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Here Rests in Honoured Glory an American Soldier Known but to God!
Wars can be won or lost, but the battlefields waged inside a human’s soul, only love can heal those wounds. Without the right people in our life, we will never fulfill God’s purpose. Succeeding at any endeavour is dependent on the nature and quality of your relationships. The scriptures tells us the Lord “established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 101.80. The land was “redeemed” indeed by thousands killed and wounded along the way at Germantown, at Bemis Heights and Charleston, and so many other places in the American Revolution. The singers of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the Constitution were inspired from on high to do that work. An objective study of the delegates involved—their fears, their limitations, vested interests, and the like—makes it clear that they were not the sort of men we usually think of as prophets. Nonetheless they were inspired, and the Constitution they provided can be designated accurately as a divine document. However, even a divine constitution required something further; it demands a kind of people who will, by their very natures, receive and respect such a constitution and function well within the conditions it establishes. Where indeed shall we find such people today? I recall one. It was in a concentration camp I helped liberate during the American revolution in the 18th century. There were thousands of American prisoners held by the British during the war. Of all the prisoners held in captivity, 80 percent of them died. New York City was the main city were prisoners were held. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
As we blew the lock off the door and tried to assist the miserable and the painful inside, I was interrupted by a tap on my boot and found, wallowing in the mud, a Protestant minister. One of his first request was, “Soldier, do you have a flag?” Later when we retrieved one from the saddle on one of the horses, I gave it to him on a stretcher and with tears in his eyes he said, “Thank God, you came.” Again the Lord said, “Wherefore, this land is consecrated unto him who he shall bring. And if it so be that they shall serve him according to the commandments which he hath given, it shall be a land of liberty unto them,” reports 2 Nephi 1.7. As Christian’s then, we know why some people came to America and others did not. We have done as well as could be expected, and are richly blessed despite our shortcoming because the Lord has thus far held us in His hands and worked His purposes, His ultimate purposes, through us. During the war, as many of 8,000 soldiers were killed, approximately 20,000 died from illness or starvation. An estimated 25,000 were wounded. Nearly 30 percent of the army was killed, wounded or captured. Can you understand, this is what America is all about? Standing up for your freedom and honor and being willing to risk your life. You and I know, and you and I alone really know, the reason for this blessed and beautiful land. In a World where men have given up on this most vital question, we know the purpose of America. Can you understand the way God has worked?? And if you do, will you join me in this day to committing yourself to preach the message of the Lord’s glorious achievement in America? #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
This is a time when you and I can afford to be patriotic, in the best sense of that term. There is a reason to be proud that we live in an established land that has been conditioned by the Lord so that His gospel could be restored. The purpose of American was to provide a setting wherein that was possible. All else takes its power from that one great, central purpose. Anti-God is Anti-American. By striving to make our citizenry the righteous people the Lord required of us. And by telling the story of what the Lord has done for us is how we make a great church. “Oh beautiful for patriot dreams, that seed beyond the years. Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears. America! America! God shed His grace on thee. And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.” (Katherine Bates, “Oh Beautiful for Spacious Skies,” Hymns, no. 126.) May that be the song of our heart and prayer for fulfillment, I humbly pray as I bear witness to these truths and add my testimony that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, and that here sits his prophet, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Unless a civilization has some explanation for why things happen—even if its explanation is nine parts mystery to one part analysis—it cannot program lives effectively. People, in carrying out the imperatives of their culture, need some reassurance that their behaviour will produce results. And this implies some answer to the perennial why. Second Wave civilization came up with a theory so powerful it seemed sufficient to explain everything. A sock smashes into the surface of a pond. Ripples swiftly radiate out across the water. Why? What causes this event? Chances are that children of industrialism would say, “because someone threw it.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
An educated European gentleman of the twelfth or thirteenth century, in attempting to answer this question, would have had ideas remarkably different from our own. He probably would have relied on Aristotle and searched for a material cause, a formal cause, an efficient cause, and a final cause, no one of which would, by itself, have been sufficient to explain anything. A medieval Chinese sage might have spoken about the yin and yang, and the force-field of influences in which all phenomena were believed to occur. Second Wave civilization found its answer to the mysteries of causation in Newton’s spectacular discovery of the universal law of gravitation. For Newton, causes were “the forces impressed upon the bodies to generate motion.” The conventional example of Newtonian cause and effect is the billiard balls that strike one another and move in response to one another. This notion of change, which focused exclusively outside forces that are measurable and readily identifiable, was extremely powerful because it dovetailed perfectly with the new indust-real notions of linear space and time. Indeed, Newtonian or mechanistic causation, which came to be adopted as the industrial revolution spread over Europe, pulled indust-reality together into a hermetically sealed package. If the World consisted of separate particles—miniature billiard balls—then all causes arose from the interaction of these balls. One particle or atom struck another. The first was the cause of the movement of the next. That movement was the effect of the movement of the first. There was no action without motion in space, and no atom could be in more than one place at one time. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Suddenly a Universe that had seemed complex, cluttered, unpredictable, richly crowded, mysterious, and messy, began to look neat and tidy. Every phenomenon from the atom inside a human cell to the coldest star in the distant night sky could be understood as matter in motion, each particle activating the next, forcing it to move in an endless dance of existence. For the atheist this view provided an explanation of life in which, as Pierre-Simon Laplace later put it, the hypothesis of God was unnecessary. For the religious, however, it still left room for God, since He could be regarded as the Prime mover who used the cue stick to set the billiard balls in motion, then perhaps retired from the game. This metaphor for reality came like a shot of intellectual adrenalin into the emerging indust-real culture. Of the French Revolution, the Baron d’Holbach, exulted, “The Universe, that vast assemblage of everything that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation nothing but in immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects.” It is all there—all implied in that one short, triumphant statement: the Universe is an assembled reality, made of discrete parts put together into an “assemblage.” Matter can only be understood in terms of motion—id est, movement through space. Events occur in a [linear] succession, a parade of event moving down the line of time. Human passions like hatred, selfishness, or love, d’Holbach went on, could be compared to physical forces like repulsion, inertia, or traction, and a wise political state could manipulate them for the public good just as science could manipulate the physical World for the common good. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
It is precisely from this indust-real image of the Universe, from the assumptions buried within it, that some of the most potent of our personal, social, and political behaviour patterns have come. Buried within them was the implication that not only the cosmos and nature but society and people behaved according to certain fixed and predictable laws. Indeed, the greatest thinkers of the Second Wave were precisely those who most logically and forcefully argued the lawfulness of the Universe. Newton seemed to have discovered the laws that programmed the Heavens. Darwin had identified the laws that programmed social evolution. And Freud supposedly laid bare the laws that programmed the psyche. Others—scientists, engineers, social scientists, psychologist—pressed the search for still more, of different, laws. Second Wave civilization now has at its command a theory of causality that seemed miraculous in is power and wide applicability. Much that hitherto had seemed complex could be reduced to simple explanatory formulae. Nor were these laws or rules to be accepted simply because Newton or Marx or someone laid them down. They were subject to experiment and empirical test. They could be validated. Using them, we could build bridges, send radio waves into the sky, predict and retrodict biological change; we could manipulate the economy, organize political movements or machines, and even—so they claimed—foresee and shape the behaviour of the ultimate individual. All that was needed was to find the critical variable to explain any phenomenon. If and only if we could find the appropriate “billiard ball” and hit it from the best angle, we could accomplish anything. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
This new causality, combined with the new images of time, space, and matter, liberated much of the human race from the tyranny of ancient mumbo jumbo. It made possible triumphant achievements in science and technology, miracles of conceptualization and practical accomplishment. It challenged authoritarianism and liberated the mind from millennia of imprisonment. However, indust-reality also created its own new prison, an industrial mentality that derogated or ignored what it could not quantify, that frequently praised critical rigor and punished imagination, that reduced people to oversimplified protoplasmic units, that ultimately sought an engineering solution for any problem. Nor was indust-reality as morally neutral as it pretended to be. It was, as we have seen, the militant super-ideology of Second Wave civilization, the self-justifying source from which all the characteristic left-wing and right-wing ideologies of the industrial age sprang. Like any culture, Second Wave civilization produced distorting filters through which its people came to see themselves and the Universe. This package of ideas, images, assumptions—and the analogies that flowed from them—formed the most powerful cultural system in history. Indust-reality, the cultural face of industrialism, fitted the society it helped to construct. It helped create the society of big organizations, big cities, centralized bureaucracies, and the all-pervasive marketplace, whether capitalist or socialist. It dovetailed perfectly with new energy systems, family systems, technological systems, economic systems, political and value systems that together formed the civilization of the Second Wave. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
It is that entire civilization taken together, along with its institutions, technologies, and its culture, that is now disintegrating under an avalanche of change as the Third Wave, in its turn, surges across the planet. We live in the final, irretrievable crisis of industrialism. And as the industrial age passes into history, a new age is born. The myth of suburbia, like all myths, contained elements of fact. That the new suburbs were architecturally similar was beyond dispute. However, the claim commonly made that this conformity also included all cultural tastes, child-rearing practices, levels of social activity, and patterns of neighbouring carried the argument to caricature. While the image of compulsive conformity and socialization was caricature, it is true that people in the suburbs were more socially homogeneous and more likely to engage in social interaction. There was general agreement that there were some differences, but their consequences were minimal. Nor was there any consensus on why, in suburbs, there was greater involvement with neighbours. Part of the difference, doubtlessly, can be explained by the presence of young children and higher family incomes, but even with these variables taken into account, differences remain. The more localized in nature of suburban friendship networks might simply reflect the relative isolation of the suburb and the greater difficulty of maintaining ties with those more distant. It also was suggested that suburbanites self-select for personality traits favouring sociability. In this view those who opt for the suburbs have chosen a lifestyle emphasizes “familism” over alternatives such as “careerism” and “consumership.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
However, the data do not appear to support this explanation. Research does suggest that the suburban neighbourhood does foster somewhat greater political participation. Suburbanites as a group tend to be somewhat more affluent than city dwellers and desire a more familistic lifestyle. It appears that those living in suburbs have some minor differences in tastes from city dwellers, for example, preferring gardening and rating cultural affairs lower. However, there is no evidence that suburban living changes tastes. Rather, those who value nature tend to gravitate toward suburbs, just as those who prefer easy access to a full cultural life tend to prefer the city. There is no evidence that suburbanites make less use of museums, concert, and art galleries than do otherwise equivalent city dwellers. Expressways allow suburbanites to get to many events as fast as those living in outer-city neighbourhoods. In recent years popular culture, such as first-run movies or sports events, have occurred outside the central city. For example, the Detroit Pistons’ basketball stadium is outside Detroit, and the New York Giants play their football in New Jersey. Needless to say, postwar suburbanites did not view themselves as living lives devoid of culture or as being excessively conforming, hyperactive joiners. They already knew what researcher such as Bennett Berger and Herbert Gans would confirm. That is, the new suburbanites had not given up their individuality, political affiliation, ethnic identity, or religious heritage as they moved houses. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
For good or ill, studies from the era of the 1950s achieved widespread popular as well as professional attention. The Organization Man was a widely read and discussed best-seller. It and its ilk helped set out contemporary view of suburbia suffered from sone serious limitations. One of the most obvious problems was rooted in the authors having preset expectations. Additionally, questions can be asked about how and why the various study sites were chosen. Rather than being “typical” suburbs, it is clear today that the sites were chosen precisely because hey were “interesting.” That is, they were selected because they were in some respects atypical, not because they were just like everyplace else. This approach to selection of a community may lead to more interesting reading, but it by definition limits generalization. The suburbs written about, for example, were almost invariably new, large-scale developments sprouting at the urban periphery. Little or no attention was paid to other types of suburbs, such as industrial suburbs, working-class suburbs, or even old established WASP suburbs. The focus of the studies was on the new middle-class subdivisions built to house young ex-GIs, their wives, and their children. Although it was not scientifically, or even logically, valid to generalize from these new suburbs to all suburbs, this was commonly done. Additionally, many of the studies fell into the so-called ecological fallacy of trying to generalize from the characteristics of an area to the characteristics of all individuals who live in that area. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Furthermore, their observations of supposedly typical suburban lifestyles were based on a single look at a new suburb immediately following the first wave of settlement. We know that a mature community viewed ten or twenty years later shows a different pattern. For example, the supposed social ability of postwar suburbia can be attributed in good part to that fact that because of the limited housing type in each subdevelopment, most of the new inmovers were approximately the same age, had the same aged children, and had the common experience of all moving into similar new houses at the same time. Most of the men also shared common experience of military service. If there was not a high degree of social interaction under such circumstances, it would be unusual. However, when most of life is frightening, and I usually feel inadequate, I may decide that being an onlooker is safer than being a doer: it is less obtrusive and hence less likely to attract hostile notice in my direction. When watching “I” is out of touch with emotions, feelings, and impulses, I develop something like Fairbairn’s Central Ego, one of whose functions is to keep me out of situations so painful that I cannot cope. Being wounded and terrified, people may withdraw into themselves in order to avoid further hurt. The danger is that they will withdraw so far that they will be left totally bereft, and get so far out of touch with their needs and feelings that they get no signals from them: it appears to such people that they have no needs—they do not feel anything. Paradoxically that may be a terrible feeling! #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The memory of having had feelings once, the capacity for which seems now lost, can fill a person with distress and longing. And in the present, I may want to keep in touch with the signals which come to me, yet be afraid of being overwhelmed by them if I do not attend to them. I may oscillate in and out of my feelings because I do not have the energy or strength to contain them at a practical level. There are other examples of the kind of people, people to whom messages from the World of others come only in very shadowy form, people not much in touch with what happens in the World of living-rooms, streets, or media. At first sight, this may not be obvious. However, slowly we realize that we are listening to someone who is not talking about people as we know them, in the round, but about “them.” We are listening to someone who can perceive only a few highly selected aspects of the World of people and things. “They,” the others, are not realistically perceived, but are experienced only in terms of their imagined capacity to assist, threaten, or frustrate. Sometimes, “they” are selectively perceived in such a way that the speaker can be both in touch with feelings, and yet able to keep them remote. “Do not be silly” or “Do not be so depressing” are examples of people speaking repressively to another person, while perhaps at the same time also disowning their own unacceptable notions. “He is out for what he can get” or “She sets her sights too high” may be said principally to enable the speaker to keep his or her own ideas isolated and disowned. Such people sometimes give us the impression that we and others are no experienced as independent people who existed before they walked into the room and who will continue to exist after they are out of sight; we are known only as experiences which must be controlled and kept away from contact with the self-image. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
“Patient: I am very depressed. I had just been sitting and could not get out of the chair. There seems no purpose anywhere: the future is blank. I am very bored and want to change but I feel stuck…
Therapist: Your solution is to damp everything down, do not feel anything, give up all real relationships to people at an emotional level and just ‘do things’ in a meaningless way, like a robot.
