in contrast to Mr. Hitler, Mr. Himmler always remain a weakling, and he knew it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Mr. Himmler’s life was a struggle against this awareness, an attempt to become strong. Mr. Himmler was much like an adolescent who wants to be strong, but has limitations, who feels guilty and weak, accuses himself of his weakness, and is always trying to change and never succeeding. However, the circumstances and his cleverness permitted him to gain a position of such power over others that he could live with the illusion of having become “strong.” At the end of officers’ training, still seventeen, Mr. Himmler’s fear of being sent to the front was allayed, he assumed a position of self-confidence. The obvious question here is why, at this point, he was eager to go to the front when several months earlier he had been so frightened. There are several answers to this seeming contradiction. His brother Gebhard had been promoted in battle to full cadet, and that must have made Mr. Himmler very jealous and eager to show that he, too, was a hero. Mr. Himmler tries to deny his fears and loneliness and dependency by an assertion of his strong will. “Today, inside myself,” he says, “I have cut loose from everyone and now depend on myself alone. If I do not find a girl whose character suits mine and who loves me, I’ll go to Russian alone.” With or without a girl he will live far away from Germany, all by himself, and with this kind of talk he tried to convince himself that he is no longer a “mother’s boy.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Mr. Himmler, at the age of twenty, was in the same position as many others who became Nazis, he not only lacked the money to live the kind of life he wanted, but also the imaginativeness, endurance, and independence, and had nowhere to go socially or professionally, and yet were ambitions and have an ardent desire to rise. With the current COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment of over 20,000,000 Americans, and people being strung along by the government with relief payments that barely meet their needs, many may be understand where some of these Nazis were coming from. (Just an objective opinion, not as justification for tragedies.) Mr. Himmler also became a member of a fraternity and did everything to make himself popular. He visited sick fraternity brothers and sought out members and alumni wherever he went. So he was out going, but he was troubled that he was not very popular with his fellow members, some of whom expressed their lack of confidence in him quite openly. Despite his politicking, and his torment about himself and his future, many of his habits and old way, including church attendance, social calls, fraternity dances and shipments of dirty laundry to Ingolstadt [his mother], still held fast. By 1929, however, Mr. Himmler commanded three hundred men of the Schutz Staffeln, which by 1933 had grown to an army of fifty thousand. What disturbs us so profoundly is not the organization of the SS nor Mr. Himmler’s ultimate position as Reich police chief, but the torture of millions of human beings and extermination of millions more because no direct answer to these questions is to be found in Mr. Himmler’s childhood and youth besides a strong male role model. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
We all go through awkwardness, rejection, and have dreams we are not able to accomplish in our youth. Yet, many of us do not turn into monsters. Mr. Himmler’s sadism probably was deeply rooted in his character structure long before he had the occasion to practice it on the scale that made his name enter history as a bloody monster. We should keep in mind the broad definition of sadism, as the passion for absolute and unrestricted power over another human being; the infliction of physical pain is only one of the manifestations of this wish for omnipotence. We must also no forget that masochistic submissiveness is not the opposite of sadism, but part of the symbiotic system in which complete control and complete submission are manifestations of the same basic vital importance. From the age of twenty-one when Mr. Himmler felt somewhat more independent because he had begun to find new friends and father figures, he began to be slightly condescending toward his father, although he always couched his preaching in appropriate forms while the condescending preaching to his older brother became increasingly vicious. Gebhard was a hero to his brother Heinrich, as a child. However, Gebhard went into the war, was promoted on the battlefield, and received that Iron Cross 1st class. He fell in love and in love with an attractive girl and became engaged to her while his younger brother, possessing neither glory nor love, was awkward, weak, and unpopular. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
The girl did not fit Heinrich’s idea of a shy, retiring, and chaste fiancée, and not only that, but Paula was an attractive and distant cousin of theirs. There was some trouble between Paula and Gebhard, so Gebhard asked Heinrich to help him. After a couple instances of harlotry behaviour, Heinrich called off his brother’s engagement and ruined the young lady’s reputation to protect his family’s name. In a letter he stated: “If your union is to be a happy one for you two and for the health of das Volk—which must be built on sound, moral families—you must control yourself with barbaric [underlined in the original statement] strength. Since you do not handle yourself strongly and firmly, and only control yourself to a small degree, and since your future husband, as I have already said, is too good for you, and possesses too little understanding of people and can’t learn it since this age won’t let it be learned, someone else must do it. Since you both approached me on this affair and drew me in, I feel myself obligated to do it. When Gebhard agreed to go along and allowed the engagement to end, Heinrich was triumphant and at the same time scornful of his brother’s lack of resistance. “It was,” he said, “as if he [Gebhard] had absolutely no soul.” This twenty-four-year-old young mand succeeded in breaking down his father, his mother, his older brother, and in making himself the virtual dictator of the family. At this point the wish to control his brother and parents assumed features of pure sadistic viciousness. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Heinrich wrote a threatening letter to Paul to stop saying nasty things about the Himmler’s and adds the warning that, although he was a nice fellow, “I will be completely different if anyone forces me to it. Then, I will not be stopped by any false sense of pity until the opponent is socially and morally ousted from the ranks of society.” This was the height of vicious control that Mr. Himmler could exert under the circumstances. When by his cunning he was able to use the new political circumstances for his own purposes, he had the possibility to act out his sadism on a historical scale. “The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear,” reports Heinrich Himmler. However, Mr. Himmler witnessed a mass execution in Minsk in the late summer of 1941 and was rather shaken by it. However, he said, “Nevertheless, I think it is right that we looked at this. Who is to decide over life and death must know what dying is like and what he askes the execution commanders to do.” Many of his SS men became sick after these mass executions; some committed suicide, became psychotic, or suffered from other severe mental damage. Nervous breakdowns were one possible consequence of his extermination campaign. However, one cannot speak of Mr. Himmler’s sadistic character without discussing what has often been described as his kindness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
I have already mentioned that he tried to make himself popular by visiting sick fraternity brothers, but he did similar things also on other occasions. He gave an old woman cake and rolls and recorded in his diary: “If I could only do more, but we are ourselves poor devils,” (not true, because Mr. Himmler’s family was a well-to-do-middle-class family and far from being door devils). Mr. Himmler also organized a benefit with his friends and gave the proceeds to Viennese children, and he behaved in a “fatherly” way to his SS men, as many have commented. From the whole picture of Mr. Himmler’s character, however, I get the impression that most of these friendly acts were not expressions of genuine friendliness. He had a need to compensate for his own lack of feeling and cold indifference, and to convince himself and others that he was not what he was, or, to put it differently, that he felt what he did not feel. He had to deny his cruelty and coldness by a show of kindness and concern. Even his aversion to hunting animals, which he described as cowardly, could not have been very serious since he proposed in one of his letters that the hunting of big animals should be facilitated for the SS men as a reward for good conduct. He was friendly to children and animals, but even here skepticism must be permitted, because there is almost nothing this man did that did not have the purpose of furthering his own career. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Of course, even a sadist like Mr. Heinrich Himmler can have some beneficial human traits, like kindness to some people in some situations; one would expect him to have such traits. What makes it so difficult to believe in them in Mr. Himmler is his complete coldness and the exclusive pursuit of his selfish goals. There is also a benevolent type of sadism in which control over the other person does not have the aim of harming one, but is meant to work for one’s own good. It may be that Mr. Himmler has some of this benevolent sadism, which often gives the impression of kindness. However, Mr. Himmler’s end was much in line with his character as his life had been. When it was clear that Germany had lost the war, he was preparing negotiations with the Western powers, through Swedish intermediaries, which would leave him in a leading role, and offered concessions with regard to the fate of the Jews. In these negotiations he surrendered one by one the political dogmas to which he had clung do tenaciously. Of course, simply by initiating the, der treue Heinrich (loyal Heinrich), as he was called, committed the last act of treachery to his idol, Mr. Hitler. That he thought the Allies would accept him as the new German “Fuhrer” was a sign of his mediocre intelligence and lack of political judgment, as well as of his narcissistic grandiosity, which made him think that he was the most important man even in a defeated Germany. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
People in America should be weary about gun control because people like Heinrich Himmler still exist. In fact, one of his beliefs was, “Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA—ordinary citizens don’t need guns, as their having guns doesn’t serve the State. Nonetheless, Mr. Himmler declined the suggestion of General Ohlendorf to surrender to the Allies and to take responsibility for the SS. The man who had preached loyalty and responsibility now showed, true to character, complete disloyalty and irresponsibility. He fled with a black patch over his eye and without his moustache, with false papers, and in the uniform of a corporal. When he was arrested and brought into a prisoner of war camp, his narcissism apparently could not tolerate being treated like thousands of unknown soldiers. He asked to see the commander of the camp and told him, “I am Heinrich Himmler.” Sometime later he bit the cyanide capsule he carried in a hollow tooth. Only a few years earlier, in 1938, he had said in a speech to his officers, “I have no understanding of a person who throws away his life like a dirty shirt because he believes this way, he will evade difficulties. Such a person must be interred like an animal. Often times leaders, because they are in positions of power and wealth hold others to standards, they themselves would not tolerate, in that position. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Thus the circle of his life closed. He had to attain absolute power in order to overcome his own experience of weakness and vital importance. After he had achieved this aim, he tried to cling to this power by betraying his idol. That is why one always has to watch those closet to them, you never know what their true plans are When he was in a prison camps, as an ordinary soldier, one among hundreds of thousands, Mr. Himmler could not bear his reduction to complete powerlessness. He preferred to die, rather than to be thrown back to the role of the powerless man that was for him that of the weakling. Mr. Himmler is an example of the typical anal-hoarding, sadistic, authoritarian character. He was weak (and did not only feel weak); he found a certain sense of security in his orderliness and pedantry, by submitting to strong father images, and eventually he developed a passion for unlimited control over others as the one way to overcome his sense of vital impotence, shyness, uneasiness. He was extremely envious of others whom life had endowed with more strength and self-esteem. His vital impotence and the resulting envy led to the malicious wish to humiliate and destroy the, wither it was his brother Gebhard’s fiancée of the Jews. He was utterly cold and without mercy, which made him feel more isolated and more frightened. His sadistic character may have been due to his early insecurity, unmanliness, cowardice, sense of impotence, and these attributes would indicate the probability of sadistic compensations. #RandolphHaris 17 of 23
There are thousands of Heinrich Himmlers living among us. That is why it is important to have diversity in political power. Socially speaking, they do only minor harm in normal life, although one must not underestimate the number of people whom they damage and make thoroughly unhappy. However, when forces of destruction and hate threaten to engulf the whole body politic, such people become extremely dangerous; they are the ones who yearn to serve the government as its agents for terror, for torture and killing. Many people commit the severe error of believing that one can easily recognize a potential Himmler from far away. One of the purposes of characterological studies is to show that the potential Himmler looks like anyone else, a fallen senator, a wealthy actress, a housewife, a hardworking factory worker, a once prestigious doctor, a beautiful and rich news anchor, a successful police captain, maybe even a president, expect those who have learned to read character and who do not have to wait until circumstances permit the “monster” to show one’s colours. What are the factors that made Mr. Himmler a merciless sadist? Perhaps no one taught him the love of God? We must also consider that there may be genetically determined factors that, while not the source of sadism, are responsible for a disposition toward it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
However, perhaps more than any other factor we must think of the pathogenic influence of the dry, banal, pedantic, dishonest, unalive atmosphere in which the Himmler family lived. There were no values except the insincere profession of patriotism and honesty, there was no hope except that of managing to hold on to their precarious position on the social ladder. There was no fresh air, spiritually or mentally, that could have encouraged the weak little boy to branch out and develop. And there was not only this family. The Himmlers were part of a social class on the lowest fringe of the imperial system that suffered from resentment, impotence, and joylessness. This was the soil on which Himmler grew—and he became increasingly more vicious as the revolution defeated his social status and values, and as it became clearer to him that he had no future in professional terms. “We, however, who must live in this time, wish to prove ourselves worthy, every day and every hour, of gifts which Fate has given us, through the fact that it sent us the Fuhrer, to start with, and after two thousand years, who was, we might say, sent by God. As German men and German women, we wish to be thankful that we were born in precisely this age, that we are able to live in this age,” reports Heinrich Himmler. Love is he measure of our faith, the inspiration for our obedience, and the true altitude of our discipleship. It is our goal to preserve life and love our neighbour’s as ourself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
As children of God, we have a tremendous responsibility to respect all life forms, animate or inanimate. The Saviour Himself provided the answer with this profound declaration: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” This is the essence of what it means to be a true disciple: those who receive Christ Jesus walk with Him. We must love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind. We have compassion that provides direction not only for our lives but also for the Lord’s Church on both sides of the veil. Because love is the great commandment, it ought to be at the center of all and everything we do in our own family, in our Church callings, and in our livelihood. Love is the healing balm that repairs rifts in personal and family relationships. It is the bound that unites families, communities, and nations. Love is the power that initiates friendship, tolerance, civility, and respect. It is the source that overcomes divisiveness and hate. Love is the fire that warms our lives with unparalleled joy and divine hope. Love should be our walk and our talk. When we truly understand what it means to love as Jesus Christ loves us, the confusion clears and our priorities align. Our walk as disciples of Christ becomes more joyful. Our lives take on new meaning. Our relationship with our Heavenly Father becomes more profound. Obedience becomes a joy rather than a burden. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
God the Eternal Father did not give the first great commandment because He needs us to love Him. His power and glory are not diminished should we disregard, deny, or even defile His name. His influence and dominion extend through time and space independent of our acceptance, approval, or admiration. No, God does not need us to love Him. However, oh, how we need to love God! For what we love determines what we seek. What we seek determine what we think and do. What we think and do determines who we are—and who we will become. We are created in the image of our Heavenly parents; we are God’s spirit children. Therefore, we have a vast capacity for love—it is part of our spiritual heritage. What and how we love not only defines us as individuals; it also defines us as a church. Love is the defining characteristic of a disciple of Christ. Our insight reveals anything communicated can be affirmed in one way or negated in another, therefore it can be quite incorrect. For behind Nature is Mystery beyond all knowing, all thinking, all describing, absolute Being beyond all relativity, that is also Non-Being. All evaluative theories, opinions, judgments, interpretation are assemblages of thoughts. Insofar as religious theories depart from or lack direct insight into the Real, into what is, they are mere thoughts. Where these thoughts enter into the recording, or the communication, of the result of such insight they colour it, add to it, adulterate it. It is when the person attempts to report the Impersonal that this danger exists. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Do not attempt to describe what God is, for whatever you say would limit God, who would then become something inferior to God. This is why Hebrew and Hindu bible alike say he is the Nameless One. However, you may describe what God is not, you may draw illustrations from human mind, capacity, and character to suggest what some aspect of God may be like in a quite different degree and way. Since the beginning of time, love has been the source of both the highest bliss and the heaviest burdens. At the heart of misery from the days of Adam until today, you will find the love of wrong things. And at the heart of joy, you will find the love of good things. And the greatest of all good things is God. Our Father in Heaven has given us, His children, much more than any mortal mind can comprehend. God created this wondrous World we live in. God the Father watches over us, fills our hearts with breathtaking joy, brightens our darkest hours with blessed peace, distills upon our minds precious truths, shepherds us through times of distress, rejoices when we rejoice, and answers our righteous petitions. He offers to His children the promise of a glorious and infinite existence and has provided a way for us to progress in knowledge and glory until we receive a fulness of joy. He has promised us all that He has. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
If all that is not enough reason to love our Heavenly Father, perhaps we can learn from the words of the Apostle John, who said, “We love him, because he first loved us.” In the center of the storm, there is clam. In the center of confusion, there is peace. In the center of exhaustion, there is rest. God, sitting in the midst of the World, please lead me to the center and grant me the calm and peace and rest that is found there. Speedily, even in our days, do Thou establish Thy dwelling in America forever. Mayest Thou be exalted and sanctified in America, Thy city, throughout all generations and to all eternity. O please let our eyes behold the establishment of Thy kingdom, accord to the word that was spoken in the inspired Psalms of David, Thy righteous anointed: The Lord shall reign forever; Thy God, O Zion, shall be Sovereign unto all generations. Hallelujah! Unto all generations we will declare Thy greatness and to all eternity we will proclaim Thy holiness. Our mouth shall ever speak Thy praise, O our God, for Thou art a great and holy God and King. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy God. Thou didst choose us for Thy service from among all peoples, loving us and taking delight in us. Thou didst exalt us above all tongues by making us holy through Thy commandments. Thou hast drawn us near, O our King, unto Thy service and hast called us by Thy great and holy name. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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I Am the Resurrection, and the Life—Glory to God in the Shining Heavens and on Earth!
From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one—absolutely no one—is above the law. The total rejection of any religious belief is so contrary to human’s natural instincts and so destructive of one’s peace of mind. However, the French revelation was a conscious effort to replace the Kingdom of God with the kingdoms of man. Thus Grace’s irreligion was soon replaced by a new faith—man’s worship of man. Meanwhile, in the New World a radical experiment opened another chapter in church-state relations. There a group of gentlemen farmers, who were neither naïve about human nature nor pretentious about human society, were drawing up the American Constitution. By refusing to assign redemptive powers to the state or to allow coercive power to the church, the American experiment separated these two institutions for the first time since Constantine. What might be considered the modern phase in church-state history has emerged in out live times. It is an amalgam of elements from the previous eras. The rise of totalitarian regimes has brought back the kind of persecution the church experienced in early Rome; like Herod, modern dictators tolerate no other kinds. In the West secularism has aggressively spread irreligion, turning Europe into a post-Christian culture and America into a battleground with orthodox religion in retreat. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
This is dangerous because of people like Heinrich Himmler, who is an excellent example of a vicious, sadistic character who illustrates what has been said about the connection between sadism and the extreme forms of the anal-hoarding, bureaucratic, authoritarian character. The “bloodhound of Europe,” as he was called by many, Mr. Himmler was, together with Adolph Hitler, responsible for the slaughter of between fifteen and twenty million unarmed and powerless Russians, Poles, and Jews. Mr. Himmler impressed one as of uncanny subalternity, narrow-minded conscientiousness, inhuman methodicalness, blended with an element of an automaton. This sadistic authoritarian character is not the description of a hater or of that of a monster as the latter is usually conceived, but of an extremely dehumanized bureaucrat. Mr. Himmler was the type of a cruel educator of the old school, strict against himself but stricter against others. The signs of compassion and especially friendly tone of his thank you letters were all a fake, as one often finds in clearly cold natures. He could be a tender family father, a correct superior and a good comrade. At the same time he was an obsessed fanatic, an eccentric dreamer and a will-less instrument in Mr. Hitler’s hands to whom he was tied in an ever increasing love/hate. The most extreme example of his submission was that to Mr. Hitler, although one must suspect that his opportunism may have induced him to use a degree of flatter that was not entirely genuine. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Mr. Hitler was for Mr. Himmler the god-man, to be compared to the significance of Christ in the Christian religion or of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita. He writes of him: “He is destined by the Karma of the universal Germanness, to lead the fight against the east and to save the Germanness of the World; one of the very great figures of light has found its incarnation in him.” Mr. Himmler submitted to the new Krishna-Christ-Hitler as he had to the old Christ/God, except much more fervently. It must be noted, however, that under the circumstances the new gods offered greater opportunities for fame and power. Can we conclude from this cursory overview that the church and the state must inevitably be in conflict? To some extent the answer is yes. Dual allegiances always create tension. And in a sinful World the struggle for power, which inevitably corrupts, is unavoidable. When the church is not being persecuted, it is being corrupted. So as much as anything else, it is human’s own nature that has created centuries of conflict. While they know that they represent different nations each living under the normal circumstances of their own society, its power and strength in comparison with other nations, nor do they know their place in their own society. Once again the contracting parties, in this case representatives of states, are allowed only enough knowledge to make a rational choice to protect their interests but not so much that the more fortunate among them can take advantage of their special situation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, every generation has an obligation to seek anew a healthy relationship between church and state. Both are reflections of human’s nature; both have a role to play. Christ’s teaching clearly delineates these roles. Jesus was remarkably indifferent to those who held political power. He had no desire to replace Caesar or Pilate with His apostles Peter or John. He gave civil authority its due, rebuking both the Zealots and Peter for using the sword. This infuriated the religious right of His day. Eager to discredit Jesus, the Pharisees and Herodians tried trapping Jesus over the question of allegiance to political authority. “Tell us,” they asked, “is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” The question puts Jesus in the middle: If He said no, He would be a threat to the Roman government; if He said yes, He would lose the respect of the masses who hated the Romans. Jesus asked them for a coin. It was a Roman denarius, the only coin that could be used to pay the hated yearly poll tax. On one side was the image of the Emperor Tiberius, around which were written the words Tiberius, Caesar Augusts, son of the divine Augustus. “Whose portrait is this?” Jesus asked, rubbing His finger over the raised features of the Roman ruler. “And whose inscription?” “Caesar’s,” they replied impatiently. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” replied Jesus, handing the coin back to them. They stared at Jesus in stunned silence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Not only had Jesus eluded the trap, but He has put Caesar in his place. Christ might simply have said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” That is all that was at issue. It was Caesar’s image on the coin, and Caesar had authority over the state. What made Jesus add the second phrase, “Give to God what is God’s”? The answer is found on the reverse face of the coin, which showed Tiberius’s mother represented as the goddess of peace, along with the words highest priest. The blasphemous words commanded the worship of Caesar; they thus exceeded the state’s authority. Jesus’ lesson was not lost on the early church. Government is to be respected, and its rule honoured. “It is necessary to submit to the authorities,” wrote the apostle Paul. “If you owe taxes, pay taxes.” However, worship is reserved solely for God. The distinction Christ made is clear; both the church and state have clear and distinct roles ordained by God. The issue is how to apply these teachings to each institution in today’s volatile World. Christ did not give the keys to of the Kingdom to Caesar nor the sword to Peter. In God’s provision the state is not to seize authority over ecclesiastical or spiritual matters, nor is the church to seek authority over political matters. Yet the constant temptation of each is to encroach upon the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The basic principle of the law of nations is a principle of equality. Independent peoples organized as states have certain fundamental equal rights. This principle is analogous to the equal rights of citizens in a constitutional regime. One consequence of this equality of nations is the principle of self-determination, the right of a people to settle its own affairs without the intervention of foreign powers. Another consequence is the right of self-defense against attack, including the right to form defensive alliances to protect this right. A further principle is that treaties are to be kept, provided they are consistent with other principles governing the relations of states. Thus treaties for self-defense, suitably interpreted, would be binding, but agreements to cooperate in an unjustified attack are void ab initio. Even in a just war certain forms of violence are strictly inadmissible; and where a country’s right to war is questionable and uncertain, the constraints on the means it can use are all the more severe. Acts permissible in a war of legitimate self-defense, when these are necessary, may be flatly excluded in a more doubtful situation. The ai of war is a just peace, and therefore the means employed must not destroy the possibility of peace or encourage a contempt for human life that puts the safety of ourselves and of humankind in jeopardy. The conduct of war is to be constrained and adjusted to this end. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The representatives of states would recognize that their national interest, as seen from the original position, is best served by acknowledging these limits on the means of war. This is because the national interest of a just state is defined by the principles of justice that have already been acknowledged. Therefore such a nation will aim above all to maintain and to preserve its just institutions and conditions that make them possible. It is not moved by the desire for World power or national glory; nor does it wage war for purposes of economic gain or the acquisition of territory. These ends are contrary to the conception of justice that defines a society’s legitimate interests, however prevalent they have been in the actual conduct of states. Granting these presumptions, then, it seems reasonable to suppose that the traditional prohibitions incorporating the natural duties that protect human life would be chosen. Now if conscientious refusal in time of war appeals to these principles, it is founded upon a political conception, and not necessarily upon religious or other nations. While this form of denial may not be a political act, since it does not take place in the public forum, it is based upon the same theory of justice that underlies the constitution and guides its interpretation. Moreover, the legal order itself presumably recognizes in the form of treaties the validity of at least some of these principles of the law of nations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Therefore if a soldier is ordered to engage in certain illicit acts of war, one may refuse if one reasonably and conscientiously believes that the principles applying to the conduct of war are plainly violated. One can maintain that, all things considered, one’s natural duty not to e made the agent of grave injustice and evil to another outweighs one’s duty to obey. Conscription is a drastic interference with the basic liberties of equal citizenship, it cannot be justified by any needs less compelling than those of national security. Citizens agree to this arrangement as a fair way of sharing in the burdens of national defense. In a well-ordered society anyway, evils arise externally, that is, from unjustified attacks from the outside. It is impossible for just institutions to eliminate these hardships entirely. The most that they can do is to try to make sure that the risks of suffering from these imposed misfortunes are more or less evenly shared by all members of society over the course of their life, and that there is no avoidable class bias in selecting those who are called for duty. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