Patient: Yes, I felt I did not care, did not register anything. Then I felt alarmed, this was dangerous. If I had not made myself do something, I would just have sat, not bothered, not interested.
Therapist: That is your reaction in analysis to me. Do not be influenced, do not be moved, do not be lured into reacting to me.
Patient: If I were moved at all, I would feel very annoyed with you. I hate and detest you for making me feel like this. The more I am inclined to be drawn to you, the more I feel a fool, undermined.”
Keep in mind that God is restoring to you the years the enemy devoured. And it may not be good to act like a robot, to not have feeling. It could cause you to have an accident. I was doing that one day, while ironing a pillow case and burned it because I was not in touch with what I was doing. It is always import to feel. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
How long with humankind have to go before they realize the only solution to self-annihilation is trust? Cut off from the external World and living in my own phantasy, I cannot feel others, for they are not real to me. My therapist and the other people around me are more than stick figures or balloons which enable me to act according to the phantasies in my head which do seem real to me, regardless of if they open their doors. I can imagine some of them to be so powerful that I must keep an eye on them and manipulate the to keep things smooth for myself, even if they are not knocking on my doors. Or I may act compliant and behave nicely to them because I imagine that is what they want, and I imagine that I must do what they say because they are always right and may feel threatened otherwise. Or I may imagine them as needing my consideration and concern so they will not take their insecurities out of my vehicle, causing me pain and costing me thousands upon thousands of dollars. What I fear to do is to know them as they are, to “discover” them so they do not try to poison me. So I am left with the choice of either feeling well but unreal, or feeling real but terrible and wondering if they are trying to set me up in a clandestine manner. I may veer between these two in an attempt to get some relief from each in turn. Bad relationships may be better than none. Even though they may wish you harm and frustrate, and have no regard for your life, it is hard to do without other people altogether, but it may be a way to say alive. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Yet, I may cling compulsively (and to others eyes tiresomely) to a loved person or valued idea, in order to keep unconscious my feelings about some of their more hateful aspects. Worse, I may cling to a relationship with an unloving or hating or unloved person, in order to keep at bay the sense of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and futility which would result from giving them up and being without anyone at all. Some people may be able to keep anxieties at bay by relating mainly to causes and ideas, and interacting with other people mainly through these. “If I stop believing in what holds me together and gives meaning to my life, only constant and unremitting self-monitoring will keep me from falling apart. I shall believe in psycho-analysis or monetarism or Adam and the Ants—they make life work living.” Somewhat better off are those people who can relate to others more directly, provided everyone’s duties and roles are carefully and minutely defined. They relate to others mainly in the meticulous execution of tasks, not risking more unpredictable and spontaneous contacts. Then there are people who prefer some kind of in/out compromise. However weakened they may be by the continual advance and retreat, it is better than nothing. Yet others may be able to make relationships, albeit tainted by fear and suspicion because they cannot help feeling that people are dangerous and easily cruel or mean. It is hard to do without people and relationships. When I fear and avoid them, something happens to myself, the self which needs to be attached to and in touch with others. Void and emptiness threaten me. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
My very identity feels as though it is disintegrating—it lacks boundaries where I should be in touch with others. I mobilize a host of defences. I look depressed, I feel depressed. However, this depression may be what I hold on to as a defence against feeling overwhelmingly anxious. And indeed, the anxieties which a person is willing to know about may be a cover to conceal anxieties about falling apart or ceasing to be a person at all. The defences against falling apart may be strong enough to be called False Selves; they may be the only parts of the personality that a terrified person dare show. One of the attractive things about this insistence on a person’s defences, is we do not speak of the False Self in condemnatory terms; we see it as a necessary defensive organization, a survival kit, a caretake self, the means by which a threatened person has managed to survive. It is worth reminding oneself, when exasperated by someone who acts flighty, irresponsible, dishonest, evasive, or snooty, that these are all defensive plays. A frightened person may make a show of anger as a way of hiding weak, scared feelings. It is easy for others to see such a person as an angry person (and to attempt a therapy on the basis of the hidden anger and the guilt which goes with it—after all, hidden anger and guilt form par of the psychoneurotic personality which was the first to be analysed and restored to relative well-being by Dr. Freud nearly a hundred years ago). However, anger and hidden guilt are not at the root of all distress, and it is possible to use the appearance of hidden anger as a defence against even ore unacceptable feelings. Our culture has a preference for these “strong” feelings. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In a word, the core of psychological distress is not guilt but fear. Guilt is itself a form of fear, but it arises at he stage when the child is becoming socialized and capable of realizing the effect of actions on other person, and the nature of their reactions of anger and condemnation. The individual feels ashamed, sad and frightened to find that one has hurt those one loves and needs. There are much more primitive fears than that, fears not the effect of our strong and dangerous needs and impulses, but of our infantile weakness, littleness, and helplessness in the face of an environment which either fails to give the support we needed as infants or else was positively threatening. Human beings all prefer to be bad and strong rather than weak. The diagnosis of guilt allows us to feel that the course of our troubles with ourselves and others is possession of mighty and powerful instinctive forces in our make-up, which take a great deal of controlling and civilizing. The philosophies of Nietzsche and Machiavelli, and the “power politics” of the present age, all make it plain that human beings feel at least a secret and often openly admitted admiration for the ruthless strong human, however bad one’s ideas and actions may be. In our competitive New World culture (including communism which is every bit as competitive as capitalism) contempt is felt for weakness. We have always known that sympathetic care for the weak and suffering, fostered by Christianity, had to fight its way forwards, and survive on the basis of much compromise; s in the often cited cases of Victorian capitalist who made fortunes by the most ruthless business methods on the one hand, and endowed churched, charities and hospitals on the other. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The main stream of the World’s active life has been carried on in the tradition of the struggle for power in which the weakest go to the wall. The superman is the criminal who has the courage to fight and does not mind hurting other people. The Christian with one’s slave-morality of self-sacrifice to save others is weak and gets crucified. A diagnosis which traced psychological troubles to our innate strength supports our self-respect and is what is called today an ego-booster. A diagnosis which traces our troubles to deep-seated fears and feelings of weakness in the face of life has always been unacceptable. To protect against occurrences like these, we have to take some positive steps. If we do not, they will continue to trip us up. Scrutinize our Externals and Internals, that is what we have to do, and make whatever realignments are necessary. Why? Because properly pave, both speed the journey toward perfection. You cannot keep yourself in a continuous state of recollection in the monastic life. You know that already, but know also that recollect you must. When? Not les than once a day. Morning or evening? In the morning make a plan; in the evening, check how you did, that is to say, what and how you did in word, deed, and thought. Why? More often than you would like to thin, you have offended God and neighbour in one manner or another. No droopy drawers here! Cinch up that cinture! Be a self-actualized being and face the diabolical onslaught head on! That is what St. Paul exhorted the Ephesians to d (6.11-17). Rein in your gluttony, and you will find it easier to bridle every others inclination of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Never drop your guard. Read or write or pray or meditate, but whatever you do, busy yourself at all time with some form of labour for the community. When it comes to corporal austerities, forget what everybody else does. Use your head. Sting, do not wound. No more. No less. Personal prayers inside the walls should not be paraded around outside the walls. The reason for that is simple. When you pray by yourself, you can hurt only yourself; that is to say, no damage is done to others. As for your own spiritual life, do not become a pig about it, too lazy to come to chapel, yet strong enough to wallow through your own peculiosities. The community’s regular spiritual exercise, participate in them wholeheartedly and single-mindedly. Beyond that—and God forbid there is any time left over!—you can pray yourselves silly. Let devotion be your guide. All spiritual exercise are suitable for all self-actualized. Sadly, not all these exercises are equally profitable to each self-actualized. Happily, no two self-actualized have the same taste. As the year passes, the many varietals of spiritual exercise are always welcomed by a monastic community. Some are good on feasts; others, no ferials. Temptation requires one sort; peace and quiet, quite another. And so on, from the times of spiritual sadness, when the dry tears sting, to the sweet weepiness of True Spiritual Joy. Any say is a hard day to renew our spiritual exercises, but when the principal feast days roll around, it all seems so easy. And, only if the are asked, the Saints, they are waiting to help; they only pretend to be hard of hearing. From one feast day to the next, we ought o make resolutions as if they will be our last. However, how can we do this? We could imagine we are about to take wing from this World to a perch in the next. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
And so we should make these times devout times, preparing ourselves carefully, passing our time prayerfully, and guarding our every observance of the Holy Rule more strictly. What is the rush? In no time we will be brough before the Final Bar, attempting to cash in on our life of spiritual labour. If we mistook the time of departure, let us put the blame on ourselves. From our point of view, we were not all that well enough prepared; from God’s point of view, we are not yet ready for glory. St. Paul described that state in his Letter to the Romans (8.18). As for the next date of departure, who knows? Whenever it is, let us strive to prepare better for the trip out there. “Blessed is the servant,” wrote the Evangelist Luke (12.37, 42), “who, when his Lord came, was found awake. Amen I say to you, all God’s goods will be put under his servant’s watchful eye.” Llanda Villa, Beautiful Victorian. Perfect Grand Queen Anne Victorian Manion by the last Bay in the World. None more beautiful. Today we kneel at Thy feet and cruse the humans who have misused you. Dear Lord in the Shining Heaven, please bless us with insight in this hour of grief, that from the depths of suffering may come a deepened sympathy for all who are bereaved, that we may feel the heart-break of our fellow humans and spirits and find our strength in helping them. Heartened by this hymn of praise to Thee, we bear our sorrow with trustful hearts, and knowing Thou art near, shall not despair. With faith in Thine eternal wisdom, we who mourn, rise to sanctify Thy name. A wise system of healing would coordinate physical and psychological, artificial and natural, dietary and spiritual treatments, using some or all of them as a means to the end—cure. However, as the spiritual is the supreme therapeutic agent—if it can be touched—it will always be the one last resort for the desperate and chronic sufferers when all other agents have had to accept defeat. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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O Wicked Wit and Gifts that Have the Power So to Seduce!
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange story. Almost all humans are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a lister’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a devil, would have no fear mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before one would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequences is, that the general stock of experiences in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect. The Devil had been raised among us, and his rage was vehement and terrible; and, when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows. It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in Boston in 1688, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murders as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and if I could, I would bury the memory this this atrocious eminence, as hi body was buried, in the Witch House’s basement. When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicious fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As no reference was at the time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered. Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief observed the absence of the dead body from the bed. As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger posses of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. John Hathorne asked most of the questions and established the judicial attitude that was to prevail throughout most of the examinations and the trials. Many people suspected that the devil killed this man and he had been summoned by Sarah Good because she had also been accused of bewitching a few girls in the town. Mr. Hathorne asked the children to look at Sarah God and say whether she was one who afflicted them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
They accused her to her face, “upon which they were all dreadfully tortured and tormented for a short space of time.” When they recovered from their fits, they charged her with causing them, saying that her specter had come and tormented them although her body remained “at a considerable distance from them.” This was spectral evidence, that is, evidence concerning a specter or apparition of the accused, rather than her bodily person. It was eventually to become the central legal issue of the trials, but at the moment we need only see why it seemed initially so convincing to the examining magistrates. Here were girls afflicted with violent physical symptoms which had no known physical cause, but which a physician had attributed to witchcraft. There was a malicious old woman accused of causing them. When the sufferers accused her they were immediately thrown into convulsions. What could be more plausible than that the convulsions were inflicted as revenge for the accusation? Yet such behaviour was still unfamiliar enough in Salem so that one of the recorders noted that “none here see the [specters of the] witches but the afflicted and themselves.” However, the change was so startling that I fully believed the girls derived their impression in some occult manner. For instance, we knew there was something occult going on because the throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech for the defense, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat in the dreadful condition referred to. Yet, it would have been impossible for such a wound to be self-inflicted by either hand. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Certainly, Mr. Hathorne was convinced; when the children had recovered and repeated their accusation he turned to the accused woman. “Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you this torment these people children?” Certainly many of her neighbours though her malicious, since they attributed to her a number of inexplicable events, including the death of a cow which perished in a “sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner.” Such testimony was common in witchcraft cases, and it has caused much unseemly hilarity among the modern historians. It is likely, they have asked, that His Satanic Majesty the Devil or any of his minions would stop to concern themselves with the fate of a New England cow? The answer is that nothing is more likely. What else would a fertility god concern himself with but the health or sickness of crops, of animals, and of humans? From the standpoint of a society that still remembered who the Devil was, no testimony could be more relevant. As a matter of fact, the village witches who still exist in rural England are often expert in folk medicines, human and animal, as well as charms, and until recently many of them were midwives. Sarah Osburn also denied that she had hurt anyone, but the girls feel again into fits. Mr. Hathorne asked her how this happened. Perhaps, she said, the Devil went about in her likeness doing harm, but she knew nothing about it. Sarah Osburn was the first at Salem to assert the principle that the Devil can impersonate an innocent person. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Whether the devil could or not was a matter of debate in the seventeenth century, but most Protestant authorities agreed with Goodwife Obsurn that, as Hamlet put it, “The Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape.” However, the principle was not discussed at this hearing, since Sarah Osburn was a likely a suspect as Sarah Good, if for no other reason than her lying. Lying was still considered a serious sin in the seventeenth century, and a crime as well, legally punishable by the courts. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believed, had any one in Court. When Mr. Hathorne tried to find out how well Sarah Osburn knew Sarah Good she said she did not know her by name. Mr. Hathorne asked if Sarah Osburn had been tempted by the devil, and she said no. Why then, he asked, had not she been at church? She had been sick, she said, and unable to go. However, her husband and others contradicted her. “She had not been at meeting,” they said, “this year and two months.” To understand why the matter of church attendance was considered so significant one must remember that the seventeenth century saw witchcraft as literal Devil worship, and therefore as a rival religion to Christianity. This is why the magistrates sometimes asked accused persons, as they asked Sarah Good, what God they served. And if the accused person avoided speaking the name of God (as Sarah Good did), they had reason to think it a suspicious circumstance. The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the judge, on the other side of the court. He slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. Then he collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The examinations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn afford grounds for suspicion and for further examination. However, the major event of that first day of March was the examination of Tituba. It began like the others, but it changed very quickly: “Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” “None.” “Why do you hurt these children?” “I do not hurt them.” “Who is it then?” “The Devil, for aught I know.” “Did you never see the Devil?” “The Devil,” said Tituba, “came to me and bid me serve him.” She went on, with a minimum of judicia prodding, to provide a detailed confession of witchcraft, the first of approximately fifty that were made during the Salem trials. On March first and second, in her examination, Tituba said that the Devil had come to her in the shape of a man—a tall man in black, with white hair. Other times he had come in the shape of an animal. He had told her he was God, that she must believe him and serve him six years, and he would give her many fine things. He had shown her a book and she had made a mark in it, a mark that was “red like blood.” Many people thought this to be a revelation. “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the Earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to comedown from Heaven to Earth in full view of men. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“He ordered them to set up an image in honour of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless one had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name,” reports Revelation 13.11-17. Sarah Osburn was to die there on the tenth of May. Tituba, like later confessors, was never brought to trial. She lay in jail until she was sold to pay the jailer’s fees, her master refusing to pay them. Sarah Good was brought to trial. Another reaction to Tituba’s confession was to confirm the community in its fear of witchcraft, and particularly its fear of the three accused women. The night of March First William Allen and John Hughes heard a strange noise; it continued frightening them, but the approached and “saw a strange and unusual beast lying on the ground. Going up to it, the said beast vanished away and in the said place started up two or three women fled, not after the manner of other women but swiftly vanished out of sight, which women we took to be Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The next night William Allen again had hallucinations: “Sarah Good visibly appeared to him in his chamber, said Allen being in bed, and brought an unusual light with her. The said Sarah came and sat upon his foot. The said Allen went to kick at her, upon which she vanished and the light with her.” Notice that in this hallucination as in many others the hallucination stops as soon as the subject is able to move or speak. A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, “curse” may refer to such a wish or pronouncement made effective by a supernatural or spiritual power, such as a god, or gods, a spirit, or natural force, or else as a kind of spell by magic or witchcraft. The Winchester rifle is a handsome gun that legend has it was forged in Hell. Whoever possesses the cursed rife either suffers disaster or fortune. Oliver Fisher Winchester was an American businessman and politician, best known as being the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Oliver Winchester was born November 30, 1810 and dead December 10, 1880. Oliver Winchester was known for manufacturing and marketing the Winchester repeating rifle, which was a much re-designed descendant of the Volcanic rifle of some years earlier. Mr. Winchester was more learned than his kind in the mysteries of a deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination. He was a man highly honoured for his natural gifts and knowledge of learned books which nobody else could read, that was when he took his second orders the bishop gave him a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his shoulders in which, and his lordship had put such power into it that, when the parson has it rightly on, he could govern any ghost or evil spirit, and even stop an Earthquake. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Such a powerful man, in combat with supernatural visitations discovered that a division of Smith & Wesson firearms was failing financially with one of their newly patented arms. Having an eye for opportunity, Mr. Winchester assembled venture capital together with other stockholders and acquired the Smith & Wesson division, better known as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principle stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, and changed the name to New Haven Arms Company. After experiencing a slow start, and then a booming success with the Henry rifle, the company reorganized once again and the first Winchester rifle was the Model 1866, which had been nicknamed the Yellow Boy. The gun was called Yellow Boy because it should be remembered that, howsoever strange and singular it may sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance at his own hands. Gradually Mr. Winchester amassed a considerable fortune. When Mr. Oliver Winchester died on December 10, 1880, his ownership in the company passed to his son, William Wirt Winchester (who married Sarah Lockwood Pardee in 1862), and died March 7 1881 at the young age of 43. The couple has also had a child, Annie Pardee Winchester, born June 15, 1866, and died 6 weeks later on July 25, 1866. Mrs. Winchester was deeply troubled by the loss of her daughter. In the course of her daily walk, she had to pass a certain heath or down where the road wound along through tall blocks of granite with open spaces of grassy sward between them. #RandpolphHarris 9 of 13
There in a certain spot, and always in the same place, she declared that she encountered, every day, a baby with a pale and troubled face, clothed in a little dress of white pique, made with two skirts. The pique was cut slightly Gabriele, and rounded off in the front with scallops, bound with white braid, with a button in each scallop, and ribbon-sash, tied at the left side, with one hand always stretched forth, and the other pressed against her side. “She is my baby,” Mrs. Winchester would say, and she often used to come to her parents house in New Haven; but that which troubled her was, that she had now been dead three years, and she had seen her body laid in the grave at her burial, this that she saw every day must needs be her soul or ghost. The hair of the appearance, sayth Mrs. Winchester, is not like anything alive, but it is so soft and light that it seemth to melt away while you look; but her eyes are set, and never blink—no, not when the sun shineth full upon her face. She maketh no steps, but seemth to swim along the top of the grass; and her hand, which is stretched out alway, seemth to point to something far away, out of sight. It is her continual coming; for she never failth to meet Mrs. Winchester, and to pass on, that hath quenched her spirits; and although she never seeth her by night, yet cannot she get her natural rest. Mrs. Winchester went to see a doctor who told her, “The case is strange but by no means impossible. It is one that I will study, and fear not to handle, if you will be free with me, and fulfill all that I desire.” Mrs. Winchester was overjoyed, but she perceived that the doctor turned pale, and was downcast with some thought which, however, he did not express. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The doctor knew that this might be a doemonium meridianum, the most stubborn spirit to govern and guide that any human can meet, and the most perilous withal. He made an appointment to go with Mrs. Winchester to the spot where she had these encounters. They had hardly reached the accustomed spot, when they both saw her at once gliding towards them; punctually as the ancient writers describe their “lemures, which swoon along the ground, neither marking the sand nor bending the herbage.” The aspect of the baby girl was exactly that which had been related by Mrs. Winchester. There was a pale and stony face, the strange misty hair, the eyes firm and fixed, that gazed, yet not on them, but on something that they saw far, far away; one hand and arm stretched out, and the other grasping the girdle of her waist. She floated along the field like upon a stream, and glided past the spot where they stood, pausingly. But so deep was the awe that came over the doctor, as he stood there in the light of day, face to face with a human soul separate from her bones and flesh, that his heart and purpose both failed him. He had resolved to speak to the spectre in the appointed form of words, but he did not. He stood like one amazed and speechless, until she had passed clean of out sight. When they returned to the house, and after he had said all he could to pacify Mrs. Winchester, he took leave for that time, with a promise that when he had fulfilled certain business elsewhere, when then he alleged, he would return and take orders to assuage these disturbances and their cause. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The doctor later told Mrs. Winchester that he thought it was best that they try an exorcism, but his Church, as is well known, hath abjured certain branches of her ancient powers, on grounds of perversion and abuse. So he referred her to a medium. The medium told Mrs. Winchesters, “There is a danger from the demons, but so there is in the surrounding air every day.” There was a kind of trouble in the air, a soft rippling sound, and all at once the shape appeared, and came towards the medium gradually. She opened her parchment scroll, and read aloud the command. The spirit paused, and seemed to waver and doubt; stood still; then she rehearsed the sentence again, sounding out every syllable like a chant. The spirit then swam into the midst of the circle, and there stood still, suddenly. Her knees shook under her, and the drops of sweat ran down her flesh like rain. But, although face to face with the spirit, the medium’s heart grew calm, and her mind was composed. The spirit then commanded Mrs. Winchester to move West and build a mansion in honour of the spirit killed by the Winchester rifle and “as long as the hammer keep pounding, her heart would continue to beat.” The medium dismissed the troubled ghost, until she peacefully withdrew, gliding towards the west. Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose, which was near her family Member, Enoch Pardee, an occultist, prominent physician, free mason, and Mayor of Oakland, California USA, had built his family’s mansion in 1868, which is now known as the Pardee House Museum. Masonry has influenced more the modern witchcraft; it has influenced dozens of occult orders. Mrs. Winchester bought a farm house and built a massive mansion. There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the Winchester mansion through the nineteenth century. The estate in those days was in a transitory state, and Mrs. Winchester, like her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the new interpretation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, the mansion is now flanked by a pleasantness, a beautiful garden and lawn, and it is surrounded by a sole grove of palm trees. It has also the aspect of age and of solitude, and looks the very scene of harmony and supernatural events. A legend might well belong to every beautiful glade of grass around, and there must surely be a haunted room somewhere within its walls. The incredible mansion, scenery of the legend still survives, and, like the field of the forty footsteps in another history, the place is still visited by those who take interests in the supernatural tales of old and new. Freemasons supposedly conducted a séance in the mansion in August of 2019. A phantom made an answer willingly. It stated, “before the next Yule-tide, a fearful pestilence will lay waste the land, and myriads of souls will be loosened from the flesh, until our valleys will be full.” The general facts stated in this diary are to these matters of belief accounted a strong proof of the veracity of the Ghost that the plague, fatal to so many millions, did break out in the global village at the close of the year. How sorely must the infidels and heretics of this generation be dismayed when they know that this Black Death, which is now swallowing its thousands in the streets of the great city, was foretold several months before the outbreak, under the séance of a freemason, by a visible and suppliant ghost! And what pleasure and improvements do such deny themselves who scorn and avoid all opportunity of intercourse with souls separate, and the spirits, glad and sorrowful, which inhabit the unseen World! May they who observe the Sabbath and call it a delight, rejoice in Thy Kingdom. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the most desirable of the days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Today is the return of our guided Mansion Tour! The tour guide-led experience allows guests to access areas of the mansion that have been closed since March 2020. Click the link in our bio for more information. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
Scripture Does Not Confine “Soulishness” to Humans and Neither Does Biology!