And, of course, it is unjust and contrary to the law of nations to attack the liberty of other societies without just cause. Therefore if a just case for war does not exist, and this may be sufficiently evident under some circumstances, a citizen is justified in refusing to discharge one’s legal duty. Both the law of nations and the principles of justice for one’s own society uphold one in this claim. It no more challenges the state’s authority than the celibacy of priest challenges the sanctity of marriage. Governments, with rare exceptions, seek to expand their power beyond the mandate to restrain evil, preserve order, and promote justice. Most often they do this by venturing into religious or moral areas. The reason is twofold: the state needs religious legitimization for its polices and an independent church is the one structure that rivals that state’s clam for ultimate allegiance. However, when the state has presumed on God’s role, whether in ancient Rome, in Germany, or modern America, the first liberty, freedom of conscience, suffers. On the other side of the coin, the church, whose principal function is to proclaim the Good News and witness the values of the Kingdom of God, must resist the tempting illusion that it can usher in that Kingdom through political means. Jesus provided the best example for the church in His wilderness confrontation with Satan when the Devil tempted Jesus to worship him and thus take dominion over the kingdom of this World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
No small temptation. With that kind of power, Christ could enforce the Sermon on the Mount; love and justice could reign. He might have reasoned that if He did not accept, someone else would. This rationalization is popular today, right up through the highest councils of government: compromise to stay in power because there you can do more for the common good. However, as the saying goes, “People who lie down with dogs, get flees.” It is just another way of achieving success by compromising one’s morals and yielding to coercive power. And think of the popularity Jesus could have gained. After all, the people wanted a Messiah who would vanquish their oppressors. However, Jesus understood His mission, and it could not be accomplished by taking over the kingdoms of the World in a political coup. The mission of the church is to build the kingdom of God on Earth, and the means of the mission is politics. We live with both good (the wheat) and evil (the tares), and cannot root out the tares. Only God is able to do that and He will—when the Kingdom comes in its final glory. However, citizens of the World have a duty to work through civil authority for the advancement of justice and human good. They may provide critical illumination, personal example and vocational leadership. There are proper ways as well for the institutional church to provide society with its moral vision and hold government to moral account. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Some Christian traditional similarly believe that they can best model Kingdom values not by involvement in politics but by the establishment of alternative communities in which they live out the teachings of the Kingdom. In its proper form, this is not a withdrawal from the World or abandonment of Christian responsibility; nor is it a privatization of Christian values as with those who profess to believe but live as they do not. Instead a different strategy to the same end of providing a witness in the kingdom of man to the values of the Kingdom of God. While I do not agree with the generally negative view of government held by such groups, I respect the faithfulness by which they live their convictions. This split up of the social order is precisely analogous to the process of growth in biology. Embryos differentiate as they develop, forming more and more specialized organs. The entire march of evolution, from the virus to the man, displays a relentless advance toward higher and higher degrees of differentiation. There appears to be a seemingly irresistible movement of living beings and social groups from less to more differentiated forms. Thus it is not accidental that we witness parallel trends toward diversity—in the economy, in politics, in religion, in art, in education and mass culture, in the social order itself. These trends all fit together forming part of an immensely larger historic process. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The Super-age of information Revolution can now be seen for what, in large measure, it is—the advance of human society to its next higher stage of differentiation. This is why it often seems to us that our society is cracking at the seams. It is. This is why everything grows increasingly complex. Where once there stood 1,000 organizational entities, there are now at least 21.6 million in America alone—interconnected by increasingly transient links. Where once there were a few relatively permanent subcults with which a person might identify, there are now thousands of temporary subcluts milling about, colliding, and multiplying. The powerful bonds that integrated industrial society—bons of law, common values, centralized and standardized education and cultural production—are breaking down. All this explains why cities suddenly seem to be “unmanageable” and states “ungovernable.” For the old ways of integrating a society, methods based on uniformity, simplicity, and permanence, are not as effective. For the individual, this leap to a new level of differentiation holds awesome implications. However, not for the ones most people fear. We have been told so often that we are heading for faceless uniformity that we fail to appreciate the fantastic opportunities for individuality that the Super-industrial Revolution brings with it. And we have hardly begun to think about the dangers of over-individualization that are also implicit in it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Therefore keep in mind that the common grace is God’s provision for the welfare of all His created beings, both those who believe in God and those who do not. The human race, far from being flattened into monotonous conformity, will become far more diverse socially than it ever was before. The new society, the super-age of informational society now beginning to take form, will encourage a crazy-quilt pattern of evanescent life styles. The critical dynamic in the church-state tension is separation of institutional authority. Religion and politics cannot be separated—they inevitably overlap—but the institutions of church and state must preserve their separate and distinct roles. In this regard, the American experiment merits closer examination. The Kingdom of God is universal, bound by neither race nor nation. The church was ordained principally for the conversion of men and women—conversion grounded in individual conscience wrought by the supernatural work of a sovereign God upon the soul. So that state could neither successfully establish nor destroy the church, since it could not rule conscience nor transform people’s hearts and soul. Each rational soul has an equal right to judge for oneself, every person has an unalienable right to act in all religious affairs according to the full persuasion of one’s own mind. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Thus two typically mortal enemies, the Enlightenment and the Christian faith, found a patch of common ground on American soil. Both agreed (for different reasons) that the new government should neither establish nor interfere with the church. The religion of every human must be left to the conviction and conscience of every human; and it is the right of every human to exercise it as these may dictate. It was this reasoning, not the right for the news reporters to spread lie, that led to the adoption of the First Amendment, expressly to protect the individual’s right to freedom of conscience and expression, and to prevent the establishment of a state church. However, contrary to the belief of many today, this separation of church and state did not mean that America was to be a nation free of religious influence. From the very beginning the American Revolution itself was seen by many as a rebellion fueled by the conviction that humans are creatures of God, and one’s political life is conditioned by that truth. As James Madison insisted, “This duty [homage to the Creator] is precedent, both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of civil society. Before any human can be considered as a member of civil society, one must be considered as a subject of the governor of the Universe.” A nation under God was no idle phrase. Nor did the separation of church and state mean religion and politics could be separated or religious values removed form the public arena. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
For one’s political life is an expression of values, and religion, by definition, most profoundly influences values. The concept of a “wall of separation,” a phrase incidentally first used by Jefferson fifteen years after the Constitution was adopted, applied to institutions of church and state, not religious and political values. The Founding Father were all aware that the form of limited government they were adopting could only succeed if there was an underlying consensus of values shared by the populace. I am reminded of this when I visit the House of Representatives. A beautiful fresco on the upper walls of the chamber itself contains the portraits of history’s great lawmakers. Standing at the speaker’s desk and looking straight ahead over the main entrance, one’s eyes meet the piercing eyes of the first figure in the series: Moses, the one who recorded the Law from the original Lawgiver. John Adams eloquently acknowledged the understanding of our constitutional framers when in 1798 he wrote: “We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passion unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any others. Many of these original American visionaries believed that Christian citizens would actively bring their religious values to the public forum. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
George Washington faintly echoed Augustine when he asserted, “Of all the dispositions and habit which lead to a political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that men claim that tribute of patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great pillars of human happiness.” Thus, when laws were passed reflecting the consensus of Christian values in the land, no one panicked supposing that the Christian religion was being “established” or that a sectarian morality was being imposed on an unwilling people. The point of the First Amendment was that such convictions could only become the law of the land if a majority of citizens could be persuaded (without coercion), whether they shared the religious foundation or nor, of the merits of a particular proposition. Today’s widespread relegation of religion to merely something people do in the privacy of their homes or churches would be unimaginable to the founders of the republic—even those who personally repudiated orthodox Christian faith. Though America has drifted far from the vision of its founders, this system continues to offer one of the World’s most hopeful models in an otherwise contentious history of conflict #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The record of the centuries should not cause despair, however. Tensions between church and state is inherent and inevitable. Indeed, it is perhaps the outworking of one of God’s great mysteries, part of the dynamic by which He governs His Universe. For from the constant tension—the chafing back and forth—a certain equilibrium is achieved. To maintain this balance the church and the state must fulfill their respective role. One cannot survive without the other; yet neither can do the work of the other. Both operate under God’s rule, each in a different relationship to that rule. Certainly one thing is clear. When they fail in their appointed tasks—that is, when the church fails to be the visible manifestation of the Kingdom of God and the state fails to maintain justice and concord—civic order collapses. The consequences can be catastrophic and tumultuous events demonstrate that. To confess that intellectually we know nothing about the Absolute is understandable. However, to say that therefore we should leave its existence entirely out of our intellectual World-view, is not. For although that exact definition and direct explanation of the spirit is unable to catch the whole of this subtle experience within our receiving range because it is turned into ordinary human intellectual, emotional, and physical experience, by studying the spirit we may nevertheless evoke an intuitive recognition of its beauty; we may be able to better understand the world of the soul and the spirit may arouse the first aspirations towards spiritual enlightenment. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Spiritual enlightenment is the topic most worth writing about yet least understood. Whoever has entered into a partial understanding—it would be too much to demand more—of it, bears some responsibility. One must communicate with one’s fellows. Because the Real is beyond the thinking intellect’s grasp, it cannot be formulated into ideas. Yet because we need signpost and a goal to give guidance and direction, we must tentatively and provisionally formulate it. Dear Lord in shining in Heaven, I drop my fears into your ocean and watch them sink from sight. I place my fears on your broad Earth and see them rot away. I put my fears into your hands and they are no more. When you offer your arms to me, Great Father, your hands hold nothing but love. We sanctify Thy name on Earth even as it is sanctified in the shining Heavens above, as described in the vision of Thy Prophet: And the seraphim called one unto another saying: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole Earth is full of His glory. Whereupon the angels in stirring and mighty chorus rise toward the seraphim and with resounding acclaim declare: Blessed be the glory of God from His Heavenly abode. From Thy Heavenly abide, please reveal Thyself, O our King, and reign over us, for we wait for Thee. O when wilt Thy reign in America? Speedily, even in our days, do Thou establish Thy dwelling here forever. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Papa—or—His Educational Surrogate—Knows Best!
All illness comes from sin. This everyone must take, whether they like it or not; it comes from sin—where it be of the body, of mind, or of soul. However, it may not be caused by the individual’s sin, but it comes from sin. While certain part of Europe and Japan are still building their first all-purpose supermarkets, the United State of America has already leaped to the next stage—the creation of specialized super-stores that widen still further (indeed, almost beyond belief) the variety of goods available to the consumer. In Washington, D.C., one such store specializes in foreign foods, offering such delicacies as hippopotamus steak, alligator meat, wild snow hare, and thirty-five different kinds of honey. The idea that primitive industrial techniques foster uniformity, while advanced automated techniques favour diversity, is dramatized by recent changes in the automobile industry. The widespread introduction of European, Japanese, and Korean cars into the American market has opened many new options for the buyer—increasing one’s choice from a dozen to nearly 300 car models in 2021. Today even this wide range of choice seems narrow and constricted. Faced with foreign competition, Detroit had to shutdown during the economic crises of 2008. However, Detroit is back to producing General Motors, Ford Motors, and Fiat Chrysler. To increase demand, General Motors, Ford Motors, and Fiat Chrysler are offer 0 percent financing of up to 84 months as well as big discounts on vehicles. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
While United States retail sales were down by about 41 percent during March and April, they have been more resilient than expected during the coronavirus pandemic, according to J.D. Power. When the “stay at home” or “shelter-in-place” orders were initially enacted some expected United States sales to fall by up to 80 percent. “We continue to see evidence that we are over the worst and we are firmly in recover,” reports Thomas Kind, J.D. Power president of data and analytics. They found that customers want cars that will give them the illusion of having-one-of-a-kind. For instance, BMW has an E26 M1 vehicle and only 453 M1 models were manufacture, approximately 54 vehicles are used for the Group 4 Pro Cars series, so they are highly coveted and desirable. BMW also only manufactured 20 examples of the “Frozen Black” E92 M3. These came standard with the Competition Package, DCT transmission, red brake calipers and red contrast stitching among other cosmetic updates. To provide that illusion for the mass consumer, the computerized assembly systems make possible not merely the illusion, but the reality. Thus the beautiful and spectacularly successful Mustang is promoted by Ford as “the one you design yourself,” because, as critic Reyner Banham explains, there “is not a dung-regular Mustang any more,” just a stockpile of options to meld in combinations of 3 (bodies) X 4 (engines) X 3 (transmissions) X 4 (basic sets of high-performance engine modifications) – 1 (rock-bottom six cylinder car to which these modification do not apply) + 2 (Shelby grand-touring and racing set-ups applying to only one body shell and not all engine/transmission combinations).” #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
This does not even take into account the possible variations in colour, upholstery and optional equipment. Both car buyers and auto sales representatives are increasingly disconcerted by the sheer multiplicity of options. The buy’s problem of choice has become far more complicated, the addition of each option creating the need for more information, more decisions and sub-decisions. Thus, anyone who has attempted to buy a car lately, as I have, soon finds that the task of learning about the various brands, lines, models and options (even within a fixed price range) requires days of shopping and reading. The auto industry may soon reach the point at which its technology can economically produce more diversity than the consumer needs or wants. BMW has already started accommodating this trend by alternating production of two of their high-end, large, luxury coupes. Both are very nice and expensive, but experts notice that when the economy is under preforming, BMW tends to produce the 6 Series and cancels the 8 Series, but when the market is doing really well, BMW cancels the 6 Series and produces the slightly more expensive 8 Series. The benefit of this kind of marketing makes these two cars hard to find and highly desirable, and buyers may hold on to their model as they anticipate the release of the next generation. It is also good for the pre-owned market because some buyers fall in love with a body style and do not care if it is not brand it. That is the car they want, no matter the year or cost, they buyer must have that car. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Marshall McLuhan has noted that, “Even today, most United States automobiles are, in a sense, custom-produced. Figuring all possible combinations of styles, options and colours available on a certain new family sports car, for example, a computer expert came up with 25,000,000 different versions of it for a buyer. When automated electronic production reaches full potential, it will be just about as inexpensive to turn out a million differing objects as a million exact duplicates. The only limits on production and consumption will be the human imagination.” We are, in fact, racing toward “over-choice”—the point at which the advantages of diversity and individualization are cancelled by the complexity of the buyer’s decision-making process. Does any of this matter? Some people argue that diversity in the material environment is insignificant so long as we are racing toward cultural or spiritual homogeneity. “It is what is inside that counts,” they say, paraphrasing a well-known burrito commercial. This view gravely underestimates the importance of material goods as symbolic expressions of human personality differences, and it glibly denies a connection between the inner and outer environment. Those who fear the standardization of human beings should warmly welcome the destandardization of goods. For by increasing the diversity of good available to a human we increase the mathematical probability of differences in the way humans actually live. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
More important, however, is the very premise that we are racing toward cultural homogeneity, since a close look at this also suggests that just the opposite is true. It is unpopular to say this, but we are moving swiftly toward fragmentation and diversity not only in material production, but in art education and mass culture as well. One highly revealing test of cultural diversity in any literate society has to do with the number of different books published per million; the more diverse these tastes, the greater the number of titles. The increase or decrease of this figure over time is a significant clue to the direction of cultural change in the society. The more advanced the technology in a country, the greater the likelihood that it would be moving in the direction of literary diversity and away from uniformity. The same push toward pluralism is evident in painting, too, where we find an almost incredibly wide spectrum of production. Representationalism, expressionism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, hardedge, pop, kinetic, and a hundred other styles are pumped into the society at the same time. One or another may dominate the galleries temporarily, but there are no universal standards or styles. It is a pluralistic market. When art was a tribal-religious activity, the painter worked for the whole community. Later one worked for a single small aristocratic elite. Still later the audience appeared as a single undifferentiated mass. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Today one faces a large audience split into a milling mass of sub-groups. According to John McHale: “The most uniform cultural contexts are typically primitive enclaves. The most striking feature of our contemporary ‘mass’ culture is the vast range and diversity of its alternative cultural choices. The ‘mass,’ on even cursory examination, breaks down into many different ‘audiences.’” Indeed, artists no longer attempt to work for a universal public. Even when they think they are doing so, they are usually responding to the tastes and styles preferred by one or another sub-group in the society. Like the manufacturers of pancake syrup and automobiles, artists, too, produce for “mini-markets.” And as these markets multiply, artists output diversifies. The push for diversity, meanwhile, is igniting bitter conflict in education. Every since the rise of industrialism, education in the New World, and particularly in the United States of America, has been organized for the mass production of basically standardized educational packages. It is not accidental that at the precise moment when the consumer has begun to demand and obtain greater diversity, the same moment when new technology promises to make destandardization possible, a wave of revolt has begun to sweep the college campus. Though the connection is seldom noticed, events on the campus and events in the consumer market are intimately connected. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Ne basic complaint of the student is that one is not treated as an individual, that one is served up an undifferentiated gruel, rather than a personalized product. Like the BMW E26 M1 and Mustang buyer, the student wants to design one’s own education. The difference is that while industry is highly responsive to consumer demand, education typically has been indifferent to student wants. (In one case we say, “the customer knows best”; in the other, we insist that “Papa—or his educational surrogate—knows best.”) Thus the student-consumer is forced to fight to make the education industry responsive to one’s demand for diversity. While most colleges and universities have greatly broadened the variety of their course offerings, they are still wedded to complex standardizing systems based on degrees, majors and the like. These systems lay down basic tracks along which all students must progress. While educators are rapidly multiplying the number of alternative path, the pace of diversification is by no means swift enough for the students. This explains why young people have set up “para—universities”—experimental colleges and so-called free universities—in which each student is free to choose what one wishes from a mind-shattering smorgasbord of courses that range from guerrilla tactics and stock market techniques to Christian ethics, morals and values, and “underground theater.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Long before the year 2040 A.D., the entire antiquated structure of degrees, majors, and credits will be a shambles. No two students will move along exactly the same educational track. For the students now pressuring higher education to destandardize, to move toward the super-age of informational diversity, will win their battle. Perhaps corporations will for their own universities and start recruiting kids out of high school, who score well on their standardized test. Perhaps public schools will be divided and sponsored by corporations, which will allow children to choose the type of enrichment material they want to learn, then the corporations will pick the brightest minds, the ones that show the most creativity to educate in their universities, and more than grades will matter. They will truly see who is excelling and genuinely cares about what they learn, even if they do not preform well on tests. That will be a way to diversify education and train people from crib to coffin to be the kind of employee you want. It is significant, for example, that one of the chief results of the student strikes in France was a massive decentralization of the university system. Decentralization makes possible greater regional diversity, local authority to alter curriculum, student regulations and administrative practices. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Many people in America are already demanding that the entire school system be cut up into smaller “community-run” school systems. Some African Americans and other ethnic groups are requesting that their kids are allowed to take history from their culture’s perspective in grade school. Some religious groups want religious based public schools. They want greater parental involvement with the schools than is possible in the present large, bureaucratic and ossified system. It claims, in short, the right to be different. And these might be viable choices. For instance, in the state of Utah, the cities Salt Lake City and Highland may have a large number of Mormons and a public school based on Mormon values may be something that the community wants for their children. Or in Sacramento, California in the Pocket/Greenhaven neighbourhood, history from an Asian American’s perspective might be something that that community desires. Other schools in the Sacramento area may want English classes that have books from African American authors. These types of programs could be a way to build the community, teach the children to appreciate their heritage, increase tax revenue and attendance in certain communities, and improve academic performance. Or children in Rancho Cordova, California may want to attend an architectural high school where the curriculum focuses more calculus and analytic geometry, architectonics, history of architecture, and environments. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Different types of educational and community-based education, in short, claims the right to be different. Of it will require families to be more stable and have an attachment to their community. If they is not always possible for parents, that is were professional parenting may come into play, where people are willing to foster children so they can remain in the community and attend school. Or we may need for organizations in communities like the Ecumenical Institute. Perhaps a corporation can purchase a block of McMansions and they can have professional parents raise children and have the educated and these specialized schools in the community. The essential issue is allowing children to have a safe place, where they can learn, be safe, and have a fair chance at life. Because as it stands, by fixing city-wide standards and curricula, by choosing texts and personnel on a city-wide basis, leaders have imposed considerable uniformity on the schools and if America is going to stay a World Super Power, we need to get each and every student to tune in and work hard. The days of being spoiled and living a leisure life are over. We need students to be interested in their education and they need the help to be successful. We need to generate local variety in public education by turning over control of the schools to community authorities. Otherwise, failure to diversify education within the system will simply lead to the growth of alternative educational opportunities outside the system. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Thus we have today the suggestions of prominent educators and sociologist, including Kenneth B. Clark and Christopher Jencks, for the creatin of new schools outside of, and competitive with, the official public school systems. Mr. Clark has called for regional and state schools, federal schools, schools run by colleges, trade unions, corporations and even military units. Such competing schools would, he contends, help create the diversity that education desperately needs. Simultaneously, in a less formal way, a variety of “para-schools” are already being established by young, successful parents and other groups who find the mainstream educational system too homogenous. We see here, therefore, a major cultural force in the society—education—being pushed to diversify its output, exactly as the economy is doing. And here, exactly as in the realm of material production, the new technology, rather than fostering standardization, carries us toward super-industrial diversity. Computers, for example, make it easier for large school to schedule more flexibly. They make it easier for the school to cope with independent study, with a wider range of course offerings and more varied extracurricular activities. More important, computer-assisted education, programmed instruction and other such techniques, despite popular misconceptions, radically enhance the possibility of diversity in the classroom. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Computer-assisted education techniques permit each student to advance at one’s own purely personal pace. They permit one to follow a custom-cut path toward knowledge, rather than a rigid syllabus as in the traditional industrial era classroom. Aaliyah Haughton, for instance, went to a performing arts high school, scored well and became a successful actor, model, and singer. Moreover, in the educational World of tomorrow, that relic of mass production, the centralized work place, will also become less important. Just as economic mass production required large numbers of students to be assembled in factories, educational mass production required large numbers of students to be assembled in schools. This itself, with its demands for uniform discipline, regular hours, attendance checks and the like, was a standardizing force. Advanced technology will, in the future, make much of this unnecessary. A good deal of education will take place in the student’s own room at home or in a dorm, at hours of one’s own choosing. With vast libraries of data available to one via computerized information retrieval systems, with one’s own tapes and video units, one’s own language laboratory and one’s own electronically equipped study carrel, one will be freed, for much of the time, of the restrictions and unpleasantness that dogged one in the lockstep classrooms. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The technology upon which these new freedoms will be based will inevitably spread through the schools in the years ahead—aggressively pushed, no doubt, my major corporations like Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and Xerox. Within the next 30 years, the educational systems of the United States of America, and several Western European countries as well, will have broken decisively with the mass production pedagogy of the past, and will have advanced into an era of educational diversity based on the liberating power of the new machines. In education, therefore, as in the production of material goods, the society is shifting irresistibly away from, rather than toward, standardization. It is not simply a matter of varies automobiles, detergents, and syrup. The social thrust toward diversity and increased individual choice affects our mental, as well as our material surroundings. One of the functions of intuition is to protect the body against unnecessary sickness by warning the human in it when one is transgressing the laws of its hygiene, or by showing the right road. In this, intuition is pitted against the body’s past habits and animal appetites, the emotional nature’s desires, as well as the mind’s ignorance immaturity and inexperience—a combination of enemies which usually triumphs over it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Another of its functions is to protect the human against avoidable calamity or preventable loss, by consciously moving one out of its reach. However, here it has opposed to it the egoistic desires and habits or the emotional impulses and negative feelings which perceive only the immediate and not the impending, the semblance of things and not the actuality. The intuitive life does not always know how or why it acts, for it is often spontaneous and unconscious. However, when it does become at times intellectually self-conscious, its power in the World to affect humans is heightened, not lessened. Like Socrates we possess an inner warning voice which forbids certain course of action but does not recommend better ones. It is negative and not positive. Intuition—which is called the surest road to truth—eradicates hesitancies. When you are in contact with God in solving a problem, you receive a direct command what to do and you then know it is right. The clouds and hesitancies and vacillations which arise when struggling between contrary points of view, melt. Whereas, if you are not in contact with God, but only being carried along through universal law, then you swing back and forth with emotion or opinion. One is indeed fortunate whose intuition shows itself in one impelling thought strong enough to outclass all other conflicting thoughts. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The uncomfortable feeling that something is wrong may combat the smooth plausible appearance of everything being right. One can depend on one thing alone to show one the right roads and the right master. It is intuition. If one’s reason governs one’s body and one’s intuition governs one’s reason, a human’s life will be less troubled and one’s happiness more secured. If a human acts according to intuitive wisdom, all will go well with one. This is not to say that one will be free from external misfortunes. However, if they come, they will be of the unavoidable kind and therefore less in number than if they included those of one’s own direct making. And even the others will be turned to profit in some way by the search for their underlying meanings, so that although humanity calls them evil, one will nevertheless gain some inner good from them. If one is sensitive enough and can touch the intuitive element within oneself, either deliberately by sheer power of deeply introspective concentration or spontaneously by immediate acceptance of its suggestive messages, one’s decisions will be filled with utter conviction and followed with resolute determination. One may be sure of this, that whatever action God’s leading causes one to take will always be for one’s ultimate good even thought it may be to one’s immediate and apparent detriment. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