California is part of the United States of America, the most powerful country in the World. Now, I am not expecting you to believe me, but what I tell you is he truth. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. Every civilization has a hidden code—a set of rules or principles that run through all its activities like a repeated design. As industrialism pushed across the planet, its unique hidden design became visible. It consisted of a set of six interrelated principles that programmed the behaviour of millions. Growing naturally out of the divorce of production and consumption, these principles affected every aspect of life from romance and sports to work and national security. Much of the angry conflict in our schools, businesses, and governments today actually centers on these half-dozen principles, as Second Wave people instinctively apply and defend them and Third Wave people challenge and attack them. However, this is getting ahead of the story. The most familiar of these Second Wave principles is standardization. Everyone knows that industrial societies turn out millions of identical products. Fewer people have stopped to notice, however, that once the market became important, we did more than simply standardize Coca-Cola bottles, light bulbs, and automobile transmissions. We applied the same principle to many other things. Among the first to grasp the importance of this idea was Theodore Vail who, at the turn of the century, built the American Telephone & Telegraph Company into a giant. (Not to be confused with the multinational ITT, the International Telephone & Telegraph Corporations.) #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
Working as a railway postal clerk in the late 1860’s, Mr. Vail had noticed that no two letters necessarily when to their destination via the same route. Sacks of mail traveled back and forth, often taking weeks or months to reach their destinations. Mr. Vail introduced the idea of standardized routing—all letter going to the same place would go the same way—and helped revolutionize the post office. When he later formed AT&T, he set out to place an identical telephone in every American home. Mr. Vail standardized not only the telephone handset and all its components but AT&T’s business procedures and administration as well. In a 1908 advertisement he justified his swallowing up small telephone companies by arguing for “a clearing-house of standardization” that would ensure economy in “construction of equipment, lines and conduit, as well as in operating methods and legal work,” not to mention “a uniform system of operating and accounting.” What Mr. Bail recognized is that to succeed in the Second Wave environment, “software”—id est, procedures and administrative routines—had to be standardized along with hardware. Mr. Vail was only one of the Great Standardizers who shaped industrial society. Another was Frederick Winslow Taylor, a machinist turned crusader, who believed that work could be made scientific by standardizing the steps each worker performed. In the early decades of this century Mr. Taylor decided that there was one best (standard) way to perform each job, one best (standard) tool to perform it with, and a stipulated (standard) time in which to complete it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
Armed with this philosophy, Mr. Taylor became the World’s leading management guru. In his time, and later, he was compared with Dr. Freud, Karl Marx, and Benjamin Franklin. Nor were capitalist employers, eager to squeeze the last ounce of productivity from their workers, alone in their admiration for Taylorism, with its efficiency experts, piecework schemes, and rate-busters. Communists shared their enthusiasm. Indeed, Vladimir Lenin urged Mr. Taylor’s methods be adapted for use in socialist production. An industrializer first and a Communist second, Mr. Lenin, too, was a believer in standardization. In Second Wave societies, hiring procedures as well as work were increasingly standardized. Standardized tests were used to identify and weed out the supposedly unfit, especially in the civil service. Pay scales were standardized throughout whole industries, along with fringe benefits, lunch hours, holidays, and grievance procedures. To prepare youth for the job market, educators designed standardized curricula. Men alike Alfred Binet and Lewis Terman devised standardized intelligence tests. School grading policies, admission procedures, and accreditation rules were similarly standardized. The multiple-choice test came into its own. The mass media, meanwhile, disseminated standardizing imagery, so that millions read the same advertisements, the same news, the same short stories. The repression of language used by marginalized ethnicities and cultures was implemented by central governments, combined with the influence of mass communications, led to the near disappearance of local and regional dialects or even whole languages, such as Welsh and Alsatian. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
“Standard” American, English, French, or, for that matter, Russian, supplanted “nonstandard” languages. Different parts of the country began to look alike, as identical gas stations, billboards, and houses cropped up everywhere. The principle of standardization ran through every aspect of daily life. At an even deeper level, industrial civilization needed standardized weights and measures. It is no accident that one of the first acts of the French Revolution, which ushered the age of industrialism into France, was an attempt to replace the crazy-quilt patchwork of measuring units, common in preindustrial Europe, with the metric system and a new calendar. Uniform measures were spread through much of the World by the Second Wave. Moreover, if mass production required the standardization of machines, products, and processes, the ever-expanding market demanded a corresponding standardization of money, and even prices. Historically, money had been issued by banks and private individuals as well as by kings. Even as late as the nineteenth century privately minted money was still in use in parts of the United States of America, and the practice lasted until 1935 in Canada. Gradually, however, industrializing nations suppressed all nongovernmental currencies and managed to impose a single standard currency in their place. Until the nineteenth century, moreover, it was still common for buyers and sellers in industrial countries to haggle over every sale in the time-honoured fashion of a Cairo bazaar. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
In 1825 a young Northern Irish immigrant named A. T. Stewart arrived in New York, opened a dry-goods store, and shocked customers and competitors alike by introducing a fixed price for every item. This one-price policy—price standardization—made Mr. Stewart one of the merchant princes of his era and cleared away one of the key obstacles to the development of mass distribution. Whatever their other disagreements, advanced Second Wave thinks shared the conviction that standardization was efficient. At many levels, therefore, the Second Wave brought a flattening out of differences through a relentless application of principle of standardization. Speculators were quick to see the financial opportunities in building commuter suburbs. Many of those who invested in streetcar lines were primarily interested in real estate profits rather than managing transit companies. Real estate speculators realized that having a streetcar line running to their properties did wonders for sales. The trolley was a subdivider’s dream, since previously marginal land that had been purchased at low cost could not be subdivided and sold at tremendous profit. Thus, for example, in Boston, the West End Line was originally established from Boston to Brookline by Henry Whitney to attract customers to his land. Nor was land speculation restricted to the largest cities. In Richmond, Virginia, where the electric streetcar had been invented, William Ginter built a streetcar line at his own expense in order to boom his north side upper-class commuter suburb of Ginter Parl. The streetcar line lost money, but the development more than made up for it in sold lots. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
The most extensive system created primarily to sell real estate was developed by Henry E. Huntington in the Los Angeles, California USA area. His Pacific Electric Railway Company operated an extensive system of “Big Red” interurbans (heavier built streetcars for longer runs). Interurbans radiated out from Los Angeles throughout the Los Angeles basin area. Huntington consciously operated interurban streetcar lines to new areas at a loss in order to spur sales of his real estate holdings. Decades before the automobile was a potent force, Huntington’s interurbans had invented urban sprawl. Trying together spatially separate new communities of homeowners, the streetcars created the multicentered Los Angeles of today. Automobiles are often blamed for the sprawl of Los Angeles area; but the automobile did not create the sprawl—it simply allowed the orange groves between communities to be filled in. None of this is to suggest that trolley lines were not economic money-makers in their own right. Electrification of existing horsecar lines and consolidation of smaller companies into traction franchises made huge fortunes for company owners. The handful of owners of New York’s Metropolitan Street Railway Company made $100,000, 000 USD (approximately $3,130,174, 418.60 in 2021 dollars). In Chicago, Charles Yerkes, by astute business sense and a willingness to use bribery and unethical practices, had consolidated most of that city’s streetcars under his control. In so doing, he also became one of the most hated men in the city. His arrogant demand that he be given the sole franchise for the city for fifty years only failed to pass a bribed Chicago City Council because of the outage of an armed mob of city residents who stormed City Hall. (Unrepentant, Yerkes moved to England and bought the London Underground.) #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
Only after World War I did the streetcar companies, with their fixed nickel fares, increasing operating and maintenance costs, and aging equipment, becomes money-loosing operations. By this time, earlier excesses of the traction companies had made fare increases virtually impossible. In city after city transit companies were being sandwiched between rising costs and fixed revenues. Particularly during World War I, there were sharp increases in the wages paid transit operators, and older, heavily used equipment needed replacement. Most transit system, however, were tied to a 5-cent fare, and any attempt to raise fares led to massive public outcries. Given the fortunes made by earlier transit owner “robber barons,” there was little public sympathy for transit companies. Now was there any support for public subsidies or tax relief for what were seen as private companies. The use of public monies for the building and maintenance of roads for automobile usage was, on the other hand, viewed as necessary. Streetcar companies thus cut back on service and equipment, which in turned caused them to lose more riders to the faster and more flexible automobiles. Nor could bus lines ever win back automobile users. In spite of the riches initially going to the owners and investors, the electric street railways were a bargain for passengers. The standard fare was 5 cents, which was half the cost of the horsecars. Moreover, the consolidated trolley lines would take one anywhere in the system, and transfers were free. At the turn of the century, the trolleys were transporting customers to the extent of 2 billion trips a year. The streetcar had become an American way of life. From this point on, American city dwellers, and more important, suburbanites, would take easy and rapid mobility for granted as a basic right. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
While the electric streetcar made middle-class suburbanization possible, the automobile was to make suburbanization the dominant residential pattern. As the twentieth century opened, the automobile was strictly a novelty—a rich man’s plaything. In all North America, there were only 8,000 horseless carriages, and most of these both expensive and highly unreliable vehicles. What changed North America into a continent of automobiles was Henry Ford’s Model T. The Model T was first introduced in 1908 and remained in production until 1927. The use of assembly line techniques and few variations (exempli gratia, Model T’s came in one colour—black) meant that the price of the “flivver” kept dropping during the two decades of its production. By the mid-1920s, a new basic Model T, which, when introduced, had cost $950.00 ($14,613.44 in 2021 dollars), could be bought for under $300 ($4,614.77 in 2021 dollars), while used models sold for as little as $50.00 ($769.13 in today’s dollars). (This promoted a social revolution as well, for it meant that young people with autos could easily escape the chaperonage of adults.) Ford’s assembly lines revolutionized auto manufacture by turning out a thousand completed cars every working day. The Model T looked ungainly, but although modestly powered, it was remarkably durable and dependable. Its high ground clearance meant it could navigate even rutted country roads, and it was so simple to repair that any farm boy could fix it. Moreover, the “Tin Lizzie” was inexpensive enough for the average middle-class urban or farm family to own. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
By the time Ford finally brought out his new Model A in 1927, some 16 million Model T’s had been built, and every second vehicle on the road was a Ford. The rise in automobile registrations indicated how Ford’s assembly lines were bringing a revolution that was changing the face of America. Registrations jumped from 2.5 million in 1915 to 9 million in 1920. This was in spite of automobiles being defined as nonessential for production during the 1917-1918 period, when he United States of America was in World War I. By 1930 auto registrations has skyrocketed to 26.5 million, and in spite of the Great Depression, another 4.5 million cars were added during the 1930s. (Today the United States has 276 million cars registered with a population of 332 million people.) The widespread usage of automobiles by the 1920s meant that cars were being increasingly viewed as necessities rather than as simply recreational vehicles. The Sunday afternoon ride in the car might still take place, but for those suburbanites located near a rail or streetcar track, the auto was a commuting necessity. The automobile made possible the development of previously inaccessible land not served by mass transit. The consequence was a suburban middle-class housing boom in the 1920s. The wide interstitial areas between the transit lines could now be profitably developed. Land speculators, home builders, and those middle-class families owning an automobile no longer were tied to narrow corridors of development. By 1941 the Bureau of Public Roads reported that over 2,100 communities ranging in size up to 50,000 population were without any form of public transportation. Those commuters who could afford the cost of an auto could now drive to work and live where they pleased within a reasonable commuting distance. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
Automobile suburbs were built at lower densities than earlier suburbs that were tied to fixed transit lines. Both newer and more established suburbs also began using the newly developed planning tool of zoning in order to exclude not only commercial activities but also inexpensive homes on small lots. Zoning laws came into widespread usage following the pioneering New York City Zoning Resolution of 1916 and subsequent court cases that ruled that zoning was a legal use of the police power of a municipality. Suburbs, whether upper or middle class, also sought to exclude not only less expensive homes, but also residents who did not match the racial, ethnic, and even religious makeup of existing residents. This was done in two ways. The simplest and most effective was through pressure on realtors not to show or sell homes to unwanted groups. Thus, if it were an all-Protestant suburb, Catholics or Jewish would be “steered” to other areas. The second method used was that of establishing for an area exclusive “restrictive covenants.” Restrictive covenants placed legal restrictions on property deeds, which prevented the resale of the property to specific groups. Some groups would have to pay well above market price, even if others were not interested in the home, just to be able to buy into the community because no one would sale to them or would not sale to them unless it was well above market value. As of 1950 over thirty-three percent of the homes in Los Angeles, California had restrictive covenants. By means of restrictive covenants and informal real estate practices, pre-World War II suburbs were stratified tightly according to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Only in 1948 did the Supreme Court say such restrictions were unenforceable, and not until the 1968 Fair Housing Act were restrictive covenants declared illegal. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
During the 1920 middle-class, auto-based suburbs sprang up surrounding every major city. The pattern of auto-based suburbs continued, although at a far reduced pace, throughout the Depression years of 1930s. By the eve of World War II, the auto had become the prime means of suburbanites, and even many city dwellers, commuting to work. This was true even in the older suburbs having public transit. In fact, by the beginning of the 1930s, over half of the commuter in all but the largest cities already were driving to work. Commuters in New York and Chicago still relied primarily on mass transit lines, but mot of those in Washington, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Kanas City, and Los Angeles drove. New York, and to a lesser extent Chicago, retained reliance on public transport in the center of the city both because there were few places for commuters to park their automobiles. Even today one finds New Yorkers who do not and cannot drive. However, in smaller cities, even before the mass suburbanization following World War II, the American suburbanite was committed to automobile commuting. Commuter suburbs built before the second World War largely were bedroom suburbs. They remained dependent on the central city for employment, entertainment, major shopping, and most services. However, they were fiercely politically and legally independent. The result was that the city, which had earlier lost it ability to annex suburbs along the railroad and streetcar corridors, now was virtually surrounded by suburban entities. The city had been encircled and banded by a ring of municipalities so that annexation was virtually impossible. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
All of the consequences of this inability to expand were not perceived in the 1920s and 1930s. During the 1920s, the cities were economically strong, and during the Depression the focus was on retrenchment. There was little concern about the problems of suburbs liming city growth. Only during the housing boom following World War II did all of the consequences of banding the city with a ring of independent suburbs become evident. Evolutionary psychologists have explored our presumed human special capacity for altruism—for selflessly helping and caring for others. The theologian Jurgen Moltmann has said that self-giving is “God’s trinitarian nature, and is therefore a mark of all His works.” Clearly, self-giving is found not just in God’s human work. “Aiding others at the cost or risk to oneself is widespread in the animal kingdom,” notes Frans de Waal. So, there goes another claim to our uniqueness. Scripture does not confine “soulishness” to humans and neither does biology. However, as we have also seen, just because two behaviours are superficially similar is no reason to assume that the underlying mechanism and thinking patterns are identical. Self-giving, self-sacrificing behaviours are superficially similar is no reason to assume that the underlying mechanisms and thinking patterns are identical. Self-giving, self-sacrificing behaviour appears in different animals. However, that in itself tell us nothing about what underlies those behaviours. Self-giving behaviour may, for example, occur with or without self-awareness. Dr. De Waal had no doubt that “evolution has produced the requisites for mortality: a tendency to develop social norms and enforce the, to capacities of empathy and sympathy, mutual assistance and a sense of fairness, the mechanisms of conflict resolution, and so on.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
It seems, therefore, that there are good arguments for believing that some aspects of self-giving and self-limiting behaviour have developed over evolutionary history and become more and more pronounced among nonhuman primates. Those of us who begin from theistic presuppositions can see embedded with creation the seeds, development, and fruit of self-giving behaviour, which is built into the brain and has fully flowered in humankind. Such behaviour is not rigidly determined but is expressed moment to moment as people live in community and make personal choices. We need not deny the emergence of self-giving behaviour, which is built into the brain and has fully flowered in humankind. Such behaviour is not rigidly determined but is expressed moment to moment as people live in community and make personal choices. We need not deny the emergence of self-giving altruism in primate in order to defend the unique self-emptying sacrifice of Jesus Christ. That, we believe, was a unique and ultimate act that sets Christ apart from all others. If evolutionary science nevertheless seems to erode one’s sense of our mystery and spiritual significance, consider this: knowing how something came to be and how it works need never destroy our appreciation for its beauty and uniqueness. A music student who comes to understand the physics of organ sound can still savour the grandeur of Bach played on a great organ. As long ago as the fifth century, St. Augustine was able to express this awe from human creatures embedded in a long history: “The Universe was brought into being in a less than fully formed state, but was gifted with the capacity to transform itself from unformed matter into a truly marvelous array of structures and life forms.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
Looking back to the birth of the Universe also evokes our sense of awe. It blows our minds—the entire Universe apparently inflating in an essential instant from a mere point to cosmological size. Scientists tells us that if energy in this Big Bang hand been infinitesimally less, the Universe would have collapsed back on itself. Had it been the teeniest bit more, the resulting thin Universe would never have supported life. As it is, the Universe is exquisitely “fine-tuned,” just precisely right to produce intelligent beings. Is there a benevolent Creator behind it? Although science is silent on that, it does offer us an amazing picture of an extraordinary nature that over time has given rise to everything from bacteria to the human brain. Our nature may be, as the Bible says, from dust to dust, but we are also amazing, priceless creatures, made in God’s own image for relationship with one another and with our creator. Therefore, the study of animal behaviour and cognition has a long history in psychology and poses no troubling issues for Christians. Attempts to specify uniquely human traits, such as the ability to read others’ minds, to display self-giving altruism, or to use language, have foundered with observations of animal mind reading and animal altruism, and with the training of chimpanzees to communicate by sign. However, then, scholars remind us that surface behaviour similarities between humans and other animals need not signify identical underlying processes. Moreover, animal cognition and helping is only a budding form of human thinking and altruism, and but a pale reminder of the infinite intelligence and love of God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
Finally, acknowledging the long emergence of life on Earth need not diminish by one iota our sense of awe at our own mysterious workings and spiritual significance. We must infer that the first words humans used had a much broader meaning in their minds than do those used in languages that are already formed; and that, being ignorant of the division of discourse into its constitutive parts, at first they gave each word the meaning of a whole sentence. When they began to distinguish subject from attribute and very from noun, which was no mean effort of genius, substantives were at first only so many proper nouns; the [present] infinitive was the only verb tense; and the notion of adjectives must have developed only with considerable difficulty, since every adjective must have developed only with considerable difficulty, since every adjective is an abstract word, and abstractions are difficult and no particularly natural operations. At first each object was given a particular name, without regard to genus and species which for those first founders were not in a position to distinguish; and all individual things presented themselves to their minds in isolation, as they are in the spectacle of nature. If one oak tree was called A, another was called B. [For the first idea one draws from two things is that they are not the same; and it often requires quite some time to observe what they have in common.] Thus the more limited the knowledge, the more extensive becomes the dictionary. The difficulty inherent in all this nomenclature could not easily be alleviated, for in order to group beings under various common and generic denominations, it was necessary to know their properties and their differences. Observations and definitions were necessary, that is to say, natural history and metaphysics, and far more than men of those times could have had. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
Moreover, general ideas can be introduced into the mind only with the assistance of words, and the understanding grasps them only through sentences. That is one reason why animals cannot form such ideas or even acquire the perfectibility that depends on them. When a monkey moves unhesitatingly from one nut to another, does anyone think the monkey had the general idea of that type of fruit and that one compares its archetype with these two individuals? Undoubtedly not; but the sight of one of these nuts recalls to one’s memory the sensations one received of the other; and one’s eyes, modified in a certain way, announce to one’s sense of taste the modification it is about to receive. Every general idea is purely intellectual. The least involvement of the imagination thereupon makes the idea particular. Try to draw for yourself the image of a tree in general; you will never succeed in doing it. In spite of yourself, it must be seen as small or large, barren or leafy, light or dark; and if you were in a position to see in it nothing but what you see in every tree, this image would no longer resemble a tree. Purely abstract beings are perceived in the same way, or are conceived only through discourse. The definition of a triangle alone gives you the true idea of it. As soon as you behold one in your mind, it is a particular triangle and not some other one, and you cannot avoid making its lines to be perceptible or it plane to have a colour. It is therefore necessary to utter sentences, and thus to speak, in order to have general ideas. For as soon as the imagination stops, the mind proceeds no further without the assistance of discourse. If, then, the first inventors of language could give names only to idea thy already had, it follows that the firs substantives could not have been anything but proper nouns. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
However, when, by means I am unable to conceive, our new grammarians began to extend to extend their ideas and to generalize their words, the ignorance of the inventors must have been subjected this method to very strict limitations. And just as they had at first unduly multiplied the names of individual things, owning to their failure o know the genera and species, they later made too few species and genera, owing to their failure to have considered beings in all their differences. Pushing these divisions far enough would have required more experience and enlightenment than they could have had, and more investigations and work then they were willing to put into it. Now if even today new species are discovered everyday that until now had escaped the attention of humans who judged things only on first appearance! As for primary classes and the most general notions, it is superfluous to add that they too much have escaped them. How, for example, would they have imagined or understood the words “matter,” “mind,” “substance,” “mode,” “figure,” and “movement,” when our philosophers, who for so long have been making use of them, have a great deal of difficulty understand them themselves; and when, since the ideas attached to these words are purely metaphysical, they found no model of them in nature? I stop with these first steps, and I implore my judge to suspend their reading here to consider, concerning the invention of physical substantives alone, that is to say, concerning the easiest part of the language to discover, how far language still had to go in order to express all the thoughts of humans, assume a durable form, be capable of being spoken in public, and influence society. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
I implore them to reflect upon how much time and knowledge were needed to discover numbers, abstract words, aorists, and all the tenses of verbs, particles, syntax, the connecting of sentences, reasoning, and the forming of all logic of discourse. As for myself, being shocked by the unending difficulties and convinced of the almost demonstrable impossibility that languages could have arisen and been established by merely human means, I leave to anyone who would undertake it the discussion of the following difficult problem: which was the more necessary: an already formed society for the invention of languages, or an already invented language for the establishing of society? Whatever these origins may be, it is clear, from the little care taken by nature to bring humans together through mutual needs and to facilitate their use of speech, how little she prepared them for becoming habituated to the ways of society, and how little she contributed to all that humans have done to establish the bonds of society. In fact, it is impossible to imagine why, in that primitive state, one human would have done to establish the bonds of society. In fact, it is impossible to imagine why, in that primitive state, one human would have a greater need for another human than a monkey or a wolf has for another of its respective species; or, assuming this need, what motive could induce the other human to satisfy it; or even, in this latter instance, how they could be in mutual agreement regarding the conditions. I know that we are repeatedly told that nothing would have been so miserable as a human in that state; and if it is true, as I believe I have proved, that it is only after many centuries that humans could have had the desire and the opportunity to leave that state, that would be charge to being against nature, not against one whom nature have thus constituted. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
However, if we understand the word miserable properly, it is a word which is without meaning or which signifies merely a painful privation and suffering of the body of the soul. Now I would very much like someone to explain to me what kind of misery can there be for a free being whose heart is at peace and whose body is in good health? I ask which of the two, civil, or natural life, is more likely to become insufferable to those who live it? We see about us practically no people who do not complain about their existence; many even deprive themselves of it to the extent they are able, and the combination of divine and human laws is hardly enough to stop his disorder. I ask if anyone has ever heard tell of a savage who was living in liberty ever dreaming of complaining about one’s life and of killing oneself. Let the judgment therefore be made with less pride on the side real misery lies. On the other hand, nothing would have been so miserable as savage humans, dazzled by enlightenment, tormented by passions, and reasoning about a state different from one’s own. It was by a very wise providence that the latten faculties one possessed should develop only as the occasion to exercise them presents itself, so that they would be neither superfluous nor troublesome to one beforehand, nor underdeveloped and useless in time of need. In instinct alone, humans had everything they needed in order to live in the state of nature; in a cultivated reason, one has only what one needs to live in society. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
Others have said that pre-existing merits in this life are the reason and cause of the effect of predestination. For the Pelagians taught that the beginning of doing well came from us; and the consumption from God: so that it came about that the effect of predestination was granted to one, and not to another, because the one made a beginning by preparing, whereas the other did not. However, against this we have the saying of the Apostle (2 Corinthians 3.5), that “we are not sufficient to think anything of ourselves as of ourselves.” Now no principle of action can be imagined previous to the act of thinking. Wherefore it cannot be said that anything begun in us can be the reason of the effect of predestination. And so others said that merits following the effect of predestination are the reason of predestination; giving us to understand that God gives grace to a person, and pre-ordains that He will give it, because He knows beforehand that He will make good use of that grace, as if a king were to give a horse to a soldier because he knows he will make good use of it. However, these seem to have drawn a distinction between that which flows from grace, and that which flows from free will, as if the same thing cannot come from both. It is, however, manifest that what is of grace is the effect of predestination; and this cannot be considered as the reason of predestination, since it is contained in the notion of predestination. Therefore, if anything else in us be the reason of predestination, it will outside the effect of predestination. Now there is no distinction between what flows from free will, and what is of predestination; as there is no distinction between what flows from a secondary cause and form a first cause. For the providence of God produces effects through the operation of secondary causes. Wherefore, that which flows from free-will is also of predestination. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