There is the feeling of being led, but not the ability to see where, and to what, one is being led. To the degree that the intuitive element can displace all others for the rulership of one’s inner life, to that degree can a healing and guiding calm displace the emotion of moods and commotion of thought. To say what the Absolute is not, to describe it in negatives, is correct so far as it goes but is not so satisfactory. The terms Void or Space, being more positive, are even better. Space is a good metaphor of Mind. In one aspect it is bounded, in another it is infinite. Mind also is static and dynamic, still active, within Universes yet transcending them all. Where is the being who has ever known the unknowable and indescribable Supreme Godhead? For all humans came into existence after it already was there. However, whoever receives knowledge by tradition, investigation, or intuition, by meditation, revelation or even by science leading into metaphysics, by art or poetry or literature, may acquire the tremendous certitude that it is there. More—it must always have been there. That which transcends even the high Worldly authorities, even World-Mind, is unthinkable and unimaginable. Therefore it is without name or form, beyond all contact with the senses, beginningless and endless, neither growing nor diminishing, indestructible, free from any relations or comparisons—this Undefinable Mystery of Mysteries. Let no one seek it, for one cannot find IT. However, one can know that it is there and, through its manifestations, the God, worship IT. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
All human explanation of the nature of Mind, as all human expositions of the working of the World-Mind, are limited forms of language. This cannot be helped. It is outside time in a Now beyond the successive character of human thinking and incomprehensible to it. Yet intellect, though it cannot enter this Grand Mystery, can at its most brilliant perception infer that it is. Try as it might, the finite thinking mind cannot break through this sound-barrier of mystery which surrounds the Unique Being, That which is ever the same. All thoughts simply pile up, leaving the last one unanswered, if not unanswerable, or else ending in an involved labyrinth from which there is no outlet. IT cannot be investigated, but the fact of its necessary existence can be stated more emphatically than any other of the innumerable or observable facts. Both church and state assert standards and values in society; both seek authority; both compete for allegiance. As members of both the religious and the political spheres, the Christian is bound to face conflict. The conflict is particularly apparent in the Judeo-Christian tradition because of the assertion that the God of both the Old and New Testament Scriptures is King. That has been an offense to some of the proud and powerful since the beginning—and the reason many Jewish and Christians alike have been systematically persecuted. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
The tensions between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of humans runs like an unbroken thread through the history of the past two thousand years. It began not long after Christ’s birth. In the end one will have to confess, as the English hermit Richard Rolle confessed over six hundred years ago, despite one’s deep mystical experiences, that it is not possible to know what God is but only that He is. When the last words have been uttered, the final sentences written down; when the sermons, books, and articles have exhausted all that human intellect and human intuition can explain, suggest, or hint; when the profoundest mystical experience has yielded all that it could reveal, there will still remain an awed feeling before the Grand Mystery that is God, a tremendous humility before Its unknowableness. Because there is nothing quite like it in human experience and because there is no opposite in the entire cosmos from which it can be differentiated, the Absolute Being remains utterly incomprehensible to human intellect. The mystery of That Which Is baffles not only the comprehension of the ordinary mind but also that of the philosophic mind. There is an abyss which no human can cross, a mystery which remains utterly impenetrable to one. This is the transcendent Godhead. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
We can know as much, and as little, of God as the wave dashing against the Californian coastline can know of the immense ocean stretching so many thousand miles to the Australian shore: such is human insignificance in relation to that activity of God which is directed to thus Universe. However, in relation to that non-activity which is God-in-itself, at rest, we can know absolutely nothing. For here is Being without end, Mind without individualization of any kind, and Life without any bottom or top to it. The Unfathomable Mystery of Mind will always remain. Despite all the absurd claims to the contrary, no one has ever interpreted to us the great Mystery of mysteries, the Godhead behind the God active in the Universe. The more righteous a people become the more they are qualified for loving others and rendering them happy. A wicked human can have but little love for one’s wife; while a righteous human, being filled with the love of God, is sure to manifest this Heavenly attribute in every thought and feeling of one’s heart, and in every word and deed. Love, joy, and innocence will radiate from one’s very countenance, and be expressed in every look. This will beget confidence in the love of one’s heart; for love beget love; happiness imparts happiness; and these Heaven born emotions will continue to increase more and more, until they are perfected and glorified in all the fulness of eternal love itself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
True love of one human for another always includes the love of God from whom all good things issue. Without a strong commitment to the Lord, an individual is more prone to have a low level of commitment to a spouse. Weak commitments to eternal covenants lead to losses of eternal consequence. If two people are earnestly and faithfully observing all the ordinances and principles of the gospels, there could not arise any cause for divorce. The joy and happiness pertaining to the marriage relationship will grow sweeter, and spouses will become more and more attached to each other as the days go by. Not only will the husband love the wife and the wide the husband, but children born to them will live in an atmosphere of love and harmony. The love of each for the others will not be impaired, and moreover the love of all towards our Eternal Father and His Son Jesus Christ will be more firmly rooted in their soul. The Lord said, “Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 42.22. This kind of love can be shown for your wives in so many ways. First and foremost, nothing except God Himself takes priority over your wife in your life—not work, not recreation, not hobbies. What does it mean to love someone with all you heart? #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
To love someone with all of your heart means to love that individual with all your emotional feelings and with all your devotion. You cannot demean her, criticize her, find fault with her. What does it mean to cleave unto her? It means to stay close to her, to be loyal and faith to her, to communicate with her, and to express your love for her. It does not mean be like Evan Chambers, a young heir to a media conglomerate, from Greek thr TV show. His mother gave him a multi-million dollar trust fund in college, and a $100,000.00 German sports car, but he had to sign a contract stating he could only drive his car on approved trips and could not marry until he was 25. So, Evan took this as a sign that meant he was not supposed to genuinely love anyone, spend lavishly on his friends, and be a suave playboy. However, love means being sensitive to the feelings of the person you are with. Husbands, recognize your wife’s intelligence and her ability to counsel with you. Give her the opportunity to grow intellectually, emotionally, and socially as well as spiritually. Remember, brethren, love can be nurtured and nourished by little tokens. Flowers on special occasions are wonderful, but so is your willingness to help with the dishes, vacuum the carpet, get up with a crying child in the night, or leave the television or the newspaper to help with dinner. Those are the quiet ways we say, “I love you,” with our actions. They bring rich dividends for such little effort. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
If two people love the Lord more than their own lives and then love each other more than their own lives, working together in total harmony with the gospel program as their basic structure, they are sure to have this great happiness. When a husband and wife go together frequently to the holy temple, kneel in prayer together in their home with their family, go hand and hand to their religious meetings, keep their religious meetings, keep their lives wholly chaste—mentally and physically—so that their whole thoughts and desires and loves are all centered in the one being, their companion and both work together for the upbuilding of the kingdom of God then happiness is at its pinnacle. Moroni tells us that this highest of Christian virtues is more accurately labeled, “The pure love of Christ.” And it endures forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well him [and her]. “Wherefore, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he has bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye may become the sons [and daughters] of God; that when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may be purified even as he is pure,” reports Moroni 7.47-48. True charity, the absolutely pure, perfect love of Christ, has really been known only once in this World—in the form of Christ Himself, the living Son of the living God. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
As in everything, Christ is the only one who got it all right, did it all perfectly, loved the way we are all to try to love. However, even though we fall short, that divine standard is there for us. It is a goal toward which we are to keep reaching, keep striving—and, certainly, a goal to keep appreciating. God of justice, may I not complain at what fate has brought to me. Please cleave my night with your lightning-axe, dividing my troubles into ones I can bear. O Lord, please open my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. May my words of you be as sweet and beautiful as honey and more precious than silver and gold, diamonds and rubies. Praised art Thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, mighty, revered and exalted God. Thou bestowest lovingkindness and possesses all things. Mindful of the patriarchs’ love for Thee, Thou wilt in Thy love bring a redeemer to their children’s children, and their children’s children for the sake of Thy name. O King, Thou Helper, Redeemer and Shield, be Thou praised, O Lord, Shield of America. Thou, O Lord art mighty forever. Thou callest the dead to immortal life for Thou art mighty in deliverance. Our solutions to life’s problems are always gospel solutions. Not only are answers found in Christ, but so is the power, the gift, the bestowal, the miracle of giving and receiving those answers. In this matter of love no doctrine could be mor encouraging to us than that. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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God Will Look to Every Soul Like its First Love Because He is its First Love!
Death is a metaphor; nobody dies to oneself. I believe that humans will not merely endure; they will prevail. My picture of the good sheepdog in the good homestead does not, of course, cover wild animals nor (a matter even more urgent) ill-treated domestic animals. However, it is intended only as an illustration drawn from one privileged instance—which is, also, in my view the only normal and unperverted instance—of the general principles to be observed in framing a theory of animal resurrection. I think Christians may justly hesitate to suppose any beasts immortal, for two reasons. Firstly because they fear, by attributing to beasts a “soul” in the full sense, to obscure that difference between beast and humans which is as sharp in the spiritual dimension as it is hazy and problematical in the biological. And secondly, a future happiness connected with the beast’s present life simply as a compensation for suffering—so many millenniums in the happy pastures paid down as “damages” for so many years of pulling carts—seems a clumsy assertion of Divine goodness. We, because we are fallible, often hurt a child or an animal unintentionally, and then the best we can do is to “make up for it” by some caress or tid-bit. However, it is hardly pious to imagine omniscience acting in that way—as though God trod on the animals’ tails in the dark and then did the best He could about it! #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
In such a botched adjustment I cannot recognize the master-touch; whatever the answer is, it must be something better than that. The theory I am suggesting tries to avoid both objections. It makes God the center of the Universe and humans the subordinate center of terrestrial nature: the beasts are not co-ordinate with humans, but subordinate to them, and their destiny is through and through related to ones. And the derivative immorality suggested for them is not a mere amende or compensation: it is part and parcel of the new Heaven and new Earth, organically related to the whole suffering process f the World’s fall and redemption. Supposing, as I do, that the personality of the tame animals is largely the gift of humans—that their mere sentience is reborn to soulhood in us as our mere soulhood is reborn to spirituality in Christ—I naturally suppose that very few animals indeed, in their wild state, attain to “self” or ego. However, if any do, and if it is agreeable to the goodness of God that they should live again, their immortality would also be related to humans—not, this time, to individual masters, but to humanity. That is to say, if in any instance the quasi-spiritual and emotional value which human tradition attributes to a beast (such as the “innocence” of the lamb or the heraldic royalty of the lion) has a real ground in the beast’s nature, and is not merely arbitrary or accidental, then it is that capacity, or principally in that, that the beast may be expected to attend on risen humans and make part of one’s “train.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Or if the traditional character is quite erroneous, then the beast’s Heavenly life would be in virtue of the real, but unknown, effect it has actually had on humans during their whole history: for if Christians cosmology is in any sense (I do not say, in a literal sense) true, then all that exists on our planet is related to humans, and even the creatures that were extinct before humans existed are then only seen in their true light when they are seen as the unconscious harbingers of humans. When we are speaking of creatures so remote from us as wild beasts, and prehistoric beasts, we hardly know what we are talking about. It may well be that they have no selves and no sufferings. It may even be that each species has a corporate self—that Lionhood, not lions, has shared in the travail of creation and will enter into the restoration of all things. And if we cannot imagine even our own eternal life, much less can we imagine the life the beasts may have as our “members.” If the Earthly lion could read the prophecy of that day when one shall eat hay like an ox, one would regard it as a description not of Heaven, but of hell. And if there is nothing in the lion but carnivorous sentience, then one is unconscious and one’s “survival” would have no meaning. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, if there is a rudimentary Leonine self, to that also God can give “body” as it pleases Him—a body no longer living by the destruction of the lamb, yet richly Leonine in the sense that is also expresses whatever energy and splendour and exulting power dwelled within the visible lion on this Earth. I think, under correction, that the prophet used an eastern hyperbole when he spoke of the lion on this Earth. I think, under correction, that the prophet used an eastern hyperbole when he spoke of the lion and the lamb lying down together. That would be rather impertinent of the lamb. To have lions and lambs that so consorted (except n some rare celestial Saturnalia of topsy-turvydom) would be the same as having neither lambs nor lions. I think the lion, when one has ceased to be dangerous, will still be awful: indeed, that we shall then first see that of which the present fangs and claws are a clumsy, and satanically perverted, imitation. There will still be something like the shaking of a golden mane: and often the good Duke will say, “Let him roar again.” It is required you do awake your faith. Then all stand still; or those that think it is unlawful business I am about, let them depart. Plunged in thy depth of mercy let me die the death that every soul that lives desires. “I reckon,” said St Paul, “that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us,” reports Romans 8.18. If this is so, a book on suffering which says nothing of Heaven, is leaving out almost the whole of one side of the account. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Scripture and tradition habitually put the joys of Heaven into the scale against the sufferings of Earth, and no solution of the problem of pain which does not do so can be called a Christian one. We are very sky nowadays of even mentioning Heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about “pie in the sky,” and of being told that we are trying to “escape” from the duty of making a happy World here and now into dreams of a happy World elsewhere. However, either there is “pie in the sky” or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is women into its whole fabric. If there is, then this truth, like any other, must be faced, whether it is useful at political meetings or no. Again, we are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that is we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in Heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A human’s love for a woman is not mercenary because one wants to marry her, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object. You may think that there is another reason for our silence about Heaven—namely, that we do not really desire it. However, that may be an illusion. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
What I am now going to say is merely an opinion of my own without the slightest authority, which I submit to the judgment of better Christians and better scholars than myself. There have been times when I think we do not desire Heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw—but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to one, that one is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of—something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Are not all lifelong friendships born at them moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have every deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that dies away just as they caught your ear. However, if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all. I am not, of course, suggesting that these immortal longings which we have from the Creator because we are humans, should be confused with the gifts of the Holy Spirit to those who are in Christ. We must not fancy we are holy because we are human. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
This signature on each soul may be a product of heredity and environment, but that only means that heredity and environment are among the instruments whereby God creates a soul. I am considering now how, but why, He makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to God; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. If you never had a key, the mould in which a key is made would a strange thing. And if you have never seen a lock, the key itself would be a strange thing. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a kay to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you—you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another’s. All that you are sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction. The Brocken spectre “looked to every man like his first love,” because she was a cheat. However, God will to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in Heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
It is from this point of view that we can understand hell in its aspect of privation. All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The say is coming when you will awake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever. This may seem a perilously private and subjective notion of the pearl of great price, but it is not. The thing I am speaking of is not an experience. You have experienced only the want of it. The thing itself has never actually been embodied in any thought, or image, or emotion. Always it has summoned you our of yourself. And if you will not go out of yourself to follow it, if you sit down to brood on the desire and attempt to cherish it, the desire itself will evade you. The door into life generally opens behind us, and the only wisdom for one haunted with the scent of unseen roses, is work. This secret fire goes out when you use the bellows: bank it down with what seems unlikely fuel of dogma and ethics, turn your back on it and attend to your duties, and then it will blaze. The World is like a picture with a golden background, and we the figures in that picture. Until you step off the plane of the picture into the large dimensions of death you cannot see the gold. However, we have reminders of it. To change our metaphor, the blackout is not quite complete. There are errors. At times the daily scene looks big with its secret. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Such is my opinion; and it may be erroneous. Perhaps this secret desire also is part of the Old Man and must be crucified before the end. However, this opinion has a curious trick of evading denial. The desire—much more the satisfaction—has always refused to be fully present in any experience. Whatever you try to identify with it, turns out to be not it but something else: so that hardly any degree of crucifixion or transformation could go beyond what the desire itself leads us to anticipate. Again, if this opinion is not true, something better is. However, “something better”—not this or that experience, but beyond it—is almost the definition of the thing I am trying to describe. The thing you long for summon you away from the self. Even the desire for the thing lives only if you abandon it. This is the ultimate law—the seed dies to live, the bread must be cast upon the waters, one that loses one’s soul will save it. However, the life of the seed, the finding of the bread, the recovery of the soul, are as real as the preliminary sacrifice. Hence it is truly said of Heaven, in Heaven there is no ownership. If any there took upon one to call anything one’s own, one would straightway be thrust out into hell and become an evil spirit. However, it is also said, “To one that overcometh I will give a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no human knoweth saving one that receiveth it,” reports Revelation 2.17. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
What can be more a human’s own than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret between God and one? And what shall we take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the Divine beauty better than any other creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently? And this difference, so far from impairing, floods with meaning the love of all blessed creatures for one another, the communion of the saints. If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note. Aristotle has told us that a city is a unity of unlikes, and St Paul that a body in a unity of different members. Heaven is a city, and a Body, because the blessed remain eternally different: a society, because each has something to tell all the others—fresh and ever fresh news of “My God” whom each finds in Him whom all praise as “Our God.” For doubtless the continually successful, yet never complete, attempt by each soul to communicate its unique vision to all others (and that by means whereof Earthly art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations) is also among the ends for which the individual was created. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
For union exists only between distincts; and, perhaps, from this point of view, we catch a momentary glimpse of the meaning of all things. Pantheism is a creed not so much false as hopelessly behind times. Once, before creation, it would have been true to say that everything was God. However, God created: He causes things to be other than Himself that, being distinct, they might learn to love Him, and achieve union instead of mere sameness. Thus He also cast His bread upon the waters. Even within the creation we might say that inanimate matter, which has no will, is one with God in a sense in which humans are not. However, it is no God’s purpose that we should go back into that old identity (as, perhaps, some Pagan mystics would have us do) but that we should go on to the maximum distinctness there to be reunited with Him in a higher fashion. Even within the Holy One Himself, it is not sufficient that the Word should be God, it must also be with God. The Father eternally begets the Son and the Holy Ghost proceeds: deity introduces distinction within itself so that the union of reciprocal loves may transcend mere arithmetical unity or self-identity. However, the eternal distinctness of each soul—the secret which makes of the union between each soul and God a species in itself—will never abrogate the law that forbids ownership in Heaven. As to its fellow-creatures, each soul, we suppose will be eternally engaged in giving away to all the rest that which it receives. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
And as to God, we must remember that the soul is but a hollow which God fills. Its union with God is, almost by definition, a continual self-abandonment—an opening, an unveiling, a surrender, of itself. A blessed spirit is a mould ever more and more patient of the bright metal poured into it, a body ever more completely uncovered to the meridian blaze of the spiritual sun. We need not suppose that the necessity for something analogous to self-conquest will ever be ended, or that eternal life will not also be eternal dying. It is in this sense that, as there may be pleasures in hell (God shield us from them), there may be something not unlike pains in Heaven (God grant us soon to taste them). For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being. For the Eternal Word also gives Himself in sacrifice; and that not only on Calvary. For when He was crucified He did that in the wild weather of His outlying provinces which He had done at home in glory and gladness. From before the foundation of the World He surrenders begotten Deity back to begetting Deity in obedience. And as the Son glorifies the Father, so also the Father glorifies the Son. And, with submission,, as become a layman, I think it was truly said “God loveth not Himself as Himself but as Goodness; and if there were aught better than God, He would love that and not Himself,” reports Theol. Germ., xxxii. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
From the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes the more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so forever. This is not a Heavenly law which we can escape by remaining Earthly, nor an Earthly law which we can escape by being saved. What is outside the system of self-giving is not Earth, nor nature, nor “ordinary life,” but simply solely hell. Yet even hell derives from this law such as reality as it has. That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality; the negative shape which the outer darkness takes by surrounding and defining the shape of the real, or which the real imposes on the darkness by having a shape and positive nature of its own. The golden apple of selfhood, thrown among the false god, became an apple of discord because they scrambled for it. They did not know the first rule of the holy game, which is that every player must by all means touch the ball and then immediately pass it on. To be found with it in your hands is a fault: to cling to it, death. However, when it flies to and fro among the player too swift for eye to follow, and the great master Himself leads the revelry, giving Himself eternally to His creatures in the generation, and back to Himself in the sacrifice, of the Word, then indeed the eternal dance makes heaven drowsy with the harmony. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
All pains and pleasures we have known on Earth are early initiations in the movements of that dance: but the dance itself is strictly incomparable with the sufferings of this present time. As we draw nearer to its uncreated rhythm, pain, and pleasure sink almost out of sight. There is joy in the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of joy. It does not even exist for the sake of good, or of love. It is Love Himself, and Good Himself, and therefore happy. It does not exist for us, but we for it. The size and emptiness of the Universe which frightened us at the outset should awe us still, for though they may be no more than a subjective by-product of our three-dimensional imagining, yet they symbolize great truth. As our Earth is to all the stars, so doubtless are we humans and our concerns to all creation; as all the stars are so space itself, so are all creatures, all thrones and powers and mightiest of the created gods, to the abyss of the self-existing Being, who is to us Father and Redeemer and indwelling Comforter, but of whom no human nor angel can say nor conceive what He is in and for Himself, or what is the work that he maketh from the beginning to the end. For they are all derived and unsubstantial things. Their vision fails them and they cover their eyes from the intolerable light of utter actuality, which was and is and shall be, which never could have been otherwise, which has no opposite. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Pain is a common and definite event which can easily be recognized: but the observation of character or behaviour is less easy, less complete, and less exact, especially in the transient, if intimate, relation of doctor and patient. In spite of this difficulty certain impressions gradually take form in the course of medical practice which are confirmed as experience grows. A short attack of severe physical pain is overwhelming while it lasts. The sufferer is not usually loud in one’s complaints. One will be for relief but does not waste one’s breath on elaborating one’s troubles. It is unusual for one to lose self-control and to become wild and irrational. It is rare for the severest physical pain to become in this sense unbearable. When short, severe, physical pain passes it leaves no obvious alteration in behaviour. Long-continued pain has more noticeable effect. It is often accepted with little or no complain and great strength and resignation are developed. Pride is humbled or, at times, results in a determination to conceal suffering. Women with rheumatoid arthritis show a cheerfulness which is so characteristic that it can be compared to the spes phthisica of the consumptive: and is perhaps due more to a slight intoxication of the patient by the infection than to an increased strength of character. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Some victims of chronic pain deteriorate. They become querulous and exploit their privileged position as invalids to practice domestic tyranny. However, the wonder is that the failures are so few and the heroes so many; there is a challenge in physical pain which most can recognize and answer. One the other hand, a long illness, even without pain, exhausts the mind as well as the body. The invalid gives up the struggle and drifts helplessly and plaintively into a self-pitying despair. Even so, some, in a similar physical state, will preserve their serenity and selflessness to the end. To see it is a rare but moving experience. Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, to some, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.” Yet if the cause is accepted and faced, the conflict will strengthen and purify the character and in time the pain will usually pass. Sometimes, however, it persists and the effect is devastating; if the cause it not faced or not recognized, it produces the dreary state of the chronic neurotic. However, some by heroism overcome even chronic mental pain. They often produce brilliant work and strengthen, harden, and sharpen their character till they become like tempered steel. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
In actual insanity the picture is darker. In the whole realm of medicine there is nothing so terrible to contemplate as a human with chronic melancholia. However, most of the insane are not unhappy or, indeed, conscious of their condition. In either case, if they recover, they are surprisingly little changed. Often they remember nothing of their illness. Pain provides an opportunity of heroism; the opportunity is seized with surprising frequency. God walks at my side, armed with sword and staff, and in the darkest of nights, my fears fly before Him. He looks into my eyes, sitting with empty hands and in the brightest of days, my cares are as nothing. O Lord, please guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile, and to those who slander me, please let me give no heed. May my soul be humble and forgiving unto all. Please open Thou my heart, O Lord, unto Thy sacred Law, that Thy statutes I may know and all Thy truths pursue. Please bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill; please speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for Thine own sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered, please answers us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou who establishest peace in the Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto all America. Amen. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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If truth is less shapely than fiction, still it is more honest. The most obviously upsetting force likely to strike the family in the decades immediately ahead will be the impact of new birth technology. The ability to pre-set the gender of one’s baby, or even to “program” its IQ, looks and personality traits, must now be regarded as a real possibility. Embryo implants, babies grown in vitro, gene editing, the ability to swallow a pill and guarantee oneself twins or triplets or, even more, the ability to walk into a “babytorium” and actually purchase embryos—all this reaches so far beyond any previous human experience that one need to look at the future through the eyes of the poet or painter, rather than those of the sociologist or conventional philosopher. It is regarded as somehow unscholarly, even frivolous, to discuss these matters. Yet advances in science and technology, or in reproductive biology alone, could with in a short time, smash all orthodox ideas about the family and its responsibilities. When babies can be grown in a laboratory jar what happens to the very notion of maternity? And what happens to the self-image of the female in societies which, since the very beginnings of humans, have taught one that one’s primary mission is the propagation of and nurture of the race? Few social scientists have begun as yet to concern themselves with such questions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
One who has concerned oneself with birth technology and the woman’s role in the family and society is psychiatrist Hyman G. Weitzen, director of Neuropsychiatric Service at Polyclinic Hospital in New York. The cycle of birth, Dr. Weitzen suggests, “fulfills for most women a major creative need…Most women are proud of their ability to bear children…The special aura that glorifies the pregnant woman has figured largely in the art and literature of both East and West.” What happens to the cult of motherhood, Dr. Weitzen asks, if “her offspring might literally not be hers, but that of a genetically ‘superior’ ovum, implanted in her womb from another woman, or even grown in a Petri dish?” If women are to be important at all, he suggests, it will no longer be because they alone can bear children. If nothing else, we are about to end the mystique of motherhood. Not merely motherhood, but the concept of parenthood itself may be in for radical revision. Indeed, the day may soon dawn when it is possible for a child to have more than two biological parents. Dr. Beatrice Mintz, a developmental biologist at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, has grown what are coming to be known as “multi-mice”—baby mice each of which has more than the usual number of parents. Embryos are placed in a laboratory dish and nurtured until they form a single growing mass. This is then implanted in the womb of a third female mouse. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Then, a baby is born that clearly shares the genetic characteristics of both sets of doners. Thus a typical multi-mouse, born of two pairs of parents, has white fur and whiskers on one side of its face, ark fur and dark hair covering the rest of the body. Some 700 multi-mice bred in this fashion have already produced more than 35,000 offspring themselves. If multi-mouse is here, can “multi-human” be far behind? Under such circumstances, what or who is the mother? And just exactly who is the father? If a couple can actually purchase an embryo, then parenthood becomes a legal, not a biological matter. Unless such transactions are tightly controlled, one can imagine such grotesqueries as a couple buying an embryo, raising it in vitro, then buying another in the name of the first, as though for a trust fund. In that case, they might be regarded as legal “grandparents” before their first child is out of infancy. We shall need a whole new vocabulary to describe kinship ties. Furthermore, if embryos are for sale, can a corporation buy one? Can it buy ten thousand? Can it resell them? And if not a corporation, how about a non-commercial research laboratory? If we buy and sell living embryos, are we back to a new form of slavery? Such are the nightmarish questions soon to be debated by us. To continue to think of the family therefore, in purely conventional terms is to defy all reason. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Faced by rapid social change and the staggering implications of the scientific revolution, super-industrial humans may be forced to experiment with novel family forms. Innovative marginalized members of the community can be expected to try out a colourful variety of family arrangements. They will begin by tinkering with existing forms. We expect a well-ordered society, but we know that in reality some serious violations of justice nevertheless do occur. Conscientious refusal is noncompliance with a more or less direct legal injunction or administrative order. It is refusal since an order is addressed to us and, given the nature of the situation, whether we accede to it is known to the authorities. Typical examples are the refusal of the early Christians to preform certain acts of piety prescribed by the pagan state, and the refusal of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the flag. Other examples are the unwillingness of a pacifist to serve in the armed forces, or of a soldier to obey an order that one thinks is manifestly contrary to the moral laws as it applies to war. Or gain, in Thoreau’s case, the refusal to pay a tax on the grounds that to do so would make one an agent of grace injustice to another. One’s action is assumed to be known to the authorities, however much one might wish, in some cases, to conceal it. Where it can be covert, one might speak of conscientious evasion rather than conscientious refusal. Covert infractions of a fugitive slave law are instances of conscientious evasion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
There are several contrasts between conscientious refusal (or evasion) and civil disobedience. First of all, conscientious refusal is not a form of address appealing to the sense of justice of the majority. To be sure, such acts are not generally secretive or covert, as concealment is often impossible anyway. One simply refuses on conscientious grounds to obey a command or to comply with a legal injunction. One does not invoke the convictions of the community, and in this sense conscientious refusal is not an act in the public forum. Those ready to withhold obedience recognize that there may be no basis for mutual understanding; they do not seek out occasions for disobedience as a way to state their cause. Rather, they bide their time hoping that the necessity to disobey will not arise. They are less optimistic than those undertaking civil disobedience and they may entertain no expectation of changing laws or policies. The situation may allow no time for them to make their case, or again there may not be any chance that the majority will be receptive to their claims. Conscientious refusal is not necessarily based on political principles; it may be founded on religious or other principles at variance with the constitutional order. Civil disobedience is an appeal to a commonly shared conception of justice, whereas conscientious refusal may have other grounds. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
For example, assuming that early Christians would not justify their refusal to comply with the religious customs of the Empire by reasons of justice but simply as being contrary to their religious convictions, their argument would not be political; nor, with similar qualifications, are the views of a pacifist, assuming that wars of self-defense at least are recognized by the conception of justice that underlies a constitutional regime. Conscientious refusal may, however, be grounded on political principles. One many decline to go along with a law thinking that it is so unjust that complying with it is simply out of the question. This would be the case if, say, the law were to enjoin our being the agent of enslaving another, or to require us to submit to a similar fate. These are patent violations of recognized political principles. It is a difficult matter to find the right course when some humans appeal to religious principles in refusing to do actions which, it seems, are required by principle of political justice. Does the pacifist posses an immunity from military service in a just war, assuming that there are such wars? Or is the state permitted to impose certain hardships for noncompliance? There is a temptation to day that the law must always respect the dictates of conscience, but this cannot be right. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
As we have seen in the case of the intolerant, the legal order must regulate human’s pursuit of their religious interests so as to realize the principle of equal liberty; and it may certainly forbid religious practices such as human sacrifice, to take an extreme case. Neither religiosity nor conscientiousness suffices to protect this practice. A theory of justice must work out from its own point of view how to treat those who dissent from it. The aim of a well-ordered society, or one in a state of near justice, is to preserve and strengthen the institutions of justice. If a religion is denied its full expression, it is presumably because it is in violation of the equal liberties of others. In general, the degree of tolerance accorded opposing moral conceptions depends upon the extent to which they can be allowed an equal place within a just system of liberty. If pacifism is to be treated with respect and not merely tolerated, the explanation must be that it accords reasonably well with the principles of justice, the main exception arising from its attitude toward engaging in a just war (assuming here that in some situations wars of self-defense are justified). The political principles recognized by the community have a certain affinity with the doctrine the pacifist professes. There is a common abhorrence of war and the use of force, and a belief in the equal status of humans are moral persons. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
And given the tendency of nations, particularly great power, to engage in war unjustifiably and to set in motion the apparatus of the state to suppress dissent, the respect accorded to pacifism serves the purpose of altering citizens to the wrongs that governments are prone to commit in their name. Even though one’s views are not altogether sound, the warnings and protests that a pacifist is disposed to express may have the result that on balance the principles of justice are more rather than less secure. Pacifism as a natural departure from the correct doctrine conceivably compensates for the weakness of humans living up to their professions. It should be noted that there is, of course, in actual situations no sharp distinction between civil disobedience and conscientious refusal. Moreover the same action (or sequence of actions) may have strong elements of both. While there are clear cases of each, the contrast between them is intended as a way of elucidating the interpretation of civil disobedience and its role in a democratic society. Given the nature of this way of acting as a special kind of political appeal, it is not usually justified until other steps have been taken within the legal framework. By contrast this requirement often fails in the obvious case of legitimate conscientious refusal. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In a free society no one may be compelled, as the early Christians were, to preform religious acts in violation of equal liberty, not must a soldier comply with inherently evil commands while awaiting an appeal to a higher authority. These remarks lead up to the question of justification. The reason people like to keep society busy with fake news and chaos is because as long as the people’s passions are spent on each other, they are not being vented on their conquerors. However, “The God of Heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed,” the prophecies said. God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to release the oppressed. The true Kingdom of Heaven is already a present reality. However, the Kingdom of God is a rule, not realm. It is the declaration of God’s absolute sovereignty, of His total order of life in this World and the next. That this Kingdom is not of this World, as Jesus later explained, and that it is spiritual rather than temporal makes it no less authoritative; that it is a rule not a realm makes it no less an actual kingdom, its laws less binding than those of nations and states, any more than unseen physical laws are less binding than the laws of legislatures. Jesus is ushering in the Kingdom of God. Almost all of His parables focused on the Kingdom in one aspect or another, while His miracles authenticated His message. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
In converting water to wine, calming storms, multiplying loaves and fishes, healing the sick, and raising the dead, Jesus was not working magic to gather crowds; nor was He showing His power to gain credibility. He was demonstrating the reality of His rule. By exercising dominion over every phase of Earthly existence, He reveled that in fact the Kingdom of God had come. Many people miss Christ’s message because they, like many today, are conditioned to look for salvation in political solutions. People long for a military messiah who will stamp out their hated oppressors. Another reason that people miss the full significance of the message of the Kingdom of God is that Jesus speaks about a Kingdom that has come and a Kingdom that is still to come—one Kingdom in two stages. This still confused people today. A holy God would not take dominion over a sinful World. So He first sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross to pay the debt for human’s sin and thereby provide for humans to be made holy and fit for God’s rule. Christ’s death and resurrection—the D-Day of human history—assure His ultimate victory. However, we are still on the beaches. The enemy has not yet been vanquished, and the fighting is still ugly. Christ’s invasion has assured the ultimate outcome, however—victory for God and His people at some future date. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The second stage, which will take place when Christ returns, will assert God’s rule over all the Universe; His Kingdom will be visible without imperfection. At that time there will be a final judgment of all people, peace on Earth, and the restoration of harmony unknow since Eden. Many soldiers died to bring about the victory in Europe. However, in the Kingdom of God, it was the death of the king that assured the victory. And this leads to another reason that the Kingdom is often misunderstood: the nature of the King Himself. What king would ever sacrifice oneself for one’s people? Kings sacrifice their subjects, not themselves. What kind would wash one’s servants’ feet, as Jesus did, or freely befriend one’s lowest subjects? Potentates maintain the mystique of leadership by keeping a distance from those they rule. A certain grandeur seems to robe those who occupy high office. There is a certain aloofness, a power that is exuded by great humans that people feel and want to follow. Jesus Christ exhibited none of this self-conscious aloofness. He served other first; He spoke to those to whom no one spoke; He dined with the lowest members of society; He touched the untouchable. He had no throne, no crown, no bevy of servants or armoured guards. A borrowed manger and a borrowed tomb framed His Earthly life. Kings and presidents and governors and mayors and prime ministers surround themselves with minions who rush ahead, swing the doors wide, and stand at the attention as they wait for the great to pass. Jesus said that He Himself stands at the door and knocks, patiently waiting to enter our lives. Christ came as the Lamb of God. However, lambs were for sacrifice. Where was the mighty warrior who would tear Rome to shreds? #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Because the nature of the King and the price He paid for His Kingdom, much is required of its citizens, and Jesus made these demands of the Kingdom clear. Through the centuries, however, many of His followers have watered down His teachings, stripped away His demands for the building of a righteous society, and preached an insipid religion concerned only with personal benefit. This distorted view portrays Christianity not as the powerful source of spiritual rebirth and the mediating force for justice, mercy, and love in the World, but as the ultimate self-fulfillment plan. The gospel is not a release for the captives, but confidence for the shy. It is the spiritual equivalent of racy sports cars, designer clothes—a commodity to help one get more out of life. Many humanists have failed to understand human nature. However, many Christians have failed also—failed to understand the utterly radical nature of the central message of Christianity. Other great leaders have expounded creeds, philosophies, and mystical visions. Many are wise and moral, but they are only belief systems: rules to live by, value codes. Humans require more than rules; they require what Jesus’ message of the Kingdom uniquely provides: answers to their most basic needs. What are these needs? To know God. The heat of humans is restless until it finds its rest in Thee. Humans most primal yearning—the need to know God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
In announcing His messiahship Jesus was saying that God’s love and just rule has come to Earth—in Him. Humans would thereafter be able to find rest not in a law they could never hope to fulfill, but in the actual person of Jesus Christ. To find salvation. However, how does one come to a personal relationship with this Christ? That is the archetypal question asked by the apostle Paul’s jailer: “What must I do to be saved?” Because we interpret it from our perspective and not God’s, salvation has always been misunderstood. People want salvation from their oppressor. However, Christ same to save them from a much greater oppressor—the sin within one. Sin is essentially rebellion against the rule of God. This is why Jesus coupled the message of the Kingdom with the call to repent and believe. Faith and repentance, the opposite of rebellion, are necessary human responses to the divine initiative of spiritual rebirth, resulting in salvation. When Christ first used the term born again, it was not the evangelical cliché or secular slur it is today. He used it in late-night conversation with Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish religious community, telling him it was the key to entering into the Kingdom of God. Imagine the shock of the religious elite when they heard Jesus’ words: Salvation was not to be found in proud piety or scrupulous adherence to religious rules, but in turning from evil and humble faith in One greater the oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Just as one is born physically in a particular nation, so one is born spiritually by submitting to God’s rule in His holy nation. To find meaning. This relationship with God meets human’s deepest psychological need. As we have already seen, human beings cannot live in a vacuum. We are not a chance collision of atoms in an indifferent Universe or islands amid cold currents of modern culture. We each have a personal purpose in history, which is to be found under the purposeful rule of God, as a beloved citizen of His Kingdom. To find authority. Christianity is more than simply a relationship between humans and God, however. The Kingdom of God embraces every aspect of life: ethical, spiritual, and temporal, and it determines the patter, purpose and dynamic by which God orders life of the Heavenly polis in this World. In announcing this all-encompassing Kingdom, Jesus was no using a clever metaphor; He was expressing the literal theme of history—that God was King and the people were His subjects. This tradition dated back to the days of Abraham and the patriarchs, when God made His original covenant with the Jews to be His “holy nation.” Americans, steeped in the tradition of democracy, find a monarchy, even with Christ on the throne, an alien concept. We think in terms of human rulers whose limitless lust for power is a constant peril to humankind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
However, God is not a mirror reflection of human rulers. He is God—and as such, is entitled to rule over all things. His character, as revealed in the Bible and in the person of Christ, reveals absolute justice, mercy, and love. Prophets promised the coming of Messiah and the eventual establishment of the Kingdom of God. Christ was the fulfillment of the prophecy; He was the final king in David’s royal line. However, Jesus was not just a king for Israel; He was king for all people. His message, then, assumes the ultimate authority humans require: God rules every aspect of what He has made. Life, death, relationships, and Earthly kingdoms are all in His hands. When Christ commanded His followers to “seek first the kingdom of God,” He was exhorting them to seek to be ruled by God and gratefully acknowledge His power and authority over them. That means that the Christian’s goal is not to strive to rule, but to be ruled. While God’s rule is authoritarian, it is also voluntary. The Good News is that the price has been paid, and His Kingdom is open to all who desire admission. If the joyful news of the rule of God is proclaimed, if humans humble themselves and do justice to its claims, if evil is overcome and humans are made free for God, then the Rule of God has already become actual among them, then the Reign of God is in their midst. If every other entity in the Universe and the Universe itself disappeared, God would remain. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
That which always remains the same, never changes, that is reality. Reality is God. THAT is real being which is faultless and partless, and without a single one of the characteristic properties belonging to this physical World. It never varies whereas that World is constantly changing. Such everlasting being is incomparable, unique, and beyond human picturization. THAT is the essence of all things, the base whence, eventually, the Universe is projected. That is the Real which not only is not subject to any change but also would still abide even if the entire Universe vanished. Everything and everyone else must come out of some prior element which traces itself down even to the first and original element, but the Real alone is self-abiding and self-existing. It has its own independent Being. There is no period so far off in the future, no tie so distant in the past, no area anywhere in space, that will be or has been without Being. If humans can find it today, they will find it then as they found it in antiquity. If they commune with it on this Earth, or enter into some relationship with it here, they can do likewise on other planets. Moreover it remains ever the Same, the Unchanged and Unchangeable. Reality being what it is, a gigantic fact which is utterly impregnable against time and change, even the total disappearance of the exponents of that truth which points to it could not alter its own status. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
We must never forget that the entire dynamic movement occurs inseparably within a static blessed repose. Becoming is not apart from Being. Its kinetic movement takes pace in the eternal stillness. World-Mind is forever working in the Universe whereas Mind is forever at rest and its still motionlessness paradoxically makes all activity and motion possible. The infinite unconditioned Essence could never become confined within or subject to the finite limited World-form. The one dwells in a transcendental timelessness whereas the other exists in a continuous time. There cannot be two eternal principles, two ultimate realities, for each will limit the other’s existence and thus deprive it of its absolute character. There is only the One, which is beyond all phenomena and yet includes them. The manifestation of the cosmic order, filled with countless objects and entities though it be, does not in any way or to any extent alter the character of the absolute Reality in which it appears. That character is unvarying—is never reduced to a lower form, never confined in a limited one, never modified by conditions, never deprived of a single iota of its being, substance, amplitude, or quality. It always is what it was. It is the ultimate origin of everything and everyone in this Universe, yet it remains as unchanged by their death as by their birth, by their absence as by their presence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Everything in the Universe is liable to changes, because it was born and must die. We venerate God because He is not liable to change, being ever-existent and self-subsisting, birthless and deathless. Considered from its own standpoint, the infinite can never manifest as the finite, the Real can never alter its nature and evolve into the unreal; hence the pictures of creation or evolution belong to the realm of dream and illusion. The gran verity is that the Universal self has never incarnated into matter, nor ever shall. It remains what it was, is, must forever be—the Unchanged and Unchangeable. The infinite has never, can never, become the finite. The Real is neither the Many nor the Changing but THAT from which these are both derived. Such a truth will never need to be replaced by a newer one: it will hold its place, and satisfy the searching mind, in a thousand years’ time as much as it does today. Bradley’s errors are: (a) to turn the Absolute into a system or a process, and (b) to identify the Absolute with its contents. God of Gentle hands, with arms held wide in benediction: please come between my enemies and me and join us together in peace. Our God and God of our fathers, may our remembrance and the remembrance of our forefathers come before Thee. Please Remember the Messiah of the house of David, thy servant, and America, Thy holy city, and all Thy people, the house of America. Please grant us deliverance and well being, loving kindness, life and peace on this day and forever. Please restore America back to a land of sanity, prosperity, law and order so we can earn the American Dream, which always includes freedom and homeownership. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
Whether you’re admiring the guest bedroom or getting ready for spa night in the Primary bedroom’s ensuite, living life at #MillsStation Residence 2 means enjoying clean, modern lines in a familiar family home layout. 😍
Residence Two at Mills Station is a two story home that has all the conveniences of a single story! At 2,317 square feet, this home features the Owner’s suite on the first floor with two secondary bedrooms on the “pop top” second story. Take advantage of the vaulted ceilings offered in this plan! The open floor plan includes three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, Home Hub, Loft and more! Walk into the great room and feel the height of the ceilings and all the light brought in from the high windows.
The kitchen opens directly to the dining room allowing for perfect flow. The large kitchen island makes food prep and entertaining easy while the walk in pantry provides ample storage. The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The great room is spacious and full of natural light with a covered patio! The Owner’s suite is located on the first floor of this home providing easy access and eliminating the hassle of climbing stairs daily. The Owner’s bathroom is spacious and tranquil including a large free standing soaking tub, walk in shower and large walk-in closet.
This home is designed with Universal Design concepts meaning that its well equipped for life’s transitions and aging in place. Learn more about this unique feature by speaking with a sales associate today!
Check out the interactive floor plan on our website! Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/
My God Sits in the Back of the Limousine, My God Has the House on the Cover of the Magazine!