We must say, therefore, that the effect of predestination may be considered in a twofold light—in one way in particular; and this there is no reason why one effect of predestination should not be the reasons or cause of another; a subsequent effect being the reason of a previous effect, as its final cause; and the previous effect being the reason of the subsequent as its meritorious cause, which is reduced to the disposition of the matter. Thus we might say that God pre-ordained to give glory on account of merit, and the He pre-ordained to give grace to merit glory. In another way, the effect of predestination may be considered in general. Thus, it is impossible that the whole of the effect of predestination in general should have any causes coming from us; because whatsoever is in humans disposing them towards salvation, is all included under the effect of predestination; even the preparation for grace. For neither does his happen otherwise than by divine help, according to the prophet Jeremias (Lam 5.21): “covert us, O Lord, to Thee, and we shall be converted.” Yet predestination has in this way, in regard to its effect, the goodness of God for its reason; towards which the whole effect of predestination is directed as to an end; and from which it proceeds, as from its first moving principle. The use of grace foreknown by God is not the cause of conferring grace, except after the manner of a final cause; as was explained above. Humans kill for love, for revenge, for survival, even for ideas. Perhaps it is part of human nature, but in this survival, must we also be taught to hate? Predestination has its foundation in the goodness of God as regards its effects in general. Considered in its particular effect, however, one effect is the reason of another; as already stated. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
The reason for predestination of some, and reprobation of others, must be sought for in the goodness of God. Thus He is said to have made all things through His goodness, so that the divine goodness might be represented in things. Now it is necessary that God’s goodness, which it itself is one and undivided, should be manifested in many ways in His creation; because creatures in themselves cannot attain to the simplicity of God. Thus it is that for the completion of the Universe there are required different grades of being; some of which hold a high and some a low place in the Universe. That this multiformity of graces may be preserved in things, Go allows some evils, lest many good things should never happen, as was said above. Let us then consider the whole of the human race, as we consider the whole of the Universe. God will to manifest His goodness in humans; in respect to those whom He predestines, by means of His mercy, as sparing them; and in respect of others, whom He reprobates, by means of His justice, in punishing them. This is he reason why God elects some and rejects others. To this the Apostle refer, saying (Romans 9.22, 23): “What if God, willing to show His wrath [that is, the vengeance of His justice], and to make His power known, endured [that is, permitted] with much patience vessels of wrath, fitted for destruction; that He might show the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He hath prepared unto glory,” and (2 Timothy 2.20): “But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver; but also of wood and of Earth; and some, indeed, unto honour, but some unto dishonour.” #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
Yet why God chooses some for glory, and reprobates others, has no reason, expect the divine will. Whence Augustine says (Tract. Xxvi. In Joan): “Why He draws one, and another He draws not, seek not to judge, if thou dost not wish to err.” Thus too, in the things of nature, a reason can be assigned, since primary matter is although uniform, why one part of it was fashioned by God from the beginning under the form of fire, another under the form of Earth, that there might be a diversity of species in things of nature. Yet why this particular part of matter is under this particular form, and that under another, depends upon the simple will of God; as from the simple will of the artificer it depends that this stone is in part of the wall, and that in another; although the plan requires that some stones should be in this place, and some in that place. Neither on this account can there be said to be injustice in God, if He prepares unequal lots for unequal things. This would be altogether contrary to the notion of justice, if the effect of predestination were granted as a debt and not gratuitously. In things which are given gratuitously, a person can give more or less, just as one pleases (provided one deprives nobody of one’s due), without any infringement of justice. This is what the master of the house said: “Take what is thine, and go thy way. It is not lawful for me to do what I will? (Matthew 20.14, 15). Hail, holy Light. Saint John of the Cross, held unjustly as a prisoner, found his cell filled with light as he dreamed one night the Virgin appeared to him promising help if he escaped. Marinus, the Danish mystic, told me that Jesus appeared to him in meditation surrounded by a ball of light. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
We want peace, of course, but sometimes we do not want to spend a lot of time trying to acquire it. Instead, we lose ourselves in the crowd, intrude ourselves into foreign affairs—that is to say, in affairs outside the monastery walls. Continue to do that, and we will surely lose what little peace we have. What is the attraction outside? Why do we pounce on every invitation, attend every function? Why do we ignore every chance to gather ourselves within? Blessed are those who live uncomplicated lives, for they shall have heads without headaches. Why have some Saints been such perfect models of the contemplative life? Because they strove to deaden their Earthly desires. In doing so they were not without some spiritual guile. They emptied out the innermost parts of their hidden hearts so they could cling to God. Inside the walls we play too much with our pet distractions; outside, we mingle too often with the passing parade. Rarely do we stamp out a vice completely. Daily do we forget to light a candle under ourselves. Rarely do we achieve the perfection that is possible within one day. And so we remain neither particular pretension. If we were maximally dead to ourselves and only minimally involved with others, then we could divine the divine, that is to say experience some of the delights in the Heavenly Garden. However, are we not, so we cannot. Our passion and concupiscences are plants, wildly successful plants chocking everything in sight. About to swing on down the road to perfection in the merry hope of following the Saints, we take a header on the first cobble and howl to high Heaven! Bruised knees, bruised feelings, we decide to stay home and nurse our hurts, not all that unhappy, it has to be admitted, about postponing the trip for the thousandth time. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
Hold your ground like the brave embroiled in battle; that is what we should do. Have no fear. God will give us a sign from above. For He is prepared to help those who slug it out for a greater glory. After all, He promotes the fights, He says, so we can enjoy the victories. Spiritual progress, that is what we are concerned about here. Observing only the externals of our religion is not enough. Devotion will dry up if that is all we are going to do. Our garden’s overrun. Let us put ax to the root. Let us purge ourselves of the spurge, the gorse and the vetch, the cattail and the creeper. That is to say, as the Gospel of Matthew exhorts (3.10), let us root out our passions, the deadly nightshades that haunt our patch. Only then will the roses emerge. Stamp out just one vice a year, and you will soon be a perfect individual. That is a piece of common wisdom but, apparently, experience tells us otherwise. In the beginning of our monastic life, we were more obedient and more observant than we are today, many years after our first vows. Or so it seems in retrospect. Fervor and progress ought to inch along each day—that is the way it was in the Great Bernard’s day, or so he said in one of his sermons (27.5), when many of his monks managed to retain their firs fervor for a lifetime. However, nowadays it is an eyebrow raider if some boke can retain just a smidge of his first fervor for a few weeks! What is the moral? No pan, no gain. If we had undergone more pain at the beginning, we would have more gain by now. And would not that be nice? #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
Not to do what you are used to is hard. Harder still, to do what you are not accustomed to. However, if you do not make it a practice of dealing with the small annoyances, you will be helpless in the face of a big challenge. Make no mistake about it. Self-denial is what we are talking about here. Now is the time to make a new start. Resist your inclination. Unlearn your bad behaviour, lest it lead you little by little to worse behavior. Oh, if you would only make a turnaround! You would start pleasing yourself and stop annoying others. Living your life well, that is the way to pay more attention to your spiritual progress. O God, my mother, my father, lord of the hills, lord of the valleys, lord of the forest, please be patient with me. I am about to do what has always been done. Now I make you an offering, that you may be warned: I am about to charm your heart. Perhaps you will have the strength to endure it. I am going to work you in order that I may live. Let no animal purse me, no snake, no scorpion, no wasp annoy me, no failing timber hit me, no ax, no machete catch me. With all my heat I am going to work you. Thou art our Almighty God, O Lord eternal; how mighty is Thy name in all the Earth! And the Lord shall be King over all the Earth; on that day shall the Lord be One and His name one. As it is written in holy Scripture: 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. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
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Father God, I am at Peace Today Because I Know You are in Control!
We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon. God desires to dwell in the midst of His redeemed people on His own terms and His own grounds. That is, Divine holiness having dealt with human’s sinfulness. “As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. However, just as one who called you is holy, be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘By holy, because I am holy,’” reports 1 Peter 1.14-15. The same giant wedge that split producer from consumer in Second Wave societies also split work into two kinds. This had an enormous impact on family life, gender roles, and on our inner live as individuals. One of he most common gender stereotypes in industrial society defines men as “objective” in orientation, and women as “subjective.” If there is a kernel of truth here, it probably lies not in some fixed biological reality but in the psychological effects of the invisible wedge. In Firs Wave societies most work was performed in the fields or in the home, with the entire household toiling together as an economic unit and with most production destined for consumption within the village or manor. Work life and home life were fused and intermingled. And since each village was largely self-sufficient, the success of the peasants in one place was not dependent upon what happened in another. Even within the production unit most workers performed a variety of tasks, swapping and shifting roles as demanded by the season, by sickness, or by choice. The preindustrial division of labour was very primitive. As a result, work in First Wave agricultural societies was characterize by low levels of interdependency. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
The Second Wave, washing across Britain, France, Germany, and other countries, shifted work from field and home to factory, and introduced a much higher level of interdependency. Work now demanded collective effort, division of labour, coordination, the integration of many different skills. Its success depended upon the carefully scheduled cooperative behaviour of thousands of far-flung people, many of whom never laid eyes on one another. The failure of a major steel mill or glass factory to deliver needed supplies to an auto plant could, under certain circumstances, send repercussions throughout a whole industry or regional economy. The collision of low- and high-interdependency work produced severe conflict over roles, responsibilities, and rewards. The early factory owners, for example, complained that their workers were irresponsible—that they cared little about the efficiency of the factory, that they went fishing when most needed, engaged in horseplay, or turned up drunk and could not pony up their rent money because they blew it at the tavern. In fact, most of the early industrial workers were rural folk who were accustomed to law interdependency, and had little or no understanding of their own role in the overall production process or of the failures, breakdowns, and malfunctions occasioned by their “irresponsibility.” Moreover, since most of them earned pitiful wages, they had little incentive to care. However, Mrs. Winchester, at the time, paid her workers triple the market rate, and provided them housing, not in the main mansion, but in other Victorian farm houses located on the original 768 acres she owned. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
In the clash between these two work systems, the new forms of work seemed to triumph. More and more production was transferred to the factory and office. The countryside was stripped of population. Millions of workers became part of high-interdependence networks. Second Wave work overshadowed the old backward form associated with the First Wave. This victory of interdependence over self-sufficiency, however, was never fully consummated. In one place the older form of work stubbornly held on. This place was the home. Each home remained a decentralized unit engaged in biological reproduction, in child-rearing, and in cultural transmission. If one family failed to reproduce, or did a poor job of rearing it children and preparing them for life in the work system, its failures did not necessarily endanger the accomplishment of those tasks by the family next door. Housework remained, in other words, a low-interdependency activity. The housewife continued, as always, to perform a set of crucial economic functions. She “produced.” However, she produced for Sector A—for the use of her own family—not for the market. As the husband, by and large, marched off to do the direct economic work, the wife generally stayed behind to do the indirect more advanced form of work; the woman was left behind to take care of the other, more backward form of work. He moved, as it were, into the future; she remained in the past. This division produced a split in personality and inner life. The public or collective nature of factory and office, the need for coordination and integration, brought with it an emphasis on objective analysis and objective relationships. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
Men, prepared from boyhood for their role in the shop, where they would move in a World of interdependencies, were encouraged to become “objective.” Women, prepared from birth for the tasks of reproduction, childrearing; and household drudgery, performed to a considerable degree in social isolation, were taught to be “subjective”—and were frequently regarded as incapable of the kind of rational, analytic thought that supposedly went with objectivity. Not surprisingly, women who did leave the relative isolation of the household to engage in interdependent production were often accused of having been defeminized, of having grown cold, tough, and—objective. Gender differences and gender role stereotypes, moreover, were sharpened by misleading indemnification of men with production and woman with consumption, even though men also consumed and women also produced. In short, while women were oppressed long before the Second Wave began to roll across the Earth, the modern “war of the roses” can be traced in large measure to the conflict between two work-styles, and beyond that to the divorce of production and consumption. The split economy deepened the gender split as well. What we have seen so far, therefore, is that once the invisible wedge was hammered into place, separating producer from consumer, a number of profound changes followed: A market had to be formed or expanded to connect the two; new political and social conflicts sprang up; new gender roles were defined. However, the split implied far more than this. It also meant that all Second Wave societies would have to operate in similar fashion—that they would have to meet certain basic requirements. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