When choosing between two evils, I always like to take the one I have never tried before. The justification for majority rule rests squarely on the political ends that the constitution is designed to achieve, and therefore on the two principles of justice. As a reminder, the first principle of justice states that each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all. The second principle of justice states that social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle). The first principle of equal basic liberties is to be embodied in the political constitution, while the second principle applies primarily to economic institutions. Fulfillment of the first principle takes priority over fulfillment of the second principle, and within the second principle fair equality of opportunity takes priority over the difference principle. The first principle affirms that all citizens should have the familiar basic rights and liberties: liberty of conscience and freedom of association, freedom of speech and liberty of the person, the rights to vote, to hold public office, to be treated in accordance with the rule of law, and so on. The first principle accords these rights and liberties to all citizens equally. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Unequal rights would not benefit those who would get a lesser share of the rights, so justice requires equal rights for all, in all normal circumstances. The second distinctive feature of the first principle is that it requires fair value of the political liberties. The political liberties, concerned with the right to hold public office, the right to affect the outcome of national elections and so on. For these liberties, citizens who are similarly endowed and motivated should have similar opportunities to hold office, to influence elections, and so on regardless of how rich or poor they are. This fair value proviso has major implications for how elections should be funded and run. The second principle of justice has two parts. The first part, fair equality of opportunity, requires that citizens with the same talents and willingness to use them have the same educational and economic opportunities regardless of whether they were born rich or poor. In all parts of society there are to be roughly the same prospects of culture and achievement for those similarly motivated and endowed. So, for example, if we assume that natural endowments and the willingness to use them are evenly distributed across children born into different social classes, then within any type of occupation (generally specified) we should find that roughly one quarter of people in that occupation were born into the top 25 percent of the income distribution, one quarter were born into the second-highest 25 percent of the income distribution, one quarter were born into the lowest 25 percent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Since class of origin is a morally arbitrary fact about citizens, justice does not allow class origin to turn into unequal opportunities for education or meaningful work. The second part of the second principle is the difference principle, which regulates the distribution of wealth and income. Allowing inequalities of wealth and income can lead to a larger social product: higher wages can cover the costs of training and education, for example, and can provide incentives to fill jobs that are more in demand. The difference principle allows inequalities of wealth and income, so long as these will be to everyone’s advantage, and specifically to advantage of those who will be worst off. The difference principle requires, that is, that any economic inequalities be to the greatest advantage of those who are advantaged least. The difference principle is partly based on the negative thesis that the distribution of natural assets is undeserved. A citizen does not merit more of the social product simply because one was lucky enough to be born with the potential to develop skills that are currently in high demand. Yet this does not mean that everyone must get the same shares. The fact that citizens have different talents and abilities can be used to make everyone better office. In a society governed by the difference principle, citizens regard the distribution of natural endowments as a common asset that can benefit all. Those better endowed are welcome to use their gifts to make themselves better off, so long as their doing so also contributes to the good of those less well endowed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The difference principle this expresses a positive ideal, an ideal of deep social unity. In a society that satisfies the difference principle, citizens know that their economy works to everyone’s benefit, and that those who were lucky enough to be born with greater natural potentials are not getting richer at the expense of those who were less fortunate. In justice as fairness, humans agree to share one another’s fate. I have assumed that some form of majority rule is justified as the best available way of insuring just and effective legislation. It is compatible with equal liberty and possesses a certain naturalness; for if minority rule is allowed, there is no obvious criterion to select which one is decide and equality is violated. A fundamental part of the majority principle is that the procedure should satisfy the conditions of background justice. In this case these conditions are those of political liberty—freedom of speech and assembly, freedom to take part in public affairs and to influence by constitutional means the course of legislation—and the guarantee of the fair value of these freedoms. When this background is absent, the first principle of justice is not satisfied; yet even when it is present, there is no assurance that legislation with be enacted. One problem with this procedure of majority rule is that it may allow cyclical majorities. However, the primary defect from the point of view of justice is that it permits the violation of liberty. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
There is nothing to the view, then, that what the majority wills is right. In fact, none of the traditional conceptions of justice have held this doctrine, maintaining always that the outcome of the voting is subject to political principles. Although in given circumstances it is justified that the majority (suitably defined and circumscribed) has the constitutional right to make law, this does not imply that the laws enacted are just. The dispute of substances about majority rule concerns how it is best defined and whether constitutional constraints are effective and reasonable devices for strengthening the overall balance of justice. These limitations may often be used by entrenched minorities to preserve their illicit advantages. This question is one of political judgment and does not belong to the theory of justice. It suffices to note that while citizens normally submit their conduct to democratic authority, that is, recognized the outcome of a vote as establishing a binding rule, other things equal, they do not submit their judgment to it. A justice constitution is defined as a constitution that would be agreed upon by rational delegates in a constitutional convention who are guided by the two principles of justice. When we justify a constitution, we present considerations to show that it would be adopted under these conditions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Similarly, just laws and policies are those that would be enacted by rational legislators at the legislative stage who are constrained by a justice constitution and who are conscientiously trying to follow the principles of justice as their standard. When we criticize laws and policies, we try to show that they would not be chosen under this ideal procedure. Now since even rational legislators would often reach different conclusions, there is a necessity for a vote under ideal conditions. The restrictions on information will not guarantee agreement, since the tendencies of the general social facts will often be ambiguous and difficult to assess. The Lord has said that “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. It would seem from this declaration that there is no permanent progress made in any field or in any place except it be through obedience to the governing law. We know this is true in the Heavens, because the Lord said: “That which is governed by law is also preserved by law and perfected and sanctified by the same. That which breaketh a law, and abideth not by law, but seeketh to become a law unto itself, and willeth to abide in sin [sin, being the breaking of the law], and altogether abideth in sin, cannot be sanctified by law, neither by mercy, justice, nor judgment. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
“For judgement goeth before the face of one who sitteth upon the throne and governeth and executeth all things. And one hath given a law unto all things, by which they move in their times and their seasons; and their courses are fixed, even the courses of the Heavens and the Earth, which comprehend the Earth and all the planets,” Doctrine and Covenants 88.34-35, 40, 42-43. This scripture tells us that all things in God’s economy, even those which to us seem inanimate, obey the laws by which they are governed. “The Earth [for example] abideh the law of a celestial kingdom, for it filleth the measure of its creation, and transgresseth not the law,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.25. Therefore, it shall be crowned with glory, even with the presence of God the Father; that bodies who are of the celestial kingdom may possess it forever and ever; and they who are not sanctified through the law which I have given unto you, even the law of Christ [which is His gospel—the perfect law of liberty] must inherit another kingdom, for one who is not able to abide the law of the celestial kingdom cannot abide a celestial glory. And one who cannot abide the law of a terrestrial kingdom cannot abide a terrestrial glory. And one who cannot abide the law of a telestial kingdom cannot abide a telestial glory,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.19-24. How blessed are Latter-day Saint to be assured by the revealed word of God that there will be no capriciousness in the World to come. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
We are so blessed that every soul will be rewarded according to the law that one has obeyed; all divine law is as immutable as the law of gravity; it is the same yesterday, today, and forever; judgment will be mercifully administered, but it will be administered pursuant to law, and it will not rob justice. Not only are we blessed by having this knowledge concerning the rule of law; we are twice blessed by having both a knowledge and an understanding of the laws by which we are to be judged. If we were to fail to obey the law, in our light of our knowledge of the perfect law of liberty, how shortsighted, how foolish, how tragic that would be. Latter-day Saints should strictly obey the laws of the government in which they live. By our own declaration of faith we are committed to do so, for we declare to the World that “we believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honouring, and sustaining the law,” reports Articles of Faith 1.12. This we do in harmony with the Lord’s command: “Let no human break the laws of the land, for one that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land. Wherefore, be subject to the powers that be, until one reigns whose right it is to reign, and subdues all enemies under one’s feet,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.21-22. Civil authority is of divine origin. It may be more or less adapted to the needs of humans; more or less just and benevolent, but, even at its worst, it is better than anarchy. Revolutionary movements that aim at the abolition of government itself are contrary to the law of God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
When the rule of law breaks down in a family, a community, a state, or a nation, chaos reigns. The kingdoms of Heaven are to be free from chaos, because no one will be in any one of them who does not by one’s own free will obey the laws thereof. Here on Earth, some people steadfastly refuse to face such facts. We avoid them by stubbornly refusing to recognize the speed of change. It makes us feel better to defer the future. Even those closet to the cutting edge of technology and scientific research can scarcely believe the reality. Even they routinely underestimate the speed at which the future is breaking on our shores. Thus Dr. Richard J. Cleveland, speaking before a conference of organ transplant specialists, announced in January, 1967, that the first human heart transplant operation will occur “within five years.” Yet before the same year was our Dr. Christiaan Barnard had operated on a fifty-five-year-old grocer named Louis Washkansky, and a staccato sequence of heart transplant operation exploded like a string of firecrackers into the World’s awareness. In the meantime, success rates are rising steadily in kidney transplants to 97 percent. Successful liver, pancreas, and ovary transplants are also reported. Scientists and doctors are getting so good that they even have the ability to do face transplants now. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Such accelerating medical advances must compel profound changes in our ways of thinking, as well as our way of caring for the sick. Startling new legal, ethical and philosophical issues arise. What, for instance, is death? Does death occur when the heart stops beating, as we have traditionally believed? Or does it occur when the brain stops functioning? Hospitals are becoming more and more familiar with cases of patients kept alive through advanced medical techniques, but doomed to exist as unconscious vegetables. What are the ethics of condemning such a person to death to obtain a healthy organ needed for transplant to save the life of a person with a better prognosis? Lacking guidelines or precedents, we flounder over the moral and legal questions. Ghoulish rumors race through the medical community. There has been speculation about the possibility of future murder rings supplying healthy organs for unofficial surgeons whose patients are unwilling to wait until natural sources have supplied the heart or liver or pancreas they need. In Trenton, New Jersey USA—an Israeli citizen living in Brooklyn, New York USA, admitted to brokering three illegal kidney transplants for payments of $120,000.00 UDS or more before he was caught conspiring to organize another illegal sale. Levy Izhak Rosenbaum also known as Isaac Rosenbaum, age 60 at the time he brought to trial in 2011 (now age 70), plead guilty to an information charging him with three counts of acquiring, receiving, and otherwise transferring human organs for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation; and one count of conspiracy to do the same. Mr. Rosenbaum was originally charged with the conspiracy by Complain in July 2009. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The defendant entered his guilty plea before U.S. District Judge Anne E. Thompson in Trenton federal court. Mr. Rosenbaum’s convictions were the first under the federal statue involving illegal market sales of kidneys from paid donors. “Mr. Rosenbaum admitted he was not new to the human kidney business when he was caught brokering what he thought was an organ trafficking,” U.S. Attorney Fishman said. “Trafficking in human organs is not only a grave threat to public health, it reserves lifesaving treatment for those who can best afford it at the expense of those who cannot. We will not tolerate such an affront to human dignity.” According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court: Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that from January 2006 through February 2009, he conspired with other to provide a service, in exchange for large payments, to individuals seeking kidney transplants by obtaining kidneys from paid donors. Specifically, Mr. Rosenbaum admitted to arranging three transplants on behalf of New Jersey residents that took place in December 2006, September 2008, and February 2009. Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that he was paid approximately $120, 000.00 USA, $150,000.00 USA, and $140,000.00 USD, respectively on behalf of these three recipients. Mr. Rosenbaum’s kidney business was exposed through the use of cooperating criminal defendant Solomon Dwek and an undercover FBI agent (the “UC”) who was posing as an employee of Dwek and who represented to Mr. Rosenbaum that her uncle was in need of a kidney transplant. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Dwek and the UC first met with Mr. Rosenbaum in mid-February 2008 at which time Mr. Rosenbaum informed them that “it’s illegal to buy and sell organs,” but assured them that “I’m doing this a long time.” Mr. Rosenbaum explained to Dwek and the UC that he would help the recipient and the donor concoct a fictitious story to make it appear that the transplant was the product of a genuine donation and that he would be in charge of babysitting the donor upon the donor’s arrival from overseas. In Washington, the National Academy of Science, backed by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, has been studying social policy issues springing from advances in the life sciences. At Stanford, a symposium, also funded by Russell Sage, examines methods for setting up transplant organ banks, the economics of an organ market, and evidence of the economics of an organ market, and evidences of class or racial discrimination in organ availability. The possibility of cannibalizing bodies or corpses for usable transplant organs, grisly as it is, will serve to accelerate further the pace of change by lending urgency to research in the field of artificial organs—plastic or electronic substitutes for the heart or liver or spleen. (Eventually, even these may be made unnecessary when we learn how to regenerate damaged organs or severed limbs, growing new ones as the lizard now grows a tail.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
And it is totally possible that the human body could be advanced to regrow limbs, organs, and other healthy tissues as it already replaces blood, hair, teeth, nail, skin and you see how can manifest and growth tumors and cancer. So if scientists are able to unlock the secrets of the human body, stopping death and loss of organs and life is totally possible. The drive to develop spare parts for failing human bodies will be stepped up as demand intensified. The development of an economical artificial heart, Professor Lederberg says, “is only a few transient failures away.” Professors R. M. Kenedi of the bio-engineering group at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow believes that “artificial replacements for tissues and organs may well have become commonplace.” For some organs, this is in fact, a reality. Already more than 3 million cardiac patients Worldwide—including a former Supreme Court justice—are alive because they carry, stitched into their chest cavity, a tiny pacemaker—a device that sends pulses of electricity to activate the hearts. Each year 600,000 pacemakers are implanted. Approximal 90,000 heart valve substitutes are now implanted in the United States of America and 280,000 Worldwide each year; it is estimated that nearly half are mechanical valves and half are bioprosthetic valves. Implanting hearing aids, artificial kidneys, arteries, hip joints, lungs, eye sockets and other parts are all in various stages of early development. We shall, before many decades are past, implant tiny, aspirin-sized sensors in the body to monitor blood pressures, pulse, respiration and other functions, and tiny transmitters to emit a signal when something goes wrong. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Such signals will feed into giant diagnostic computer centers upon which the medicine of the future will be based. Some of us will carry a tiny platinum plate and a dime-sized “stimulator” attached to the spine. By turning a midget “radio” on and off we will be able to activate the stimulator and kill the pain. Initial work on these pain-control mechanisms is already under way at the Case Institute of Technology. Push button pain killers are already being used by certain cardiac patients. Such developments will lead to vast new bio-engineering industries, chains of medical-electronic repair stations, new technical professions and a reorganization of the entire health system. They will change life expectancy, shatter insurance company life tables, and bring about important shifts in the human outlook. Surgery will be less frightening to the average individual; implantation routine. The human body will come to be seen as modular. Through application of the modular principle—preservation of the whole through systematic replacement of transient components—we may add two or three decades to the average life span of the entire population. Imagine that, people living to be an average of 100 to 120 and strong and healthy. Unless, however, we develop far more advanced understanding of the brain than we now have, this could lead to one of the greatest ironies in history. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Sir George Pickering Regius professor of medicine at Oxford, has waned that unless we watch out, “those with senile brains will form an ever increasing fraction of the inhabitants of the Earth. I find this,” he added unnecessarily, “a terrifying prospect. With President Joe Biden being the 46th President of the United States and the oldest President so far, being 78 years of age, many feel this is why Speaker on the United States House, Nancy Pelosi fought to remind the people about the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The 25th Amendment deals with Presidential Disability and Succession, which says that is a President becomes unable to do his or her job, the Vice President shall become President. This amendment was passed by Congress 6 July 1965, and ratified 10 February 1967. Such terrifying prospects will drive us toward more accelerated research into the brain—which, in turn, will generate still further radical changes in the society. Today we strive to make heart valves or artificial plumbing that imitate the original they are designed to place. We have even been able to use valves from the hearts of pigs into human beings. We strive for functional equivalence. Once we have mastered the basic problems, however, we shall not merely install plastic aortas in people because their original aorta is about to fail. We shall install specially-designed parts that are better than the original, and then we shall move on to install parts that provide the user with capabilities that were absent in the first place. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Just as genetic engineering holds out the promise of producing “super-people,” so, too, does organ technology suggest the possibility of track stars with extra-capacity lungs or hearts; sculptors with a neural device that intensifies sensitivity to texture; students with super computer brains. We will no longer implant merely to save a life, but to enhance it—to make possible the achievement of moods, states, conditions or ecstasies that are presently beyond us. Under these circumstances, what happens to our ago-old definitions of “human-ness?” How will it feel to be part protoplasm and part transistor? Exactly what possibilities will it open? What limitations will it place on work, play, socialism, intellectual or aesthetic responses? What happens to the mind when they body is changed? Questions like these cannot be long deferred, for advanced fusions of human and machine—called “Cyborgs”—are closer than more people suspect. We are constantly faced by the hoariest of all problems, which is “Why did the Universe arise out of the depth and darkness of the Absolute Spirit?” The Seer can offer us a picture of the way in which this Spirit has involved itself into matter and is evolving itself back to self-knowledge. That is only the How and not the Why of the World. The truth is not only that nobody has ever known, that nobody knows, and that nobody will ever know the final and fundamental purpose of creation, but that God Himself does not even know—for God too has arisen out of the Absolute no less than the Universe, has found Himself emanated from the primeval darkness and utter silence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Even God must be content to watch the flow and not wonder why, for both God and humans must merge and be absorbed when they face the Absolute for the last time. (In the symbolic language of the Bible, “For humans cannot meet God face to face and live.”) That which IS can be none other than Final Being itself, not dependent on anything or anyone, mysteriously self-sufficient without a shape, yet all shaped things and creature have emerged from elements which trace back to it. Forever alone, there was none to witness the Beginning. As Mind the Real is static, as World-Mind it is dynamic. As Godhead It alone is in the stillness of being; but as God it is the source, substance, and power of the Universe. As Mind there is no second thing, no second intelligence to ask the question why it stirred and breathed forth World-Mind, hence why the whole World-process exists. Only humans ask this question and it returns unanswered. For all of us, for the witless and for the wise, there are unanswerable questions in life and we must learn to live with them. None of us is a full and finalized encyclopedia, for however, far we may penetrate into the meaning of things we are always confronted in the end by the Unknowable Mystery. We do not know why the whole process of involution and evolution ever started at all: because we find that there is in the deepest metaphysical sense no becoming and process at all, there is only the Real. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
At the ultimate level there is neither purpose nor plan because there is no creation. Mind, which forever is, can undergo n change in itself and no multiplication of itself. If it could, it would not be what it is—the Ultimate, the Unconditioned, and the Unique. Nor, being perfect, complete, could it have desire, purpose, aim, or motive for itself. Therefore it could not have projected the Universe on account of any benefit sought or gain needed. There is no answer to the question why the Universe was sent forth. It is to impose human limitation upon the transcendental Godhead to say that It has any eternal purpose to fulfill for Itself in the cosmos, whether that purpose be the establishment of a perfect society on Earth or the training of individuals to enter into fellowship with It and participate in Its creative work. Purpose implies a movement in times whereas the Godhead is also the Timeless. Neither this Earth nor the societies upon it can be necessary to God’s serenely self-sufficient being. Yet these fallacies are still taught by the theology of theistic orthodox. We know as much, and as little, about the Primal Mind as we know why there was a beginning of the Universe—that is, precisely nothing. If being asked how to prevent oneself from being deceived by these pseudo-intuitions, it can be said that a useful rule is to check them against other sources on the same subject and see if they all harmonize. If, for example, fifty inspired humans who have written on the subject teach what contradictions the alleged intuition, then there is something wrong on one side or the other and careful investigation is called for. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
It is always safer to ascertain what the great scriptural texts or the classic mystical testaments have to tell on the matter and not depend solely on what one’s intuition tells. We need more. And most of us—deep down—cannot deny it. There is a core of truth buried in every heart, a truth that we cannot escape. All-Father God, protector of travelers, please guards us, please guide us, please bring us through in safety and ease on our journey today. As I enter your realm, spirits of the air, as I mount to the clouds in this airplane, I place myself in your hands. There, among the vagaries of the winds, I will not be afraid, because I know you are my allies. As I fly today, please be at my side. Please protect me until I land again safely. Who is like unto Thee, O Lord, among the mighty? Who is like unto Thee, glorious in holiness, revered in praises, doing wonders? At the shore of the Red Sea, the redeemed offered praise unto Thy name. Singing a new song, they proclaimed Thy sovereignty: “The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.” O Rock of America, arise to help Thy scattered folk; deliver all who are crushed beneath oppression’s heel. Thou art our Saviour: the Lord of Hosts is Thy name; blessed art Thou, O Lord, Redeemer of America. O Lord, please open Thou my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. Expand your faith so you can access everything God has in store. Allow God to be present in your life and have faith in Him, and you will see God make miracles and blessings that you can only imagine in your best dreams! #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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The Last Infirmity of Noble Mind–To Scorn Delights and Live Labourious Day!
We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists in the loved one, perfection. A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime. The types of skills which an anxious child develops are characteristic of one’s situation. Children with a sense of security and competence, and an interest in the World of challenging unyielding things, are likely to look for new things and enjoy the challenge. Children with a more insecurely-based self will feel more dependent on others, unsure whether they will be given good things and unsure whether they are allowed to get good things for themselves; they will therefore have less practice in developing the skills which lead to control over the environment in any direct way. The skills they develop are more likely to be in the area of getting others to comfort or approve or achieve for them. They may be a good deal more perceptive than their mores secure friends, their sensitivity to others developing from the time when voice and body-language might yield clues on what others were good for and how they could be got to be kind, pleased, not offended. Other people’s expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one’s being, the homunculi and the very earliest memory-traced. This kind of development, a compensatory structure, is called the False Self. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
In fact, all of us have a collection of overlapping selves or roles, some of us more so, some of us less. Some of these selves are falser than others: more strongly linked with being acceptable, less strongly linked with our deeper feelings. One of my friends has “George,” a robot bit of her very nice personality, whom she switches on at formal do’s and occasions when genuineness and spontaneity are very much not called for! It makes it pleasant for the rest of her to have her around, false self or not. In any case, the False Self is not a structure that should be unthinkingly denigrated. All of us need protective defences and devices against hurt. Some developments of the self are primarily defensive, deriving from the need to carry on when life no longer feels like a continuous stream of satisfying (or at least manageable) experiences. In the analysis of a False Personality the fact must be recognized that the analyst can only talk to the False Self of the patient about the patient’s True Self. It is as if a nurse brings a child, and at first the analyst discusses the child’s problem, and the child is not directly contacted. Analysis does not start until the nurse has left the child with the analyst, and the child has become able to remain with the analyst and has started to play. Normal healthy development starts with a strong biologically determined attachment to a mother figure, while exploration of the environment comes naturally at a later stage, exactly because the growing young individual feels secure and safe, not terrified, starving or desperate. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Lack of secure attachment forces the immature organism into action, but the action is accompanied by terror and stereotyping. Real understanding is lack when the infant has had no opportunity for a leisurely and secure playful exploratory phase, during which it has a chance to familiarize itself gradually with the fascinating World of other people and things. Mental representations of the self-in-the-World will have had to form prematurely for the sake of avoiding distress; because of this, a lot of enriching connections which might otherwise have been linked to these representations, will be missing. If the baby has been too worried to linger and enjoy, the adult will think, “Never mind the sunset, let’s go home before something goes wrong.” We ding either that individuals live creatively and feel that life is worth living, or else that they cannot live creatively and are doubtful about the value of living. This variable in human beings is directly related to the quality and quantity of environmental provision at the beginning of each baby’s living experience. Some unfortunate people have almost no complex ego-functioning, they just react. As soon as a need appears or an alarm is signalled, the instant any meaning or pattern begins to emerge, they respond with scarcely a moment of reflection. Premature development of the ego-functions means doing too much, being too little. Premature ego-development is experiences as a continual pressure to respond and react, a sense of straining. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In many ways similar to ecstatic destructiveness is the chronic dedication of a person’s whole life to hate and destructiveness. Not a momentary state as in ecstasies, it has nevertheless the function of taking hold of the whole person, of unifying one in the worship of one goal: to destroy. This state is a permanent idolatry of the god of destruction; one’s devotee has, as it were, given over one’s life to him. Some people have a special pleasures in destruction, thus they can feel in the midst of the daily pain an absorbing pleasure in seeing how the baggage of ideas and values has diminished, how the arsenal of idealisms has been ground piece by piece until nothing remains but a bundle of flesh with raw nerves; nerves that like taut strings renders each tune vibrantly and doubly so in the thin air of isolation. These people want power. They want an aim that fills their day, they want life with all the sweetness of this World, they want t know that the sacrifices are worth while. People who find pleasure in destructiveness do not fight so that the nation is happy, they fight to force it into its line of fate. Their intense masochism by which they make themselves a willing subject of a higher power is fueled by a unifying force of hate and the wish for destruction that they worship something they are willing to give their lives for. These types of individuals do not want to forget the pain they suffered for they believe forgetting will damn them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
By visualizing hurt and pain from the past every day and every hour, it creates a potent hate destructive people thrive on. They do not want to forget any humiliation, and slighting, any arrogant gesture, they want to think of every meanness done to them, every word that caused them pain and was meant to cause pain. They want to remember every face and every experience and every enemy. They want to load their whole life with the whole disgusting dirt, with this a piled-up mass of disgusting memories. They do not want to forget; but the little good that happened to them, that they want to forget. They hate not only their enemies, but they hate life itself. This is very clear from their disposition and how they feel about others, the environment, and animals. These types of individuals feel utterly unrelated and unresponsive to anybody or anything alive. One condition of their worship of hate is because their whole World had been broken down, morally and socially. Their thirst for revenge, the meaninglessness of their present existence, their social uprootedness, goes far to explain their worship of hate. What triggers the effect of their destructive behaviour? A person may first react with defensive aggression against a threat; by this behaviour one has shed some of the conventional inhibitions to aggressive behaviour. This makes it easier for others kinds of aggressiveness, such as destruction and cruelty, to be unleashed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Once this aggressive destruction is unleashed, it may lead to a kind of chain reaction in which destructiveness becomes so intense that when a critical mass is reached, the result is a state of ecstasis in a person, and particularly in a group. There is so much more to psychology than most people realize. And while it is important to be kind and show respect to others, there are just some people we should stay away from. People also have to realize that they cannot fix others and it is not always a great idea to reach out to others it pain, they may be baiting you into a situation that allow them to attach their pain and darkness to you and they may never want to let go. Therefore, follow the usual rules. Do not talk to strangers, and if someone makes you uncomfortable, stay away from them. We are creating and using up ideas and images at a faster and faster pace. Knowledge, like people, places, things, and organizational forms, is becoming disposable. If our inner images of reality appear to be turning over more and more rapidly, one reason may well be an increase in the rate at which image-laden messages are being hurled at our senses. Little effort has been made to investigate this scientifically, but there is evidence that we are increasing the exposure of the individual to image-bearing stimuli. The external environment showers stimuli upon us. Signals originating outside ourselves—sound waves, light, et cetera—strike our sensory organs. Once perceived, these signals are converted, through a still mysterious process, into symbols of reality, into images. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
The waves of coded information turn into violent breakers and come at a faster and faster clip, pounding at us, seeking entry, as it were, to our nervous system. Many schools of thought encourage us to shift the responsibility for our behaviour from our own shoulders to some inherent necessity in the nature of human life, and thus, indirectly, to the Creator. Popular forms of this view are the evolutionary doctrine that what we call badness is an unavoidable legacy from our animal ancestors, or the idealistic doctrine that it is merely a result of our being finite. Now Christianity, if I have understood the Pauline epistles, does admit that perfect obedience to the moral law, which we find written in our hearts and perceive to be necessary even on the biological level, is not in fact possible to humans. This would raise a real difficulty about our responsibility if perfect obedience had any practical relation at all to the lives of most of us. Some degree of obedience which you and I have failed to attain in the last twenty-four hours is certainly possible. The ultimate problem must not be used as one more means of evasion. Most of us are less urgently concerned with the Pauline question than with William Law’s simple statement: “If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
If our depravity were total, we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us so much goodness in human nature. Nor is there a universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each human’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which I have little cause to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying he apostolic injunction to “rejoice” as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain one’s faith in human nature, who is really sad. I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a human is, the more fully one is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that his humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smile. That is a most dangerous error. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (id est, a perfection) with an illusion (id est, an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because in encourages a human to mistake one’s first insights into one’s own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round one’s own silly head. No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy. The principle of perfection is a fascinating concept. There are two variants: in the first it is the sole principle of a teleological theory directing society to arrange institutions and to define the duties and obligations of individuals so as to maximize the achievement of human excellence in art, science, and culture. The principle obviously is more demanding the high the relevant ideal is pitched. Humankind must continually strive to produce great individuals. We give values to our lives by working for the good of highest specimens. For the questions is this: how can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens. The second variant is a more moderate doctrine in which perfection is accepted as but one standard among several in n intuitionist theory. The principle is to be balanced against others by intuition. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The extent to which such a view is perfectionist depends, then, upon the weight given to the claims of excellence and culture. If for example it is maintained that in themselves the achievements of the Greeks in philosophy, science, and art justified the ancient practice of slavery (assuming that this practice was necessary for these achievement), surely the conception is highly perfectionist. Th requirements of perfection override the strong claims of liberty. On the other hand, one may use the criterion simply to limit the redistribution of wealth and income under a constitutional regime. In this case it serves as a counterpoise to egalitarian ideas. Thus it may be said that distribution should indeed be more equal if this is essential for meeting the basic needs of those less favoured and only diminishes the enjoyments and pleasures of those better off. However, the greater happiness of the less fortunate does not in general justify curtailing the expenditures required to preserve cultural values. These forms of life have greater intrinsic worth than the lesser pleasures, however widely the latter are enjoyed. Under normal conditions a certain minimum of social resources must be kept aside to advance the ends of perfection. The only exception is when these claims clash with the demands of the basic needs. Thus given improving circumstances, the principle of perfection acquires an increasing weight relative to a greater satisfaction of desire. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
No doubt many have accepted perfectionism in this intuitionist form. It allows for a range of interpretations and seems to express a far more reasonable view than the strict perfectionist theory. Persons in the original position are asked to consider which principles one would select for the basic structure of society, but one must select as if one had no knowledge ahead of time what position one would end up having in that society. This choice is made from behind a “veil of ignorance,” which prevents one from knowing the individual’s ethnicity, social status, gender, and crucially, the individual’s idea of how to lead a god life. Ideally, this would force participants to select principles impartially and rationally. Individuals in the original position take no interest in one another’s interests, they know that they have (or may have) certain moral and religious interests and other cultural ends which they cannot put in jeopardy. Moreover, they are assumed to be committed to different conceptions of the good and they think that they are entitled to press their claims on one another to further their separate aims. The parties do not share a conception of the good by reference to which the fruition of their powers or even the satisfaction of their desires can be evaluated. They do not have an agreed criterion of perfection that can be used as a principle for choosing between institutions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
If it did not lead to a loss of freedom altogether to advance many of one’s spiritual ends, to acknowledge any such standard would be, in effect, to accept a principle that might lead to a lesser religious or other liberty. If the standard of excellence is reasonably clear, the parties have no way of knowing that their claims may not fall before the higher social goal of maximizing perfect. Thus is seems that the only understanding that the persons in the original position can reach is that everyone should have the greatest equal liberty consistent with a similar liberty for others. They cannot risk their freedom by authorizing a standard of value to define what is to be maximized by teleological principle of justice. Very often it is beyond question that the work of one person is superior to that of another. Indeed, the freedom and well-being of individuals, when measured by the excellence of their activities and works, is vastly different in value. This is true not only of actual performance but of potential performance as well. Comparison of intrinsic value can obviously be made; and although the standard of perfection is not a principle of justice, judgments of value have an important place in human affairs. They are not necessarily so vague that they must fail as a workable basis for assigning rights. The argument is rather that in view of their disparate aims the parties have no reason to adopt the principle of perfection given the conditions of the original position. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
In order to arrive at the ethic of perfectionism, we should have to attribute to the parties a prior acceptance of some natural duty, say the duty to develop human persons of a certain style and aesthetic grace, and to advance the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of the arts. However, this assumption would drastically alter the interpretation of the original position. While justice as fairness allows that in a well-ordered society the values of excellence are recognized, the human perfections are to be pursed within the limits of the principle of free associations. Persons join together to further their cultural and artistic interests in the same way that they form religious communities. They do not use coercive apparatus of the state to win for themselves a greater liberty or larger distributive shares on the grounds that their activities are of more intrinsic value. Perfectionism is denied as a political principle. Thus the social resources necessary to support associations dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences and culture generally are to be won as a fair return for services rendered, or from such voluntary contributions as citizens wish to make, all within a regime regulated by the two principle of justice. On the contract doctrines, then, equal liberty of citizens does not presuppose that the ends of different persons have the same intrinsic value, nor that their freedom and well-being is of the same worth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
It is postulated though that the parties are moral persons, rational individuals with a coherent system of ends and a capacity for a sense of justice. Since they have the requisite defining properties, it would be superfluous to add that the parties are equally moral persons. We can say if we wish that humans have equal dignity, meaning by this simply that they all satisfy the conditions of moral personality expressed by the interpretation of the initial contractual situation. And being alike in this respect, they are to be treated as the principles of justice require. Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all; social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: they are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society. However, none of this implies that their activities and accomplishments are of equal excellence. To think this is to conflate the notion of moral personality with the various perfections that fall under the concept of value. Persons’ being of equal value is not necessary for equal liberty. Their being of equal value is not sufficient either. Sometimes it is said that equality of basic rights follows from the equal capacity of individuals for the higher forms of life; but it is not clear why this should be so. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Intrinsic worth is a notion falling under the concept of value, and whether equal liberty or some other principle is appropriate depends upon the conception of right. Now the criterion of perfection insists that rights in basic structure be assigned so as to maximize the total of intrinsic value. Presumably the configuration of rights and opportunities enjoyed by individuals affects the degree to which they bring to fruition their latest powers and excellences. However, it does not follow that an equal distribution of basic freedom is the best solution. The situation resembles that of classical utilitarianism: we require postulates parallel to the standard assumptions. Thus even if the latent abilities of individuals were similar, unless the assignment of right is governed by a principle of diminishing marginal value (estimated in this case by the criteria for excellence), equal rights would not be insured. Indeed, unless there are bountiful resources, the sum of value might be best increased by very unequal rights and opportunities favouring a few. Doing this is not unjust n the perfectionist view provided that it is necessary to produce a greater sum of human excellence. Now a principle of diminishing marginal value is certainly questionable, although perhaps not so much as that of equal value. There is little reason to suppose that, in general, rights and resources allocated to encourage and to cultivate highly talented persons contribute less and less to the total beyond some point in the relevant range. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
To the contrary, this contribution may grow (or stay consistent) indefinitely. The principle of perfection provides, then, an insecure foundation for the equal liberty and it would presumably depart widely from the difference principle. The assumptions required for equality seem extremely implausible. To find a firm basis for equal liberty, it seems that we must reject the traditional teleological principles, both perfectionism and utilitarian. Justice as fairness requires us to show that modes of conduct interfere with the basic liberties of others or else violate some obligation or natural duty before they can be restricted. For it is when arguments to this conclusion fail that individuals are tempted to appeal to perfectionist criteria in an ad hoc manner. When it is said, for example, that certain kinds of relations involving pleasures of the flesh are degrading and shameful, and should be prohibited on this basis, if only for the sake of the individuals in question irrespective of their wishes, it is often because a reasonable case cannot be made in terms of the principle of justice. Instead we fall back on notions of excellence. However, in these matters we are likely to be influenced by subtle aesthetic preferences and personal feelings of propriety; and individual, class, and group differences are often sharp and irreconcilable. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Since these uncertainties plague perfectionist criteria and jeopardize individual liberty, it seems best to rely entirely on the principles of justice which have a more definite structure. Thus even in its intuitionistic form, perfectionism would be rejected as not defining a feasible basis of social justice. Eventually of course we would have to check whether the consequences of doing without a standard of perfection are acceptable, since offhand it may seem as if justice as fairness does not allow enough scope for ideal-regarding considerations. Yet, public funds for the arts and sciences may be provided through the exchange branch. In this instance there are no restrictions on the reasons, citizens may have for imposing upon themselves the requisite taxes. They may assess the merits of these public goods on perfectionist principles, since the coercive machinery of government is used in this case only to overcome the problems of isolation and assurance, and no one is taxed without one’s consent. The criterion of excellence does not sere here as a political principle; and so, if it wishes, a well-ordered society can devote a sizable fraction of its resources to expenditures of this kind. However, while the claims of culture can be met in this way, the principles of justice do not permit subsidizing universities and institutes, or opera and the theater, on the grounds that these institutions are intrinsically valuable, and that those who engage in them are to be supported even at some significant expense to others who do not receive compensating benefits. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Taxation for these purposes can be justified only as promoting directly or indirectly the social conditions that secure the equal liberties and as advancing in the appropriate way the long-term interests of the least advantaged. This seems to authorize those subsidies the justice of which is least in dispute, and so in these cases anyway there is no evident need for a principle of perfection. The contract doctrine may serve well enough as an alternative moral conception. When we check its consequences for institutions, it appears to match our common sense convictions more accurate than its traditional rivals, and to extrapolate to preciously unsettled cases in a reasonable way. Outreach is one essential task of Christ’s people, and among them there will always be those especially gifted for evangelism. However, the most successful work of outreach would be the work of inreach that that turns people, wherever they are, into lights in the darkened World. A simple goal for the leaders of a particular group would be to bring all those in attendance to understand clearly what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and to be solidly committed to discipleship in their whole life. That is, when asked who they are, they first words out of their mouth would be, “I am an apprentice of Jesus Christ.” This goal would have to be approached very gently and lovingly and patiently with existing groups, where the people involved have not understood this to be part of their membership commitment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
We are not talking about purifying the church, by getting all the “tares” or (Matthew 13). Even tares, real or apparent, are to be loved and served—and called to apprenticeship to Jesus. “Purifying” the church, on the other hand, has always been part of the illusion of being perfectly “right.” Instead of pursing that illusion, we are trying to clarify the local congregation itself in the light of Christ’s call to it. We are trying to make clear what it is that even a false professor must profess in order to participate fully in the congregation. They would, namely have to profess to be disciples or apprentices of Jesus. However, the Lord is the only purifier of groups, and one has one’s own schedule for it. Our task is to be fruitful wheat and to cultivate others to be so. Who we are in our inmost depths is the most basic issue. God’s first concern is not what the church does, it is what the church is. Being must always precede doing, for what we do will be according to what we are. To understand the moral character of God’s people is a primary essential in understanding the nature of the church. As Christians we are to be a moral example to the World, reflecting the character of Jesus Christ. In our present context, to be sure, serious work will have to be done, and there is a strong likelihood of failure. The genuine intuition gets mixed up with guesses and speculations about the matter, with reasonings and ruminations about it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
One’s intuition is unavoidably condition by one’s own personality, inevitably shaped as it is because one is the kind of human one is. It is not only one’s wishes and hopes which interfere with correct receptivity to intuition but also one’s fears and suspicions. One’s normal everyday mind is slow to heed the Higher Power of God and confused in interpretation of the prompting received. One whose mind is too sharply critical to be sensitive to finer mental radiations may fail to recognize the inner happening. This may be because one oneself is not sufficiently in tune with the high frequency represented by God, or it may be because one is too impatient and wants something which in one’s case can only be had with sufficient time. When intuition points to something unwelcome to the ego, the intellect looks for and usually finds an excuse to reject it. A human who really and sincerely wants to find the Truth should be on the lookout for hints, clues, and signs which would be useful to one’s Quest, for they constitute the response from God to one’s aspiration. God can furnish one with the Truth and puts these signals in one’s way. Manifestation implies the necessity of manifesting. However, it might be objected that any sort of necessity existing in the divine equally implies its insufficiency. The answer is that the number One may become aware of itself as being one only be becoming aware of the presence of Two—itself and another. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
However, the figure Nought is under no compulsion. Here we have a mathematical hint towards understanding the riddle of manifestation. Mind as Void is the supreme inconceivable unmanifesting ultimate whereas the World-Mind is forever throwing forth the Universe-series as a second, an “other” wherein it becomes self-aware. God-active, the Unseen Power, is (for us humans) the World-Mind. God-in-repose is Mind. The creative power or energy which comes from World-Mind is not the ultimate essence-consciousness which is God. It is needful to point out the difference between the divine essence and the divine energies. The latter may be several and varied, but the former is always single. It is the difference between Mind as it is in itself, and Mind as it expresses through the cosmos. It would, however, be a mistake to consider the World-Mind as one entity and Mind as another separate from it. It would be truer to consider World-Mind as the active function of Mind. Mind cannot be separated from its powers. The two are one. In its quiescent state it is simply Mind. In its active state it is World-Mind. Mind is in it inmost transcendent nature is the inscrutable mystery of Mysteries but when expressing itself in act and immanent in the Universe, it is the World Mind. We may find in the attributes of the manifested God—that is, the World-Mind—the only indications of the quality, existence, and character of the unmanifest Godhead that it is possible for human to comprehend all. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
All this is a mystery which is perhaps forever will remain an incomprehensible paradox. Mind is active and mind is quiescence are not two separate beings, but two aspects of one and the same being as they appear to human inquiry. Mind active expressed itself in the heart of humans as one’s higher self and in the Universe as the World-Mind. The World-Mind is a radiation of the forever incomprehensible Mind. It is the essence of all things and all beings, from the smallest to the largest. Mind id the Real; matter is the appearance it takes on. The Universe comes by degrees out of the ultimate Being, beyond which nothing is or could possibly be. It is Mind, measureless, with a Power equally measureless. World-Mind is this power in operation, creating, maintaining, and in the end destroying what it has brought forth. If it be true that absolute divine Mind knows nothing of the Universe, nothing of mortal humans, then it is also true that the World-Mind, which is its other aspect, does know them. May God of my people hear my prayers; as we go to the polls to choose our leaders, may it be with wisdom. Lord, please bless my country. Please guide its governors, show them the path to take, make their actions conform to the way of nature. Please knit together the many peoples into one tribe; unite us, make us a family, as indeed we are under your loving gaze. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
God’s chief hosts are holy beings that exalt the Almighty and continually declare God’s glory and holiness. Be Thou praised, O Lord our God, for the excellence of Thy handiwork and for the luminaries which Thou hast made and which render Thee glory. The Heavens are envisioned as the scene of a symphony of worship and song in which all the celestial beings, obedient servants of the divine will, join in a harmonious melody of praise to the Creator. Be Thou blessed, O our Rock, our King and Redeemer; praised by Thy name forever, Creator of ministering beings who stand in the heights of the Universe and with awe proclaim in unison the words of the living God and everlasting King. All of them act with harmonious accord, with purity of purpose and with united strength to perform reverently the will of their Creator. They all break forth into song of pure and holy praise, while they bless, glorify, and proclaim the sovereignty of the name of God, the great, mighty, awe-inspiring King; holy is He. They all pledge before one another to accept willingly the rule of the Kingdom of God. Each grants leave to the other to join in hallowing their Creator. In tranquil spirit with pure speech and sacred melody, they all exclaim in unison and reverently declare: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of His glory. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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They Provide Bed and Bath, but Something Deeper—The Certainty that Someone Cares!
Every soul speaks that same language. Know that language of love that swells within the human temple. Our presence in a place of need is more powerful than a thousand sermons. Being there is our witness. As we love God through our love for others, seemingly insurmountable barriers fall before us. When we are at perfect peace with God, our warm smiles show it. It is a reflection of our one hope for breaking down barriers and for restoring the sense of community, of caring for one another, that our decadent, impersonalized culture has sucked out of us. It is the most urgent challenge for the holy nation, perhaps the most important principle. It is the nature of human beings to organize. Probably since the Tower of Babel we have been setting up hierarchies, organizational flow charts, orders of authority, and all the other structural schemes dreamed up through the ages. The more advanced the civilization, the more refined the organizational schemes. However, though structures are essential to hold society together, they are there to serve, not be served. The marvels of modern technology have produced a sophistication in systems and structures that encourage the political illusion, the misguided belief that all problems can be solved by structures—namely, institutions. So for each new problem, a new institution is created. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
However, the church is a living organism and its function is to love the God who created it—to care for others out of obedience to Christ, to heal those who hurt, to take away fear, to restore community, to belong to one another, to proclaim the Good News while living it out. The church is the invisible made visible. In happy circumstances, the baby sees its own charm, worth, and lovability when one looks into the (m)other’s face. The first definitions of the self are influenced on the one hand by the internal climate and, on the other, by what you discover about yourself from the mirror of the other. All this is very relevant to the process of psychotherapy, in which people discover parts of themselves which hitherto had been hidden. This uncovering makes people feel unsure and vulnerable. They are not as they thought they were. How will other people react now? Can they accept their new discoveries? The recognition and acceptance found in other people’s eyes (in some circumstances the psychotherapist’s) may make all the difference between renewed defensiveness and a change for the better. When (m)others are sensitive and living, the infant sense of the love of God and is able to experience a smooth sequence from feeling-a-need to having-that-need-met. This smooth sequence makes for the integration in at least three way. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The smooth sequence welds the arousal of the infant’s needs strongly to the satisfaction to an idea of the World as a-place-where-needs-are-met. So the satisfaction of experienced needs contributes to the infant’s expanding imagery of itself and of the World. The child who has been fortunate in its parents is supported by the confidence that one can do the things which-it-and-the mother did while they were at one, and that the environment is benevolent and not frustrating or hostile. Such a child’s self-imagery is replete with confident self-congratulatory feelings, such as some socially successful parents’ children have who—although they themselves have not yet achieved anything—nevertheless feel that they are somehow more meritorious than the children of parents who are less well off. At a later stage, good parenting brings about not only the infant’s experience that it can cope, but also the experience that it can cope with occasional times when it either is not getting that gratification it is looking for, or is not getting it straight away or not so well. If things have gone well, the child can absorb a certain amount of strain of this kind and can put up with the discovery that the World is sometimes less than entirely beneficent. The “right” amount of anxiety has been generated for the child one’s own powers. Not too little, not too much, but just the right: “optimal” frustration. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Learning to deal with frustrations early on is very important. Most of us feel bad about inflicting hurt. However, some people go through life causing a great deal of hurt to other people, including their romantic partners and even their own children. They might fall under the label of narcissistic or borderline personality disorder. When one is on the receiving end of dealing with a person’s ill will, it can be extremely frustrating. When people do not like themselves—no matter how good of a front they put on—they are likely to project this self-dislike onto others. Particularly if this self-dislike stems from abusive behaviour which they have experiences in their past, they will engage in hurtful behaviours towards those people they love—replicating their own lived experiences. They may be driven by a desire to hurt you in the same way they have been hurt, to bring you down and cause you pain in the same way they have experienced it. These individuals need to seek help, but often will not and no one will usually point out to them that they have a problem and hurting others gives them the energy they need to boost their own self-esteem. Hurting others can be part of a strategy to weaken another individual. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Very different from destructiveness are certain deeply buried archaic experiences that often appear to the modern observer as proof of human’s innate destructiveness. Yet a closer analysis can show that while they result in destructive acts, their motivation is not the passion to destroy. One should be warned against the hasty interpretation of all destructive behaviour as the outcome of a destructive instinct, rather one must reorganize the frequency of religious and nondestructive motivations behind such behaviour. Destructiveness, however, can be spontaneous, or bound in the character structure. By the former I refer to the outburst of dormant (not necessarily repressed) destructive impulses that are activated by extraordinary circumstances, in contrast to the permanent, although not always expressed, presence of destructive traits in the character. However, these destructive explosions are not spontaneous in the sense that they break out without any reason. In the first place, there are always external conditions that stimulate them, such as wars, religions or political conflicts, poverty, extreme boredom and insignificance of the individual. Secondly, there are subjective reasons: extreme group narcissism in national or religious terms, as in India, a certain proneness to a state of trance, as in parts of Indonesia. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
It is not human nature that makes a sudden appearance, but the destructive potential that is fostered by certain permanent conditions and mobilized by sudden traumatic events. Without these provoking factors, the destructive energies in these population seems to be dormant, and not as with the destructive character, a constantly flowing source of energy. Vengeful destructiveness is a spontaneous reaction to intense and unjustified suffering inflicted upon a person or the members of the group with whom one is identified. It differs from normal defensive aggression in two ways: It occurs after the damage has been done, and hence is not a defense against a threatening danger. It is of much greater intensity, and is often cruel, lustful, and insatiable. Language itself expresses this particular quality of vengeance in the term “thirst for vengeance.” It hardly needs to be emphasized how widespread vengeful aggression is, both among individuals and groups. All forms of punishment—from primitive to modern—are an expression of vengeance. The Bible continually mandates restitution for property offenses. The Old Testament in the Christian Bible contains repeated references; and in the New Testament is found the example of Zacchaeus giving back fourfold what had been wrongly taken. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Nowhere in Scripture are prisons instituted as punishment for crimes, however. They are referred to as place for detaining people and for political purposes. The use of prisons for rehabilitation or punishment following conviction is a very recent invention, the result of Quaker-initiated reforms two centuries ago. The word “penitentiary” comes from the Quaker idea that the criminal needed to be penitent and repent and reform themselves. The first state prison in American was the Walnut Street jail in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, opened in 1790. The program drew national attention and has been duplicated many times since. However, punishment as an expression of vengeance, the classic example is the lex talionis of the Old Testament. The threat to punish a misdeed up to the third and fourth generation must also be considered an expression of revenge by a God whose commands have been disobeyed, even though it seems that the attempt was made to weak the traditional concept by adding “and who will be merciful until the thousandth generation.” The same idea can be found in many primitive societies—for instance, the law of the Yakuts which says events which cause the loss of life require atonement. The atonement was attached to the aggressor’s descendants for nine generations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
It cannot be denied that criminal law has a certain social function in upholding social stability. However, why is vengeance such a deep-seated and intense passion? I can only offer some speculations. Let us consider first the idea that vengeance is in some sense a magic act. By destroying the one who committed the atrocity one’s deed is magically undone. (However, that is not very rational and one never wants another person to suffer the same as one did. That is why we have the justice system.) Yet, the former is still expressed today by saying that “the criminal has paid one’s debt”; at least in theory, one is now like someone who never committed a crime. Vengeance may be said to be a magic reparation; but even assuming that this is so, why is this desire for reparation so intense? Perhaps humans are endowed with an elementary sense of justice; this may be because there is a deep-rooted sense of “existential equality”: we all are born from mothers, we were once powerless children, and we shall one day return to Heaven. Although no human can often not defend oneself against the harm others inflict upon one, in one’s wish for revenge one tries to wipe the sheet clean by denying, magically, that the damage was ever done. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
It seems that envy has the same root. Cain could not stand the fact that he was rejected while his brother was accepted. The rejection was arbitrary, and it was not in his power to change it; this fundamental injustice aroused such envy that the score could only be evened out by terminating Abel. However, there must be more to the cause of vengeance. When God and secular authorities fail, humans seem to take justice into their own hands. It is as if in one’s passion for vengeance one elevates oneself to the role of God, and of the Angels of vengeance. The act of vengeance may be one’s greatest hour just because of this self-elevation. While vengeance is indeed widespread there are great differences in degree, up to the point that certain cultures and individuals seem to have only minimal traces of it. There must be factors that explain the difference. One such factor is that of scarcity versus abundance. The person—or group—who has confidence in life and enjoys it, whose material resources may not be ample but sufficient not to elicit stinginess, will be less eager for the reparation of damage than an anxious, hoarding person who is afraid that one can never made up for one’s losses. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