Whether the object of production was profit or not, whether the “means of production” were public or private, whether the market was “free” or “planned,” whether the rhetoric was capitalist or socialist made no difference. So long as production was intended for exchange, instead of use, so long as it has to flow through the economic switchboard or market, certain Second Wave principles had to be followed. Once these principles are identified, the hidden dynamics of all industrial societies are laid bare. Moreover, we can anticipate how Second Wave people typically think. For these principles added up to the basic rules, the behaviour code book, of Second Wave civilization. It is difficult to fully understand the tremendous importance of the electric streetcar to the development of American suburbs. The electric streetcar literally changed the physical shape of metropolitan areas. It also contributed mightily to the modern residential pattern where one’s area of residence tells a great deal about one’s socioeconomic status. Electric streetcars permitted the construction of economically and socially homogenous suburbs. There had been numerous attempts to build an electric streetcar, but the first successful—that is, reliable—system was put into operation in Richmond, Virginia USA, in 1888. The system was designed by Frank Sprague, an inventor and electrical engineer who had earlier worked under Thomas Edison. Dr. Frank Sprague’s system was relatively straightforward. Electric current was transferred from an overhead line to the electric motor powering the wheels by means of a troller, or trolley, that was held against the overhead line by means of a spring. However, when Dr. Sprague signed the Richmond contract in 1887, much of the necessary equipment had yet to be designed, much less built and tested. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
Moreover, Dr. Sprague’s contract specified that unless he could build a fully working system within a year that was acceptable to the Richmond officials, they would pay nothing. Dr. Sprague assumed the full cost of designing and building the entire system. To the delight of the city fathers and mothers, the system worked as specified. Dr. Sprague’s design was clearly superior to any of the experimental systems that had been tested elsewhere and found unreliable. Dr. Sprague’s system proved to be both safe and reliable. Within a year twenty other cities had brought Dr. Sprague’s system and he was both a famous and rich man. Dr. Sprague’s new electric streetcars were adopted in city after city with remarkable speed. Horse-drawn car lines, which accounted for two-third of all streetcar lines in 1890, the remainder being mostly cable system, had virtually vanished a mere decades later. Seldom has any invention so completely replaced its predecessors in such a short period. Electric streetcars had clear advantage over the earlier cable and horse-drawn systems. Electric streetcars could average 15 miles per hour, which was a least double and sometimes triple the speed of its cable and horse-drawn competitors. Moreover, the trolleys had over three times the carrying capacity of the horse-drawn cars without any of the pollution. The electric systems also cost far less to build and operate than cable systems. By 1902 electric trolleys accounted for 97 percent of all streetcar milage, with 2 percent still operated by cable care lines and only 1 percent of horse cars. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
The electric streetcars, which provided comparatively high-speed transit for a modest 5-cent fare, changed the way urban-area dwellers lived. There no longer was any necessity for middle-class families to live within walking distance of their place of work. Industrialization was making residence near one’s work less attractive, while the streetcar meant it was not possible for middle-class employees to live in suburbs (Municipal Statistic Areas) as far as 10 or even 12 miles from the central business district and commute both rapidly and inexpensively. Within a short period, new middle-class residential suburbs were being constructed along the right-of-way of the streetcar lines. The burgeoning streetcar suburbs made it possible for the middle class to live in new housing areas on the city’s fringe while still being able to commute within thirty minutes to downtown offices and even shop at downtown department stores. From 1890 to 1920, the streetcar dominated metropolitan transport. The very shape of the metropolitan area changed. Previously, outer growth had occurred more or less everywhere on the periphery where growth was not constrained by geography. The electric streetcar, by contrast, restricted growth to narrow, fingerlike development along the streetcar tracks. Real estate developers built homes paralleling the tracks, but only to a depth of a few blocks on either side. The interstitial areas remained undeveloped. The special configuration of the American city changed from that of a compact city to that of a star-shaped metropolitan area. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
The streetcar lines, which opened up outlying sites for development, often also made the existing city homes of the well to do and the upper-middle class living along major city thoroughfares less desirable. Living along an electric streetcar line was extremely noisy. Streetcars, in those days, made a great deal of clamour with squealing wheels and changing bells, and their constant passage created major noise pollution for those living in homes adjacent to the trolly line. On a hot summer’s night, with all the windows open, the jarring sound of screeching metal on metal made sleep difficult. Once-quiet residential streets became noisy streetcar lines. As a consequence, those who could afford to move o quieter and more sedate surroundings—usually further out. Because a location along the streetcar line was good for business, retail stores frequently opened stores in what were previously residences. A common pattern was for a storefront extension to be built out to the sidewalk on what was originally the front yard of a home. This pattern consisting of a shop in front with the original house behind can still be seen in many older cities today. Middle-class residents of turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs also found that their new homes had practical advantages beyond that of fast transportation to the city. Sewer lines, water lines, and gas lines tended to be installed along the street right-of-way, while electric and telephone poles paralleled the tracks. This was comparatively inexpensive for the utilities (usually private companies) to do, since it did not involve ripping up already-paved streets. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
Suburbanites, being well-off, were also ideal customers from the business standpoint. Thus, outlying streetcar suburbs often received the services of the new utilities well before hey came to working-class areas of the city. Outer areas built at the turn of the century had from their time of construction “modern” advantages such as toilets and electricity. By contrast, some poor city neighbourhoods still had to use outhouses and light their homes with kerosene. At the time of World War I, three-quarters of American homes still did not have electric service. Even more important than the physical and quality-of-life differences between the city and the suburbs were the emerging social differences. Simply put, the suburban trolley lines allowed the upper-middle and middle class to move out. The technology of the steam railroad had allowed the well-to-do of earlier decades to separate their place of work from their place of residence. Now the technology of the streetcar allowed the middle class to do the same. The new suburban areas were almost exclusively middle class. The poor were excluded from the new subdivisions. Homogeneous economic and social communities replaced the more mixed pattern of the earlier walking city. Segregation of population as well as of land uses was becoming the norm. By providing the means for the middle class to move out of the city, the trolley provided a physical inheritance of housing type and distribution that we can still see throughout North America. Newer and more affluent homes on larger lots were built in outlying areas. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
As one would ride the streetcar from center to suburb, there would be a clear upgrading in the size and quality of residences. When traveling the old street car routes, even over a century later, the patterns can still be clearly through the cities of the east coast and middle west today. Many of what were new middle-class neighbourhoods at the turn of the century became residences of the metropolis’ working class and poor, but now they are becoming the neighbourhoods of the affluent due to expanding businesses and economic growth, and a lot of people are dying to get their hands on old building, Brownstones, Victorians and redevelop them or find land near the city to copy these designs. Essentially the pattern of an inverse relationship between the centrality of residence and socioeconomic status of those occupying the property reverted to its original target group. While the electric streetcar lines certainly did not invent social and economic exclusivity, the trolleys did facilitate the separation of the city into homogenous socioeconomic, ethnic, and racial enclaves. The suburbs, in addition to being heavily middle class, also differed in ethic composition from the central city. The turn of the century was the high tide of southern and eastern European immigration to the United States of America. Ellis Island received over a million immigrants a year during the first decade to the twentieth century. The industrial cities of the east and Midwest were the principal destinations of these Italian, Polish, Slavic, and Jewish immigrants. As of 1900, over three-quarters of the population of cities such as New York, Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago were listed by the Bureau of the Census as being of foreign stock. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
That is, the census listed the cities as being foreign because most of their population was born outside of the United States of America, or their parents were born outside of the United States of America. Suburbs, by contrast, were overwhelmingly WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant). The new suburbs allowed those who feared the menace of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” to escape to segregated neighbourhoods. Those who were uncomfortable living in a city teeming with foreign immigrants now had a convenient and comfortable alternative. Additionally, the suburbs offered middle-class WASPs the opportunity to remove themselves and their families from both the taxes and immigrant-dominated political machines of the city. Suburban enclaves were essentially homogeneous in social, economic, and ethnic composition. By the time of World War I, the pattern of a segregated urban area had become the norm. The poor and ethic working class lived in the central city, while the affluent and middle-class nonethnics increasingly commuted from out-city and suburban areas. However, in capital cities like Sacramento, California USA, some politicians built mansions near and around the state capitol so they could walk to work. Developers also created apartment buildings on N Street and a senator’s hotel on 15th street for political to live in. Were we to want to suppose a savage human as skilled in the art of thinking as our philosophers make one out to be; were we, following their example, to make one full-fledged philosophers, discovering by oneself the most subline truths, and, by chains of terribly abstract reasoning, forming for oneself maxims of justice and reason drawn from the love of order in general or from the known will of one’s Creator. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
In a word, we were to supposed there was in one’s mind as much intelligence and enlightenment as one needs, and is in fact found to have dullness and stupidity, what use would the species have for all that metaphysic, which could not be communicated and which would perish with the individual who would have invented it? What progress could the human race make, scattered in the woods among animals? And to what extent could humans mutually perfect and enlighten one another, when, with neither a fixed dwelling nor any need for one another, they would hardly encounter one another twice in their lives, without knowing or talking to one another. Let us consider how many ideas we owe to the use of speech; how much grammar trains and facilitates the operations of the mind. And let us think of the inconceivable difficulties and the infinite amount of time that the first invention of languages must have cost. Let us join their reflections to the preceding ones, and we will be in a position to judge how many thousands of centuries would have been necessary to develop successively in the human mind the operations of which it was capable. May I be permitted to consider for a moment the obstacles to the origin of languages. First of all, how could have languages become necessary; for since humans had no communication among themselves nor any need for it, I fail to see either the necessity of this invention or its possibility, if it were not indispensable. I might well say, as do many other, that languages were born in the domestic intercourse among fathers, mothers, and children. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
However, aside from the fact that this would not resolve the difficulties, it would make the mistake of those who, reasoning about the state of nature, intrude into it ideas taken from society. They always see the family gathered in one and the same dwelling, with its members maintaining among themselves a union as intimate and permanent as exists among us, where so many common interests unite them. However, the fact of the matter is that in that primitive state, since nobody had houses or huts or property of any kind, each one bedded down in some random spot and often for only one night. Males and females came together fortuitously as a result of chance encounters, occasion, and desire, without there being any great need for words to express what they had to say to one another. They left one another with the same nonchalance. The mother at first nursed her children for her own need; then, with habit having endeared them to her, she later nourished the for their own need. Once they had the strength to look for their food, they did not hesitate to leave the mother herself. And since there was practically no other way of finding one another than not to lose sight of one another, they were soon at the point of not even recognizing one another. It should also be noted that, since the child had all one’s needs to explain and consequently more things to the mother than the mother to the child, it is the child who must make the greatest effort toward inventing a language, and that the language one uses should in large part be of one’s own making, which multiplies languages as many times as there are individuals to speak them. This tendency was abetted by a nomadic and vagabond life, which does not give any idiom time to gain a foothold. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
For claiming that the mother teaches her child the words one ought to use in asking her for this or that is a good way of showing how already formed languages are taught, but it does not tell us how languages are formed. Let us suppose this first difficulty has been overcome. Let us disregard for a moment the immense space that there must have been between the pure state of nature and the need for languages. And, on the supposition that they are necessary, let us inquire how they might have begun to be established. Here we come to a new difficulty, worse still than the preceding one. For if human needed speech in order to learn to think, they had a still greater need for knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speaking. And even if it were understood how vocal sounds had been taken for the conventional expression of our ideas, it would still remain for us to determine what could have been conventional expressions for ideas that, not having a sensible object, could not be indicated either by gesture or by voice. Thus we scarcely able to form tenable conjectures regarding the birth of this art of communicating thought and establishing intercourse between minds, a sublime art which is already quite far from its origin, but which the philosopher sill sees at so prodigious a distance from is perfection that there is no human so foolhardy as to claim that it will ever achieve it, even if the sequences of change that time necessarily brings were suspended in its favour, even if prejudices were to be barred from the academies or be silent before them, and even if they were able to occupy themselves with that thorny problem for whole centuries without interruption. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
Human’s first language, the most universal, the most energetic and the only language one needed before it was necessary to persuade humans assembled together, is the cry of nature. Since this cry was elicited only by a kind of instinct in pressing circumstances, to beg for help in great dangers, or for relief of violent ills, it was not used very much in the ordinary courses of life, where more moderate feelings prevail. When the ideas of human begin to spread and multiply, and closer communication was established among them, they sought more numerous signs and a more extensive language. They multiplied vocal inflections and combined them with gestures, which by their nature, are more expressive, and whose meaning is less dependent on a prior determination. They therefore signified visible and mobile objects by means of gestures, and audible ones by imitative sounds. However, since a gesture indicates hardly anything more than present or easily described objects and visible actions; since its use is not universal, because darkness or the interposition of a body renders it useless; and since it requires rather than stimulates attention, humans finally thought of replacing them with vocal articulations, which, while not having the same relationship to certain ideas, were better suited to represent all ideas as conventional signs. Such a substitution could only be made by a common consent and in a way rather difficult to practice for humans whose crude organs had as yet no exercise, and still more difficult to conceive in itself, since that unanimous agreement had to have had a motive, and speech appears to have been necessary in order to establish the use of speech. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