This much can be stated with some degree of probability: the thirst for revenge can be plotted on a line at ne end of which are people in whom nothing will arouse a wish for revenge; these are humans who have reached a degree of development which in Buddhist or Christian terms is the ideal for all humans. On the other end would be those who have an anxious, hoarding, or extremely narcissistic character, for whom even a slight damage will arouse an intense craving for revenge. This type would be exemplified by a human from who a thief has stolen a few dollars and who wants one to be severely punished; or a professor who has been slighted by a student and therefore writes a negative report on him when he is asked to recommend the student for a good job; or a customer who has been treated “wrongly” by a salesperson and complains to the management, wanting the individual to be fired. In these cases we are dealing with a character in which vengeance is constantly present trait. The spontaneous outbreak of lust for revenge, with which we are here mainly concerned, occurs in people who do not have a vengeful character, but in whom extraordinary provocations can whip up intense and sometimes almost compulsive vengefulness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Of course, we do not want to be vengeful, nor do we want to hurt others. The goal is to be law abiding citizens, express the love of Christ, and allow the law to enforce the rules of the land. When humans attempt to be Christian without this preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment as to one who is always inexplicably angry. Every human, not very holy or very arrogant, has to live up to the outward appearance of other humans: one knows there is that within one which falls far below even one’s most careless public behaviour, even one’s loosest talk. In an instant of time—while your friend hesitates for a word—what things have passed through your mind? We have never told the truth. We may confess ugly fact—the meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurity—but the toke is false. The very act of confessing—an infinitesimally hypocritical glance—a dash of humour—all this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. No one could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they turned into words. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls one’s normal form one’s “bad days” and mistakes one’s rare success for one’s normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. However, the important thing is that we should not mistake out inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside. A reaction—it itself wholesome—is not going on against purely private or domestic conceptions of mortality, a reawakening of the social conscience. We feel ourselves to be involve in an iniquitous social system and to share a corporate guilt. This is very true: but the enemy can exploit even truths to our deception. Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those humdrum, old-fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with “the system” and which can be dealt with without waiting for the future. For corporate guilt perhaps cannot be, and certainly is not, felt with the same force as personal guilt. For most of us, as we now are, this conception is a mere excuse for evading the real issue. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
When we have really learned to know our individual corruption, then indeed we can go on to think of the corporate guilt and can hardly think of it too much. However, we must learn to walk before we run. We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. As if they were no concern of the present speaker’s and even with laughter, I have heard myself recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood. However, mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the prince of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the fact of a sin, is it probably that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. It is not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the playing with your cute little toes and singing a song, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a schoolboy or schoolgirl, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the Universe. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Perhaps in that eternal moment St. Peter—he will forgive me if I am wrong—forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, “an acquired taste”—and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public place. Of course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is worth keeping in mind. Here we are learning to understand and do the things Jesus gave us in specific commandments and teachings. We are studying his words and deeds in the four gospels. This “learning” is primarily developed through the teaching ministry of our church as we gather. We must learn to trust ourselves wholly to Christ. It is necessary to attribute providence to God. For all the good that is in created things has been created by God. In created things good is found not only as regards their substance, but also as regards their order towards an end and especially their last end, which, is the divine goodness. This good of order existing in things created, is itself created by God. Since, however, God is the cause of things by His intellect, and this it behooves that the type of every effect should pre-exist in Him, as is clear from what has gone before, it is necessary that the type of the order of things towards their end should be pre-exist in the divine mind: and the type of things ordered towards an end is, properly speaking, providence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
For it is the chief part of prudence, to which two other parts are directed—namely, remembrance of the past, and understanding of the present; inasmuch as from the remembrance of what is past and the understanding of what is present, we gather how to provide for the future. Now it belongs to prudence, according to the Philosopher, to direct other things towards an end whether in regard to oneself—as for instance, a human is said to be prudent, who orders well one’s own acts towards the end of life—or in regard to others subject to one, in a family, city or kingdom; in which sense it is said, “a faithful and wise servant, whom one’s lord hath appointed over one’s family,” reports Matthew 24.45. In this way prudence or providence may suitably be attributed to God. For in God Himself there can be nothing ordered towards an end, since He is the last end. This type of order in things towards an end is therefore in God called providence. Whence Boethius says (De Consol. Iv, 6) that {Providence is the divine type itself, seated in the Supreme Ruler; which disposeth all thing”; which disposition may refer either to the type of the order of things towards an end, or to the type of the order of parts in the whole. The intuitive feeling or the seminal idea may be planted in a human’s heart today but it may need twenty to thirty years before it comes to sufficient growth in one’s conscious mind. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Providence resides in the intellect; but presupposes the act of willing the end. Nobody gives a precept about things done for an end; unless one will that end. Hence prudence presupposes the moral virtues, by means of which the appetitive faculty is directed towards good. Even if Providence has to do with the divine will and intellect equally, this would not affect the divine simplicity, since in God both the will and intellect are one and the same thing. No one was or could have been present at creation. Moreover, while we have an idea of who God is and wants, He wants, He is utterly incomprehensible to finite humans. The World-Mind is forever attempting to reflect its qualities and attributes in the Universe. The Universe is already and eternally within God. No decision was needed nor could there have been one, any ore than a human may decide to be kind. Bringing the Universe out of Himself is a function, quality, or attribute—none of these terms is quite correct but a better is hard to find—an obedience to the law of God’s own being. The movement which brings the Universe into being out of the World-Mind’s stillness is a spontaneous, not a deliberate, one. It just happens because it is the very nature of the World-Mind to make this movement. It is an inner compulsion rather than an inner necessity that moves the World-Mind to bring about these repeated reincarnations of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
If we try to consider the inner necessity which makes the World-Mind manifest Itself to Itself through an other, a cosmos, we find ourselves on the threshold of a mystery. How could compulsion, limit, or desire arise in the desireless one? Human intellect can only formulate such a question, but cannot answer it. The moment we assert that this infinite Power has a motive in making the cosmos, a purpose in creating the World, in that moment we limit it and ascribe need or want or lack to it. The World-Mind has the power of vigorous creativeness as an essential attribute of its nature. It will stop its work of sustaining the Universe when it stops being what it is. There is no other purpose behind creation than that of continuing its own existence. To understand this is to understand that the question as to purpose is not at all applicable to the World-Mind but only to an imagined and inferior being, one which could start or discontinue. We know that the mask of the unconscious is not rigid—it reflects the face we turn towards it. Hostility lends it a threatening aspect, friendliness softens its features. It is not a question of mere optical reflection but of an autonomous answer which reveals the self-sufficing nature of that which answers. Christian symbolism is particularly concerned with healing, or attempting to heal the wound of the gaping rift in this World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
It would be more correct to take the open conflict as a symptom of the psychic situation of humans in the New World, and to deplore their inability to assimilate the whole range of the Christian symbol. As a doctor I cannot demand anything of my patients in this respect, also I lack the Church’s means of grace. Consequently I am faced with the task of taking the only path open to me—bringing the hidden into consciousness. At the same time I must leave my patient to decide in accordance with one’s assumptions, one’s spiritual maturity, one’s education, origins, and temperament, so far as this is possible without serious conflicts. As a doctor it is my takes to help the final decisions, because I know from experience that all coercion—be it suggestion, insinuation, or any other method of persuasion—ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and most decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with one’s own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. If one is to find out what it is that supports one when one can no longer support oneself, the patient must be alone. I would be only too delighted to leave this anything but easy task to the theologian, were it not that it is just from the theologian that many of my patients come. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
They ought to have hung on to the community of the Church, but they were shed like dry leaves from the great tree and now find themselves “hanging on” to the treatment. As if they or the thing they cling to would drop off into the void the moment they relaxed their hold, something in them clings, often with the strength of despair. They are seeking firm ground on which to stand. Since no outward support is of any use to them they must finally discover it in themselves—admittedly the most unlikely place from the rational point of view, but an altogether possible one from the point of view of the unconscious. We can this this from the archetype of the “lowly origin of the redeemer.” The way to the goal seems chaotic and interminable at first, and only gradually do the signs increase that it is leading anywhere. The way is not straight but appears to go round in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals: the dream-motifs always return after certain intervals to definite forms, whose characteristic is to define a center. And as a matter of fact the whole process revolves about a certain point or some arrangement round a center, which may in certain circumstances appear even in the initial dreams. As manifestations of unconscious processes the dreams rotate or circumambulate round the center, drawing closer to it as the amplifications increase in distinctness and in scope. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Owning to the diversity of the symbolical material it is difficult at first to perceive any kind of order at all. Nor should it be taken for granted that dream sequences are subject to any governing principle. However, as I say, the process of development proves on closer inspection to be cyclic or spiral. We might draw a parallel between such spiral courses and the processes of growth in plants; in fact the plant motif (tree, flower, et cetera) frequently recurs in these dreams and fantasies and is also spontaneously drawn or painted in Mandala symbolism. In alchemy the tree is the symbol of Hermetic philosophy. Harmonicists believe that true theology exists in all religions, and that it was given by God to humans in antiquity. When the inner voice says what we do not like to hear, we are apt to ignore it in modern times. However, in its manifestation, an intuitive idea is too often such a tiny spark that we are more likely to miss it than not. It is prudent to obey warning premonitions than to ignore them. Take time over problems, let your final decisions wait until they are fully ripe. Where is the wisdom in forcing a quick decision, which could easily be a wrong one, merely to get a decision at all? Intuition is the voice which is constantly calling one to this higher state. However, if one seldom or never pauses amid the press of activity to listen for it, one fails to benefit by it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Such intuitions manifest themselves only on the fringe of consciousness. They are tender shoots and therefore need to be tenderly nurtured. The more one follows a course contrary to intuitive leading, the more will errors of mishaps follow one. These feelings may be cultivated as a gardener cultivates flowers. Their visitation may be brought on again, their delight renewed. If one listens humbly, in the end one will rely on this little inner voice which speaks and tells one which way to turn. Do not deny your intuitive self as Judas denied his master, as Peter denied him. There is also one’s subconscious mind, one’s brilliant and seemingly effortless hunches. One’s judgements come forth spontaneously like lightning, with no supporting brief of argument. One follows one’s own subconscious with blind faith but insists that to have a hunch, one must first have all the facts at one’s command, and one’s intelligence must be working at full speed. Then suddenly and without conscious effort you think of a solution which is really based on facts, but is not achieved by deliberate cerebrations. With it comes an unexampled feeling of well-being. One will learn sooner or later by the test of experience to defer to this intuitive feeing whenever its judgement, guidance, or warning manifests itself. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Thomas Alva Edison, an American inventor and businessman who has been described as America’s greatest inventor developed many devices such as the phonograph and incandescent electric light and power, telephony and telegraphy sound recording. He said that all his inventions grew out of initial flashes which welled up from within. The rest was a matter of research. The intuitive element has to be awaited wit much patience and vigilant attention. Is one fully open to intuitive feelings that originate in one’s deeper being, one’s sacred self? Or does one’s ego get in the way by its rigidities, habits, and tendencies? The importance of these feelings is that they are threadlike clues which need following up, for they can lead one to a blessed renewal or revelation. The capacity to respond to spiritual intuitions is latent in all humans but trained and developed in few humans. From this hidden source comes at times guidance, warnings, attractions, or aversions which ought to be construed as intuitive messages. However, for this they must first best recognized and believed: they pass too quickly. It is not that one put out the antenna of one’s intuition, so much as that one insulates its end and thus provides clear receptivity. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
We may not forecast how quickly or how well every student will progress in this art. For one may naturally possess much sensitivity but another may posses little. And even when an intuition is recognized immediately, the will may respond to it very slowly. It is true that conscious is the voice of God in the moral life of humans, but it is also true that one seldom hears its pure sound. Most often one hears it mixed with much egotism. Do you hear me, Earth spirits, as I go walking? Do you hear my footfalls, drumming on the dirt? Do you hear my breathing, mixing with the air? Do you hear my heart beating, weaving in the rhythms? Do you hear my words of prayer, asking your attention? Do you hear me, Earth Spirits? Please hear me, please hear me, please hear my voice. Please hear the one who walks among you. Please hear my words of peace and friendship. Please hear my plea, please grant my wish. In mercy Thou bringest light to the Earth and to those who dwell thereon, and in Thy goodness renewest continually each day the work of creation. How great are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom has Thou made them all; the Earth is full of Thy creatures. O King, Thou alone hast been exalted from the days of old, praised, glorified and extolled from of yore. O everlasting God, in Thine abundant mercy, please have compassion on us. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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It Aims to Get People into Heaven Rather than Get Heaven into People!
Every person carries within one’s head a mental model of the World—a subjective representation of external reality. This model consists of tens upon tends of thousands of images. These may be as simple as a mental picture of clouds scudding across the sky, or big red and pink hearts. We many think of this mental model as a fantastic internal warehouse, an image emporium in which we store our inner portraits. People say Valentine’s Day is just a capitalistic holiday to make money, but I think Valentine’s Day is important. It gives people an excuse to be happy and express their love for others, a reason to buy gifts for someone else, and an occasion to get dressed up and feel young again. We have some much to grieve, and Valentine’s Day, much like other holidays, gives us a reason to come together, thank God we are alive, unite with others, and express love. The news, on the other hand, wants to make us sad, scared and fear for our safety. The government got something right. Regardless of if it is a federal holiday, or just a symbolic one, it is important to slow down, celebrate, and appreciate the beauty in our lives. Valentine’s Day also teaches children to share and it makes them happy by giving them art projects to work on. It is nice for everyone to take a break from doom and gloom and express love for one another. This is, after all, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Any person’s mental model will contain some images that approximate reality closely, along with others that are distorted or inaccurate. However, for the person to function, even to survive, the model must bear some overall resemblance to reality. Every reproduction of the external World, constructed and used as a guide to actions by an historical society, must in some degree correspond to that reality. Otherwise the society could no have maintained itself; its members if acting in accordance with totally untrue propositions, would not have succeeded in making even the simplest tools and in securing therewith food and shelter from the external World. No human’s model of reality is a purely personal product. While some of one’s images are based on firsthand observation, an increasing proportion of them today are based on messages beamed to us by the mass media and people around us. Thus the degree of accuracy in one’s model to some extent reflects the general knowledge in society. And as experience and scientific research pump more refined and accurate knowledge into society, new concepts, new ways of thinking, supersede, contradict, and render obsolete ideas and World views. If society itself were standing still, there might be little pressure on the individual to update one’s own supply of images, to bring them in line with the latest knowledge available in the society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
So long as the society in which one is embedded is stable or slowly changing, the images on which one bases one’s behaviour can also change slowly. However, to function in a fast-changing society, to cope with swift and complex change, the individua must turn over one’s own stock of images at a rate that in some way correlates with the pace of change. One’s model must be updated. To the degree that it lags, one’s responses to change become inappropriate; one becomes increasingly thwarted, ineffective. Thus there is intense pressure on the individual to keep up with the generalized pace. Today change is so swift and relentless in the techno-societies that yesterday’s truths suddenly become today’s fictions, and the most highly skilled and intelligent members of society admit difficulty in keeping up with the deluge of new knowledge—even in extremely narrow fields. You cannot possibly keep in touch with all you want to. I spend 25 percent to 50 percent of my working time trying to keep up with what is going. With all the information and technology coming out, it is hard for almost anyone to wade through the ocean of information. In fact, with all the high technology cars coming out, I wonder how auto science engineers are able to keep up-to-date with how to repair them? #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
New knowledge either extends or outmodes the old. In either case it compels those for whom it is relevant to reorganize their store of images. It forces them to relearn today what they thought they knew yesterday. Thus Lord James, vice-chancellor of the University of York, says, “I took my first degree in chemistry at Oxford.” Looking at the questions asked in chemistry exams at Oxford today, he continues, “I realized that not only an I not do them, but that I never could have done them, since at least two-thirds of the questions involved knowledge that simply did not exist when I graduated.” And Dr. Robert Hilliard, once the top educational broadcasting specialist for the Federal Communications Commission, presses the point further: “At the rate which knowledge is growing, by the time the child born today graduates from college, the amount of knowledge in the World will be four times as great. By the time that same child is fifty years old, it will be thirty-two times as great, and 97 percent of everything known in the World will have been learned since the time one was born.” Granting that definitions of “knowledge” are vague and that such statistics are necessarily hazardous, there still can be no question that the rising tide of new knowledge forces us into ever-narrower specialization and drives us to revise our inner images of reality at ever-faster rates. Nor does this refer merely to abstruse scientific information about physical particles or genetic structure. It applies with equal force to various categories of knowledge that closely affect the everyday life of millions. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
There is a tendency for common sense to suppose that income and wealth, and the good things in life generally, should be distributed accord to moral desert. Justice is happiness according to virtue. While it is recognized that this ideal can never be fully carried out, it is the appropriate conception of distributive justice, at least as a prime facie principle, and society should try to realize it as circumstances permit. Now justice as fairness rejects this conception. Such a principle would not be chosen in the original position. There seems to be no way of defining the requisite criterion in that situation. Moreover, the notion of distribution according to virtues fails to distinguish between moral desert and legitimate expectations. Thus it is true that as persons and groups take part in just arrangements, they acquire claims on one another defined by the publicly recognized rules. Having done various things encouraged by the existing arrangements, they now have certain rights, and just distributive shares honor these claims. A just scheme, then, answers to what humans are entitled to; it satisfies their legitimate expectations as founded upon social institutions. However, what they are entitled to is not proportional to nor dependent upon their intrinsic worth. The principles of justice that regulate the basic structure and specify the duties and obligations of individuals do not mention moral desert, and there is no tendency for distributive shares to correspond to it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This contention is borne out by the preceding account of common-sense precepts and their role in pure procedural justice. For example, in determining wages a competitive economy gives weight to the precept of contribution. However, as we have seen, the extent of one’ s contribution (estimated by one’s marginal productivity) depends upon supply and demand. Surely a person’s moral worth does not vary according to how many offer similar skills, or happen to want what one can produce. No one supposes that when someone’s abilities are less in demand or have deteriorated (as in the case of singers) one’s moral deservingness undergoes a similar shift. All of this is perfectly obvious and has long been agree to. It simply reflects the fact noted before that it is one of the fixed points of our moral judgments that no one deserves one’s place in the distribution of natural assets any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society. Moreover, none of the precepts of justice aims at rewarding virtue. The premiums earned by scarce natural talents, for example, are to cover the costs of training and to encourage the efforts of learning, as well as to direct ability to where it best furthers the common interest. The distributive shares that result do not correlate with moral worth, since the initial endowment of natural assets and the contingences of their growth and nature in early life are arbitrary from a moral point of view. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The precept which seems intuitively to come closet to rewarding moral desert is that of distribution according to effort, or perhaps better, conscientious effort. Once again, however, it seems clear that the effort a person is willing to make is influenced by one’s natural abilities and skills and the alternatives open to one. The better endowed are more likely, others things equal, to strive conscientiously, and there seems to be no way to discount for their greater good fortune. The idea of rewarding desert is impracticable. And certainly to the extent that the precept of need is emphasized, moral worth is ignored. Nor does the basic structure tend to balance the precepts of justice so as to achieve the requisite correspondence behind the scenes. It is regulated by the two principles of justice which define other aims entirely. The same conclusion may be reached in another way. In the preceding remarks the notion of moral worthy as distinct from a person’s claims based upon one’s legitimate expectations has not been explained. Suppose, then, that we define this notion and show that it has no correlation with distributive shares. We have only to consider a well-ordered society, that is, a society in which institutions are just and this fact is publicly recognized. Its members also have a strong sense of justice, an effective desire to comply with the existing rules and to give one another that to which they are entitled. In this case we may assume that everyone is of equal moral worth. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
However, the equal moral worth of persons does not entail that distributive shares are equal. Each is to receive what the principles of justice say one is entitled to, and these do not require equality. The essential point is that the concept of moral worth does not provide a first principle of distributive justice. This is because it cannot be introduced until after the principles of justice and of natural duty and obligation have been acknowledged. Once these principles are on and, moral worth can be defined as having a sense of justice; the virtues can be characterized as desires or tendencies to act upon the corresponding principles. Thus the concept of moral worth is secondary to those of right and justice, and it plays no role in substantive definition of distributive shares. For a society to organize itself with the aim of rewarding moral desert as a first principle would be like having the institution of property in order to punish thieves. The criterion to each according to one’s virtue would not, then, be chosen in the original position. Since the parties desire to advance their conceptions of the good, they have no reason for arranging their institutions so that distributive shares are determined by moral desert, even if they could find an antecedent standard for its definition. In a well-ordered society individuals acquire claims to share of the social product by doing certain things encouraged by the existing arrangements. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The legitimate expectations that arise are the other side, so to speak, of the principle of fairness and the natural duty of justice. For in the way that one has a duty to uphold just arrangements, and an obligation to do one’s part when one has accepted a position in them, so a person who has complied with the scheme and done one’s share has a right to be treated accordingly by others. They are bound to meet one’s legitimate expectations. Thus when just economic arrangements exist, the claims of individuals are properly settled by reference t the rules and precepts (with their respective weights) which these practices take as relevant. It is incorrect to say that just distributive shares reward individuals according to their moral worth. However, what we can say is that, in the traditional phrase, a just scheme gives each person one’s due: that is, it allots to each what one is entitled to as defined by the scheme itself. The principles of justice for institutions and individuals establish that doing this is fair. Even though a person’s claims are regulated by the existing rules, we can still make a distinction between being entitled to something and deserving it in a familiar although nonmoral sense. To illustrate, after a game one often says that the losing side deserved to win. Here one does not mean that the victors are not entitled to claim the championship, or whatever spoils go to the winner. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Like the controversy Kanye West created when he interrupted the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs), by cutting off Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for winning the award for Best Female Video category, when he thought that Beyonce should have won because, “Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time!” one is not saying the other team or individual should not have won. One is, however saying that the losing entity displayed to a higher degree that skills and qualities that the game or industry calls forth, and the exercise of which gives the sport or industry its appeal. Therefore the losers truly deserved to win but lost out as a result of bad luck, or from other contingencies that caused the contest to miscarry. Similarly even the best economic arrangements will not always lead to the more preferred outcomes. The claims that individuals actually acquire inevitably deviate more or less widely in favoured positions, for example, may not have to a higher degree than others the desired qualities and abilities. All this is evident enough. Its bearing here is that although we can indeed distinguish between the claims that existing arrangements required us to honor, given what individuals have done and how things have turned out, and the claims that would have resulted under more ideal circumstances, none of this implies that distributive shares should be in accordance with moral worth. Even when things happen in the best way, there is still no tendency for distribution and virtue to coincide. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
No doubt some may still contend that distributive shares should match moral worth at least to the extent that this is feasible. They may believe that unless those who are better off have superior moral character, their having greater advantages is an affront to our sense of justice. Now this opinion may arise from thinking of distributive justice as somehow the opposite of retributive justice. It is true that in a reasonably well-ordered society those who are punished for violating just laws have normally done something wrong. This is because the purpose of the criminal law is to uphold basic natural duties, those which forbid us to injure other persons in their life and limb, or to deprive them of their liberty and property, and punishments are to serve this end. They are not simply a scheme of taxes and burdens designed to put a price on certain forms of conducts and in this way to guide human’s conduct for mutual advantage. If the acts proscribed by penal statues were never done, it would be far better. Thus a propensity to commit such acts is a mark of bad character, and in a just society legal punishments will only fall upon those who display these faults. It is clear that the distribution of economic and social advantages is entirely different. These arrangements are not the converse, so to speak, of the criminal law, so that just as the one punishes certain offenses, the other rewards moral worth. The function of unequal distributive shares is to cover the costs of training and education to attract individuals to places and associations where they are most needed from a social point of view, and so on. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Assuming that everyone accept the propriety of self—or group-interested motivation duly regulated by a sense of justice, each decides to do those things that best accord with one’s aims. Variations in wages and income and the perquisites of position are simply to influence these choices so that the end results accords with efficiency and justice. In a well-ordered society there would be no need for the penal law expect insofar as the assurance problem made in necessary. The question of criminal justice belongs for the most part to partial compliance theory, whereas the account of distributive shares belongs to strict compliance theory and so to the consideration of the ideal scheme. To think of distributive and retributive justice as converses of one another is completely misleading and suggests a different justification for distributive shares than then one they in fact have. When we fail to center everything on becoming people who have the character of Christ, then we become means and angry Christians. As a leader of a Christian organization, I often feel the burn of the meanness within the Christian community, a mean-spirited suspicion and judgment that mirrors the broader culture. Every Christian leader I know feels it. It is difficult to be Christian in a secular World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
However, you know, it is sometimes more difficult to be a leader in Christian circles. There too you can be vilified for just the slightest move that is displeasing to someone. This is one of the most common points of commiseration among our leaders. We must realize there is an answer as to why some Christians are so man. And we must face this answer and effectively deal with it or Satan will sustain his stranglehold on spiritual transformation in local congregations. Some Christians are routinely taught by example and word that it is more important to be right (always in terms of their beloved vessel, or tradition) than it is to be Christlike. In fact, being right licenses many people to be mean, and, indeed, requires one to be mean—righteously mean, of course. It is believed that one must be hard on people who are wrong, and especially if they are in positions of Christian leadership. They deserve nothing better. This is part of what I call the practice of “condemnation engineering.” A fundamental mistake of the conservative side of the American church today, and much of the churches in the New World, is that it takes as its basic goal to get as many people as possible ready to die and go to Heaven. It aims to get people into Heaven rather than to get Heaven into people. This of course requires that these people, who are going to be “in,” must be right on what is basic. You cannot really quarrel with that. However, it turns out that to be right on “what is basic” is to be right in terms of the particular church vessel or tradition in question, not in terms of Christlikeness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Now, the project thus understood and practiced is self-defeating. It implodes upon itself because it creates groups of people who may be ready to die, but clearly are not ready to live. They rarely can get along with another, much less those “outside.” Often this most intimate relations are tangles of reciprocal harm, coldness, and resentment. They have found ways of being “Christian” without being Christlike. As a result they actually fall short of getting as many people are possible ready to go to Heaven, because the lives of the “converted” testify against the reality of “the life that is life indeed,” reports 1 Timothy 6.19. The way to get as many people into Heaven as you can is to get Heaven into as many people are you can—that is, to follow the path of genuine spiritual transformation of full-throttled discipleship to Jesus Christ. When we are counting up results we also need to keep in mind the multitudes of people (surrounded by churches) who will not be in Heaven because they have never, to their knowledge, seen the reality of Christ in a living human being. The Christian minister is frequently in the position of a lawyer who states to the court the case one intends to prove (that would be the biblical picture of life from above), and then calls one’s witnesses (professing Christians), who contradict their testimony (their life) every point one said one would prove. One can have no greater sign of confirmed pride than when one thinks one is humble enough. Love may cause pain to its object, but only on the supposition that that object needs alteration to become fully lovable. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Now why do we humans need to much alteration? The Christian answer—that we have used our free will to become very bad—is so well known that it hardly needs to be stated. However, to bring this doctrine into real life in the minds of modern humans, and even of modern Christians, is very hard. The consciousness is supposed to deliver humans from the fear of eternal punishment. It was against this background that the Gospel appeared as good news. It brought news of possible healing to humans who knew that they were morally ill. However, all this has changed. Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis—in itself very bad news—before it can win a hearing for the cure. There are two principle causes. One is the fact that for about a hundred and fifty years we have so concentrated on one of the virtues— “kindness” or mercy—that most of us do not feel anything except kindness to be really good or anything but cruelty to be really bad. Such disequilibrium of ethical developments are not uncommon, and other ages too have had their pet virtues and curious insensibilities. And if one virtue must be cultivated at the expense of all the rest, none has a higher claim than mercy—for every Christian must reject with detestation that covert propaganda for cruelty which tries to derive mercy out of the World by calling it names such as “Humanitarianism” and “Sentimentality.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The real trouble is that “kindness” is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. If nothing happens to be annoying an individual in the moment, everyone feels benevolent. Thus a human easily comes to console oneself for all one’s other vices by a conviction that one’s heart is in the right place and that one would not hurt a fly nor take candy from a baby, though in fact one has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We thin we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble. The second cause is the effect of Psychoanalysis on the public mind, and, in particular, the doctrine of repressions and inhibition. Whatever these doctrines really mean, the impression they have actually left on most people is that the sense of Shame is a dangerous and mischievous thing. We have laboured to overcome that sense of shrinking, that desire to conceal, which either Nature herself or the tradition of almost all humankind has attached to cowardice, unchastity, falsehood, and envy. We are told to “get things out in the open,” not for the sake of self-humiliation, but on the grounds that these “things” are very natural and we need not be ashamed of them. However, unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one; and even the Worldly society has usually recognized “shamelessness” as the nadir of the soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
In trying to extirpate shame we have broken down one of the ramparts of the human spirit, madly exulting in the work as the Trojans exulted when they broke their walls and pulled the Horse into Troy. I do not know that there is anything to be done but to set about the rebuilding as soon as we can. It is mad work remove hypocrisy by removing the temptation to hypocrisy: the ”frankness” of people sunk below shame is a very cheap forthrightness. However, if one’s own scepticism, sensualism, or materialism does not offer too hard a resistance, the intuition which is working its way to formulation, expression, and understanding may finally gain acceptance. This opens a new cycle for one. If only one heeds its intuitive message, the higher self will not fail one. One will make one’s way to true balance sanity and deep inner calm. Without searching for others, knowing that in oneself God’s representative resides and that this can give the right kind of help, one will depend for self-reliance on an ever-presence. If one cultivates sufficient faith, out of the cosmic mind will come the response to one’s aspirations and, eventually, the answers to one’s questions. To receive this, one must learn to keep a constant vigil for intuitive feelings and messages of the delicate nature, and to trust one’s inner promptings. One’s attention should always have God at its center. By constant prayer and aspiration to one’s higher self, the student will get intuitive promptings from time to time. One should catch them when they appear and yield oneself to them: in this way one will get the necessary guidance from within. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Once one learns to recognize the intuitive voice, follow its dictates; do not hesitate to conform with them to try to make up an excuse for failing to do so it the guidance is unpalatable. If the seeker will heed this intuitive feeling it may lead one to a clue, a thread by holding which one may grope one’s way to clearer and stronger feeling until it becomes a certainty. If reason, experience, and authority can solve it, whatever be the problem, carry it inwards to the deep still center. However, one must learn to wait in patience for the answer, for the blockage is in you, not in it. A day or a month may pass until the response is felt, thought, or materialized. There is a feeling of scaredness, of holy peace at such moments, and they should be cherished for the precious moment that they are. They contain hints of the communion with the Higher Self, elements of something beyond the ordinary self, and possibilities of transcending the past with its debris of memories and mistakes. In every important move one will seek guidance from the intuitive levels of being as well as from the intellectual. These messages are all formulated by the faculty of intuition. Hence their lofty tone. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
However, the emotions, desires, and intellect—being on a lower level—ignore the message in practice and action. Hence, disobeyed, they bring suffering or disappointment. Sometimes the intuitive bidding of God will be in favour of one’s own private interests but sometimes it will be at variance with them. Where the wakeful consciousness is not easily reached owing to its preoccupations, then the dream consciousness will be more receptive to the message. Sometimes an intuition does not stay behind. It flashes through consciousness for a small fraction of a second and is gone. Unless it is detected and recognized during this quick passage while it is still fresh, we are hardly likely to do so afterwards. Amid the toils and agitations of everyday living, through all the boiler pressures of crisis events, such intuitions can gain entry only with difficulty. Yet we need their help and solace more than we know: we need their stimulus to enkindle fresh hope and more faith. Either a human possesses this intuitive sense or one does not. It cannot be created by argument or analysis. They betray the higher part of themselves every time they resist, reject, or merely ignore the intuitive feelings which come so delicately into consciousness. In the seeming self’s activity, personal willpower is used and personal effort is made. In God’s activity, both these signs are absent. Instead there is a passive receptivity to its voice—intuitions—and obedience to its guidance. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The self-sufficing World-Mind has nothing to gain for itself by the Universal activity. What could the Supreme Power gain by bringing the World into existence? It is not like the humans who have desires to be satisfied or limitations to be removed. Those who point to the marvellous pattern of the Universe as proof of the existence of Deity, do well; but when they begin to render account of the reasons which induced Deity to turn Himself into myriad souls and to blind their divine sight by involving them into this material Universe, it is time to put on our shoes and walk away. For no philosopher and no theologian, no occultist and no mystic has yet solved this supreme riddle in a truly satisfying manner. World-Mind imagines and objectifies thing and happenings, and humans are within this space-time net. God is within the Universe but unbound by its limitations. God is free in a sense in which no human being is free. For the conflict of motives which precedes every act of human freedom is entirely absent from the acts of God, which are truly spontaneous. No one knows why the Infinite Power must go on incarnating something of Itself in the Universe; everyone can in the end only accept the fact, for the question is answerless. “Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for true and just are His judgments,” reports Revelations 19.1. Mothers and Fathers who went before, please watch over my words as I tell the old stories, that they may be passed on rightly. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Please make me today’s link in the chain that reaches on, from nights around the fire beneath American sikes to the end of humanity and beyond. Endowed with might, endowed with everlasting power, they govern all the World. In splendor, lustrously their brightness radiates, their brilliance beautiful throughout the Universe. In rising they rejoice, in setting they exult, awesomely fulfilling their Creator’s will. Glory and honor do they give unto His name; in joyous songs of praise His kingdom they acclaim. God called unto the Sun and it shone forth in light, He looked, and then He formed the figure of the Moon. The Heavenly host, the constellations gave Him praise, and all celestial beings of the Heavenly throne attribute honor, greatness, glory—unto God who rested from all His work, and on the seventh day exalted Himself and ascended the throne of His glory. Adorned in majesty for the day of rest, God called the Sabbath a delight. This is the praise offered by the Sabbath day, the day itself rendered praise saying: A psalm, a song of Sabbath Day. It is good to give thanks unto the Lord. Therefore, let all of God’s creatures glorify and bless Him. Let them all render praise, distinction and greatness unto God, the King and Creator of all, who in His holiness bestoweth rest upon His people of American on the sacred Sabbath day. May Thy name, O Lord our God, be sanctified, and Thy fame, O our King, glorified in Heaven above and on Earth beneath. Be Thou praised, O our Deliverer, for the excellency of Thy handiwork and for the luminaries which Thou hast made and which render Thee glory. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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If there is Laughter in the Morning, there Will be Tears Before Bedtime!
I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better. Rage and envy and the feelings of persecution which go with humanity impairs the ability to be fully human. Feeling persecuted by others is not very compatible with find them wonderful and taking easy uncomplicated pleasure in the company. People who have been insufficiently mirrored, admired, and confirmed may go in for rather idealized hierarchical leadership-structures and hero-worship. Conversely, people who had lot of confirmation but lacked the opportunity to create and copy admired figures are more liable to sit around like garden gnomes being agreeable and democratic and lovable and cosy—even while Rome burns. The grandiose self and the wretched self correspond rather closely. A split of this kind is also more likely when an individual discovers too abruptly and unexpectedly the limitations to which one is subject. For instance, if one has been your source of support beyond an appropriate time, this in turn is more likely because an attachment figure sees you as an extension of one’s own self-esteem and one’s own grandiose phantasies, so that there is a merging beyond the time when this was necessitated by the individual’s weakness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
When people are too supportive of an individual, it is often because they are anxious phobic caregivers also, and this obstructs the individual’s normal development, which would otherwise has taken one beyond a desire to be merged in a selfobject state. Fixation in the selfobject state interferes with the development, which would otherwise have taken one beyond a desire to be merged in a selfobject state. Fixation in the selfobject state interferes with the development of identification with an admired figure who does things. We then get the kind of person who, smugly or desperately, conveys the impression “I am wonderful because I am so lovable.” Such individuals may have had the opportunity for gradually developing the skills needed for a more independent exercise of their functions. So, the individual will discover its lack of power. One will discover the extent to which one is defenceless and subject to intrusion, and that will be a terrible blow. Just going off to school or work for some people in the morning can be a terrible experience because they may not yet be psychologically individuated. Splits are due to inadequate recognition and confirmation: inadequate mirroring. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Splits are due to things going wrong in the development of appropriate integrations and individuations. One has not been appreciated in the right way for what one is and what one can become. One’s grand and one’s wretched self are isolated from one another. Repression is different. It puts the lid on certain experiences and feelings. Repression creates a horizontal split. This is a later development, when a more realistic self is beginning to be formed. Neither wretched nor grandiose self are very realistic: elements of both will be integrated in more realistic self-structures when development does as it should. With a more realistic self, the individual becomes able to take pride and pleasure in what one is and what one can do. This process is called the natural self-assertion, in contrast to the unrealistic grandiosity attributable to unresolved selfobject merging. When the lid is put on the individual’s sense of being grans, when its natural excitement and self-assertion, in contrast to the unrealistic grandiosity attributable to unresolved selfobject merging. When the lid is put on the individual’s sense of being grand, when one’s natural excitement and self-assertion are met with disapproval, the individual feels bad, and in some circumstances one may become anxious whenever one thinks of doing anything unbidden that might be fun or feel good. This is a repressed, guilty individual. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
In some strata of British life, and probably elsewhere, people are shamed as a matter of routine at the very moments when they feel they have done something good or done something well—jokingly, of course, so that the ill-will can be disowned. There appears to be a determination that no one shall feel “bigheaded” or forget for a moment that “if there is laughter in the morning, there will be tears before bedtime.” Even the very possibility of someone achieving something has to be counteracted by “taking them down a peg or two.” No wonder that individuals brought up in this atmosphere avoid being noticed as far as they can, and are quietly angry: “sullen.” Whereas splitting has to do with defects in mirroring, repression has more to do with identification with admired figures, and especially with the idealization of rather ungiving and unforgiving figures—the dour, the jealous, the exhausted. Such people can confirm the fears and phantasies of weakness and inadequacy which the individual has necessarily accumulated already. A strong sense of self-esteem brings not only a sense of well-being, but also generally improved functioning. As, though the right therapeutic approach, patients feel better about themselves, their capacity for work improves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Conversely, many of the most severe work-disturbances are due to a decline in self-esteem and subsequent fear of fragmentation. People will often attempt to counteract painful feelings of unreality or fragmentation by forcing themselves into activities, ranging from the physical (in sports) to overwork. Their work (or their sport) is made the isolated activity of an isolated self-structure, a pocket lacking pleasant associated connections. Such people engage in their activities in an “automatic” way, passively, without pleasure or initiative, simply responding to cues or demands. If things go well in therapy, individuals will one day report that their work has changed, that they are now enjoying it, that they now have the choice of whether to work or not, that they now undertake it on their own initiative rather than by passive obedience. Last but not least, they find that their approach has now some originality rather than being humdrum and routine. A living self in depth has become the organizing center of the ego’s activities. Takes which we set ourselves, and to which we feel committed, can play an important role in giving meaning and validity to what might otherwise be a rather more fragile personality-structure. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
A skill is a good example of a compensatory structure. I may not be lovable or interesting to people, but I know I can design the best residential architecture than anyone in my town, or come first in exams, or tell fascinating stories about history, or impress others with my charm. Compensatory developments add to self-respect by achievements which are generally respected, and other more defensive manoeuvres which can do no more than serve to hide the pain suffered through lack of self-respect: unrealistic values, hostile phantasies, perversions. Clearly this is a tricky area in which to make pronouncements, since it depends so much on what is admired in the culture. To make yourself the most outstanding competitor would normally be seen as compensatory in our culture, but it might be seen as a defensive perverted individualism in a more collectively minded culture. If one is not careful, however, compensatory methods can lead to a “False Self.” It is a loss, and a grave one, to let oneself remain torpid to intuitive feeling so much of the time, while alert and alive to every lesser and lower feeling. There are times, however, when, in a hard problem, reason will come into conflict with intuition but when the later is so overwhelmingly strong that it seems one must perforce yield to it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
In the times when these are difficult, we have to do what it takes to survive. Time alone can show the truth of such a matter. Let one therefore not fall into the peril of strict ideas about it. Let one rather withhold judgment and await its issue patiently. Intuition does not always flash suddenly out of the depths of the mind into consciousness: quite often if forms itself very slowly over a period of hours, days, or even weeks. Who hears this quiet whisper of intuition? Who, hearing, obeys? Not only is it most unnoticed but its guidance is also unsought; humans prefer and follow, the ego’s direction. It begins as an uncertain and intermittent feeling: it ends as a definite and persistent intuition. If humans followed their intuition more there would be fewer tragedies that could have been prevented or regrets that could have been avoided. The student should make one’s own research and observation on the need of accepting first intuitive impressions and being the best guidance. The undegraded feeling which first comes when an object, a person, or an event confronts one is mostly the correct intuition about it. However, it must be caught on the wing or it will be gone. If we understood this capacity to receive first impressions better, we should value them accordingly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The subtlety and depth of one’s intuitions will increase with quickness, readiness, and obedience of one’s response to them. If they are to remain and not vanish away, intuition must be caught quickly and inspiration must be followed up at once. If we respectfully meet each intuitive feeling and give it our trusting collaboration, it will little by little become a frequent visitor. First, we have to become willing to receive these divine intuitions. These intuitive feelings do not respond to direct frontal demands for their appearance. They must be gently coaxed out of their deeper levels where they reside, quietly lured out of their shy seclusion. To open ourselves and receive an intuition we must surrender the ego and submit the intellect to it. If one is to interpret it aright and not miss its importance, one should let oneself go when one feels this inner prompting. Let it absorb one’s being, draw one inwards to a deepening sense of itself. The deeper mind is so close to the source of our karma that we may at times get its right guidance not only intuitively from within but also circumstantially from without. The interval between the coming and the going of an intuitive thought is so short that one must immediately and alertly respond to it. If one misses it, one will find that the mind can go back to it only with difficulty and uncertainty. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
We can receive a new truth more easily in the mind’s quietude than in the mind’s agitation. When thinking is stilled, intuiting begins. Such internal silence is not useless idleness, it is creative experience. God may use some event, some person, or some book as a messenger to Him. It may make any new circumstance act in the same way. However, one must have the capacity to recognize what is happening and the willingness to receive the message. To let the intuitive feelings come through requires an inner passivity which meditation fosters but which extroversion inhibits. Submit yourself as an empty vessel to be filled with the intuitive leading of God. Do not stop short of this goal, do not be satisfied with a half-and-half sort of life. We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Love between the father and son, is a symbol, means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make the son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, want him to be. Even in our own days, though a man might say it, he could mean nothing by saying, “I love my son but do not care how great a blackguard he is provided he has a good time.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The Church is the Lord’s bride whom he so loves that in her no spot or wrinkle is endurable. For the truth which this analogy serves to emphasize is that Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere “kindness” which tolerates anything expect suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love. When we fall in love with another human being, do we crease to care whether she or he is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care? Does anyone regard it as a sign of love in another human being that one neither knows nor cares how he or she is looking? Love may, indeed, love the beloved when one’s beauty or handsomeness is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved; one’s feeling is more soft and sensible than are the tender horns of cockled snails. Of all powers one forgives most, but one condones least: one is pleased with little, but demands all. When Christianity says that God loves humans, it means that God loves human: not that He has some “disinterested,” because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the lord of terrible aspect, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of one’s guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the Worlds, persistent and the artist’s love for one’s work and despotic as a human’s love for one’s garden, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between intimate partners. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring; we are inclined, like the maidens in the old play, to deprecate the love of Zeus. However, the fact seems unquestionable. The Impassible speaks as if it suffered passion, and that which contains in Itself the cause of its own and all other bliss talks as though it could be in want and yearning. The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love,” and look on things as if human are the center of them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Humans are not the center. God does not exist for the sake of humans. Humans do not exist for their own sake. “Thou has crated all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created,” reports Revelation 4.11. We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest well pleased. To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us God must labour to make us lovable. We cannot even wish, in our better moments, that God could reconcile Himself to our present impurities—no more than the beggar maid could wish the King Cophetua should be content with her rags and dirt, or a dog, once having learned to love humans, could wish that humans were such as to tolerate one’s house the snapping, verminous, polluting creature of the wild pack. What we would here and now call our “happiness” is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The body of believers called the church is to grow from the inside out in response to the Spirit. Built that way, the church prevails against anything. The church comes together on Saturday or Sunday mornings principally to be prepared to carry out its ministry the rest of the week in every walk of life. And the church must equip the humans to take the church into the World. The believer’s ministry is being Christ’s person right where one is, in the marketplace or the home, every moment of every day. This is part of the everyday business of holiness. This is the very nature of loving God. Therefore spiritual discipline is very important. We must practice fervent prayer and serious study of God’s Word. This is the life-or-death principle, churches that exercise spiritual discipline can be mightily used. The great revivals have been born in times when Christians were intent on prayer. The evidence also makes clear that revivals are not confined geographically. For the church of Jesus Christ is not confined to one area. It is one church, one body, one holy nation transcending human’s arbitrary geographic and political boundaries. As one holy nation, we must break free of any provincialism and work for unity in Christ. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
In my travels as a believer among fellow believers of other races and nationalities, the Lord has given me some of His richest fellowship in those very countries. The Holy Spirit can break down every barrier. However, the requirement for individual cells within God’s holy nation goes far beyond sharing financial resources; the church is called to give itself, to share in the hunger and pain of those in need. Jesus Himself shared the pain of the less affluent; He suffered for the entire World. As God’s visible presence in the World today, should not His people also participate in the suffering of the World? Most empathically, yes. Not until we go where need is and share in the suffering of the less affluent, alienated, isolated, and downtrodden will the holy nation of God’s people also become the loving nation. With the methods employed hitherto we have not succeeded in Christianizing the soul to the point where even the most elementary demands of Christian ethics can exert any decisive influence on the main concerns of the Christian European and American. The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor and naked heathen, but the spiritual who populate the Old World and the New World have as yet heard nothing of Christianity. If it is to meet its high educative task, Christianity must indeed begin again from the beginning. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
So long as religion is only faith and outward form, and the religious function is not experienced in our own souls, nothing of any importance has happened. It has yet to be understood that the mysterium magnum is not only an actuality but is first and foremost rooted in the human psyche. The human who does not know this from one’s own experience may be a most learned theologian, but one has no idea of religion and still less of education. Yet when I point out that the soul possesses by nature a religious function, and when I stipulate that it is the prime task of all education (of adults) to convey the archetype of God-image, or its emanations and effects, to the conscious mind, then it is precisely the theologian who seizes me by the arm and accuses me of “psyhchologims.” However, were it not a fact of experience that supreme values reside in the soul (quite apart from the holy ghost who is also there), psychology would interest me in the least, for the soul would then be nothing but a miserable vapour. I know, however, from hundredfold experience that it is nothing of the sort, but on the contrary contains the equivalents of everything that has been formulated in stick doctrines and a good deal more, which is just what enables it to be an eye destined to behold the light. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The beholding of the light requires limitless range and unfathomable depth of vision. I have been accused of “deifying the soul.” Not I but God Himself has defied it! I did not attribute a religious function to the soul, I merely produced the facts which prove that the soul is naturaliter religiosa, id est, possess a religious function. I did not invent or insinuate this function, it produces itself of it own accord without being prompted thereto by any opinions or suggestions of mine. With a truly tragic delusion these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time that we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing. For it is obvious that far too many people are incapable of establishing a connection between the sacred figures and their own psyche: they cannot see to what extent the equivalent images are lying dormant in their own unconscious. In order to facilitate this inner vision we must first clear the way for the faculty of seeing. How this is to be done without psychology, that is, without making contact with the psyche, is frankly beyond my comprehension. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Another equally serious misunderstanding lies in imputing to psychology the wish to be a new and possibly heretical doctrine. If a visually impaired man can gradually be helped to see it is not to be expected that one will at once discern new truths with an eagle eye. If he sees anything at all, one must be glad, and if he begins to understand what he is seeing, that is a blessing. Psychology is concerned with the act of seeing and not with the construction of new religious truths, when even the existing teachings have not yet been perceived and understood. In religious matters it is a well-known fact that we cannot understand a thing until we have experienced it inwardly, for it is in the inward experience that the connection between the psyche and the outward image or creed is first revealed as a relationship or correspondence like that of sponsus and sponsa. Accordingly when I says as a psychologist that God is an archetype, I mean by that the “type” in the psyche. The word “type” is, as we know, derived from “blow” or “imprint”; thus an archetype presupposes an imprinter. Psychology as the science of the soul has to confine itself to its subject and guard against overstepping its proper boundaries by metaphysical assertions or other professions of faith. Should it set up a God, even as a hypothetical cause, it would have implicitly claimed the possibility of proving God, thus exceeding its competence in an absolutely illegitimate way. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Science can only be science; there is no “scientific” professions of faith and similar contradictiones in adiecto. We simply do not know the ultimate derivation of the archetype any more than we know the origin of the psyche. The competence of psychology as an empirical science only goes so far as to establish, on the basis of comparative research, whether for instance the imprint found in the psyche can or cannot reasonably be termed a “God-image.” Nothing positive or negative has thereby been asserted about the possible existence of God, and more than the archetype of the “hero” posits the actual existence of a hero. Now if my psychological researches has demonstrated the existence of certain psyche types and their correspondence with well-known religious ideas, then we have opened up a possible approach to those experienceable contents which manifestly and undeniably form the empirical foundations of all religious experience. The religious-minded human is free to accept whatever metaphysical explanations one pleases about the origin of these images; not so the intellect, which must keep strictly to the principles of scientific interpretation and avoid trespassing beyond the bounds of what can be known. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Nobody can prevent the believer from accepting God, Purusha, the Atman, or Tao as the Prime Cause and thus putting an end to the fundamental disquiet of humans. The scientist is a scrupulous worker; one cannot take Heaven by storm. Should one allow oneself to be seduced into such an extravagance one would be sawing of the branch on which one sits. God, please open the way for me. God, please remove my obstacles. God, please carry me on your back, bringing me through difficulties to success. Heavenly God, please rain your blessings down on your people, like milk pouring from above. Unto Thee we offer blessings and thanksgiving from this time forth and forevermore. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, exalted in praises, God of thanksgiving, Lord of wonders, who takest delight in songs and psalms, Thou God and King, the life of the Universe. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, son; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed for ever 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 19 of 19
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Randolph Harris II International 