Research on the “theory of mind” began with David Premack and Guy Woodruff’s 1978 description of animals that understand the minds of other animals. Theory of mind refers to an animal’s (or a person’s) ability to respond not just to another’s behaviour but also according to what it assumes about the other’s beliefs and desires. As a species’ brain cortex volume increases, so does its ability to read minds—to infer others’ mental states—and even to deceive others and to invent tools. For example, the psychologists Andre Whiten and Richard Byrne repeatedly saw one young baboon pretending to have been attacked by another as a tactic to get its mother to drive the other baboon away from its food. When observing monkey-human similarities in abilities such as mind reading, it becomes tempting to say that humans are therefore “nothing but” complex primates, and to ignore the distinctiveness of the ethical, moral, and religious aspects of human though and behaviour. However, primate abilities, including primates’ mind-reading capacity, may get overplayed. Dr. Byrne notes: “It is tempting, but may be utterly wrong, to assume that an animal….has some idea of the effect its behaviour is having on the mind of another.” Actually, one warns, the explanation may be simpler: “Rapid learning in social circumstances, a good memory for individuals and their different characteristics, and some simple genetic tendencies are capable of explaining much that has impressed observers as intelligent in simian primates.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
Dr. Frans de Waal similarly cautions against exaggerated claims: “Even if animals other than ourselves act in ways tantamount to moral behaviour, their behaviour does not necessarily rest on deliberations of the kind we engage in. It is hard to believe that animals weigh their own interests against the rights of others, that they develop a view of the greater good of society or that they feel lifelong guilt about something they should not have done….To communicate intentions and feelings is one thing; and to clarify what is right, and why, and what is wrong, and why, is quite something else. Animals are no moral philosophers.” Despite the concern of some Christian about apparently narrowing gap between ourselves and nonhuman primates, we see no great issues at stake in this research. We welcome developments in evolutionary psychology. As Dr. Byrne and Dr. de Waal illustrate, scholars are often dismayed by the excited interpretations of their findings in the popular media. If Christians are more discerning, they will be able to glimpse fresh pointers to the Creator’s greatness in the wonders of creation. They will also be able to draw on the findings of evolutionary psychology as they exercise stewardship for the creation and compassion for humanity. Research on theory of mind, for example, has expanded our understanding of autistic children, who have difficulty in reading others’ minds and therefore in responding appropriately. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
When I think about London, I usually see a mental picture of Euston Street. However, when I think (as I do) that London has several million inhabitants, I do not mean that there are several million images of people contained in my image of Euston Station. Nor do I mean that several millions of real people live in the real Euston Station. In fact though I have the image while I am thinking about London, what I think or say is not about that image, and would be manifest nonsense if it were. It makes sense because it is not about my own mental pictures but about the real London, outside my imagination, of which no one can have an adequate mental picture at all. Or again, when we say that the Sun is ninety-odd million miles away, we understand perfectly clear what we mean by this number; we can divide and multiply it by other numbers and we can work out how long it would take to travel that distance at any given speed. However, this clear thinking is accompanied by imagining which is ludicrously false to what we know that the reality must be. To think, then, is one thing, and to imagine is another. What we think or say can be, and usually is, quite different from what we imagine or picture; and what we mean may be true when the mental images that accompany it are entirely false. It is, indeed, doubtful whether anyone except an extreme visualist who is also a trained artist ever has mental images which are particularly like the things one is thinking about. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
In these examples the mental image is not only unlike the reality but is known to be unlike it, at least after a moment’s reflection. I know that London is not merely Euston Station. Let us now go on to a slightly different predicament. I once heard a lady tell her young daughter that you would die if you are too many tablets of aspirin. “But why?” asked the child, “it is not poisonous.” “How do you know it is not poisonous?” said the mother. “Because,” said the child, “when you crush an aspirin tablet you do not find horrid red things inside it.” Clearly, when this child though of poison she had a mental picture of Horrid Red Things, just as I have a picture of Euston when I think of London. The difference is that whereas I know my image to be very unlike the real London, the child through that poison was really red. To that extent she was mistaken. However, this does not mean that everything she thought or said about poison was necessarily nonsensical. She knew perfectly well that a poison was something which killed you or made you ill if you swallowed it; and she knew, to some extent, which of the substances in her mother’s house were poisonous. If a visitor to that house had been warned by the child, “Do not thin that. Mother says it is poison” he would have been ill advised to neglect the warning on the ground that “This child has a primitive idea of poison as Horrid Red Things, which my adult scientific knowledge has long since refuted.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
Thinking may be sound in certain respect where is it accompanied not only by false images but by false images mistake for true ones. What the Old Testament writers called the shekinah is a sacred and luminous appearance. More than a hundred years ago, Konko Daijin founded a new religion in Japan. Called Konkokyo, “the religion of the golden light,” it enjoined its followers to live in dependence on “the God of Heaven’s brightness.” One of the states of samadhi in Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism is called “Pure Light.” One of the Attained Ones in this religion is Amita, or Amitabha, the “Buddha of Boundlessly Diffused Light.” That there is actually a light emitted by the divine World of being is indicated by the following excerpt from, I believe, a Mahayana Buddhist: “There are four successive stages of piercing in reality, identical in sleep and dying. The first, ‘Revelation,’ is experienced in the earliest period of sleep, and appears as a moonlit cloudless sky. The drowsiness deepens and ‘Augmentation’ is reached. It appears as brilliant clear sunlight. Few can go beyond this into the third stage, ‘Immediate Attainment.’ Here there is total darkness. It vanishes when sleep gets deeper still; then the Void is penetrated, called ‘Innate Light,’ the first clear radiance. The student thus passes into Reality and Enlightenment, whether in the nightly death of sleep or the end of human life.” The Quakers believe that what they call the Inner Light is a supernatural thing. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
Saint Brendan saw, while at ceremonial prayer in the presence of other celebrated ancient Irish holy men, a bright flame-like light rising above his head and continuing until the end of the ceremony. If God is to be seen, then it must happen in a Light, as God Himself is Light. LIGHT: The seventeenth-century Welsh poet Henry Vaughan expressed the same idea in his lines: I saw Eternity the other night, like a great Ring of pure and endless light. If the grains, fruits, cereals, and vegetables which we eat are themselves undernourished because the soil in which they grow is deficient in minerals or otherwise exhausted then we in turn will not really receive from our food the proper nourishment we believe it is giving nor will the cattle pastured on such depleted soil. Nor is this all If the foods derived from unbalanced soil are our mainstay for a lengthy period of years, the unbalance will be reflected in our body as some kind of sickness or malfunction. Wherever and whenever people are properly nourished and housed in safe and clean locations, as the rule, and not the rarity that it is today for a certain segment of the population, we may expect violence and crime to abate markedly. The change our to proper nourishment creates in some cases a feeling of bodily weakness. This will be limited to the transition period only, which may be a matter of days or months, depending on the individual. Such persons should make the changeover gradually. Many others have made the change quite abruptly without any fatigue or any hard. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
The person who is afraid to alter one’s living habits, and especially one’s eating and drinking habits, because one is afraid that other persons may regard one as queer, eccentric, or fanatic forgets that the ownership of one’s body, the responsibility for its well-being, belongs to one, not them. Theory left unapplied is only one-third of knowledge. A surgeon knew and taught that anger would raise the pressure of the blood and strain the heart in proportion to its severity. Yet it was anger that eventually killed him. The influence of body on mind is shown by the efficacy—in his case at least—of Socrates’ method of smiling at himself when counterattacking a negative emotion while it was ye in is slender beginning. There is a corrective purpose in the existence of disease. Any cure which removed the symptoms but fails to correct the inner mental or physical cause of them is merely a temporary expedient, not a real cure. It serves the ego’s present convenience. However, the future must necessarily be menaced by a reappearance of the same disease, or of a different one which will also express the cause. And this may happen either in the same lifetime or in the next. A disease whose origin is physical will not need more than a physical remedy to cure it. However, one of a physical, mental, or moral nature can be reached and overcome only by corresponding means. The long walk which might fatigue your strength and become difficult drudgery becomes easy and endurable if, at the dame time, your mind is deeply absorbed in concentration on some lofty matter. Why? Because you are not then thinking of your ego. Such is the power of mind over the body. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
If one lives only and wholly in an optimistic harmonious feeling, if one consistently rejects all negative and destructive ones, the result must certainly be that ne will enjoy better health in the body as one already enjoys the best in mind. Shun the madding crowd. Turn a deaf ear to the histories of the World. Whether original works or just condensation, they crow out our knowledge of the World of the spirit. And the vanity in these volumes—a light dusting at first, but before you know it, it is snowing soot! Many is the time I wish I had not gone outside the walls. All I did was talk. I yammered and listened to the yammerings of others, but when it was time to return to the realm of silence, my ears were battered the colour of plum. Tittlers and tattlers I suppose we all are when it comes to our bruised hearts; talk helps, and someone needs to listen. However, why is it that jokes and japes are so good a relieving the stress, the depression? Well, it must be the magpies in us, and though I hesitate to say it, it is not so bad every now and then to give them voice to jabber and to chatter and to tell you what the matter is with you. These klatches outside the walls, they are such a pain! At best, in vain. At worst, inane. They are for exterior consolation only, for they clash with the very consolation that is interior and divine. Inside the walls we Devouts must watch and pray, as the Gospel of Matthew urges us (26.41), that none of our time is spent idly. However, if we have to speak and to have the permission, we should do so but only about bonda fide Edifables; St. Paul would have the Ephesians do just that (4.29). Otherwise, abuse of this rule in particular and negligence of our own spiritual progress in general will lead us to lose control of our tongue. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
Nevertheless, because you are in a religious community devoted to the Lord, conversational topics related to spiritual progress should come up from time to time. As Joseph and Oliver worked together on the translation of the golden plates, they learned many things. They were much interested in what was written about baptism for the remission of sins. They talked about it, studied about it from the Bible, and desired very much to be baptized as Christ taught in the golden book. One day they went into the woods to pray, asking God to explain baptism to them. It was a beautiful spring day, May 15, 1829. As they prayed near the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, an Angel came to them in a cloud of light saying he was John the Baptist of whom they had read in the New Testament. He said that he had been sent Saints Peter, James, and John, who has been apostles with Jesus when He lived on Earth. The Angel laid his hands upon them, saying, “Upon you, my fellow servants, in the name of Jesus, I confer the priesthood of Aaron, and his shall never again be taken from the Earth until the son of Levi do offer again an offering unto the Lord in righteousness.” The Angel explained that humans having the Aaronic priesthood may do much of the work in the church. He told them, however, that the Aaronic priesthood does not carry the authority for laving on of hands for the gift of the Holy Spirit. This power should be given to them later. Then he said, “God and be baptized.” Joseph and Oliver went into the water of the Susquehanna River. Joseph firs baptized Oliver, and then Oliver baptized Joseph. Then the Angel told them to ordain each other. As the two came out of the water they were so filled with the power of the Holy Spirit that they understood things they had been unable to understand previously, and many things were shown them about the Lord’s work which they were to do. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
It is a wonderful experience for these two young men to hear the voice of an Angel speaking the words of the Lord. With great joy they returned to their work of translating. They old some of the family and closest friends about this wonderful experience and what God was about to do. Samuel and Hyrum Smith, two of Joseph’s brothers, believed and were baptized. Hyrum, the older brother, was a quiet and gentle man who loved Joseph very much. He was very happy about the wonderful message of Jesus, and he wanted to go out at once to tell everyone about it. Though he understood little about the things he heard and saw, he wanted to preach to the World. However, it was not the right time for men to preach, for the work of translating the golden plates had not been finished, and no one fully understood the teaching of Christ. Jesus Christ spoke by revelation through Joseph telling Hyrum to wait a little longer, then he could preach. The words of the Lord to Hyrum were: “Behold, I say unto you, Keep my commandments, and seek to bring forth and established the cause of Zion. Seek not for riches, but for wisdom. Put thy trust in that Spirit which leadeth to do good; yea, to do justly, to walk humbly, to judge righteously; and this is my Spirit. I will impart unto you of my Spirit, which shall enlighten your mind, which shall fill your soul with joy. By this shall you know all things whatsoever you desire of me. You need not suppose that you are called to preach until you are called. Wait a little longer, until you shall have my word, my rock, my church, and my gospel, that you may know of a surety my doctrine. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
“Then, behold, according to your desires, yea, even according to your faith, shall it be done unto you. However, now hold your peace; study my word which has gone forth among the children of humans, and also study my word which shall come forth among the children of humans, or that which is now translating. Treasure up in your hearts until the time which is in my wisdom that you shall go forth.” With these instructions the men continued their study and work so they might bring to all people the wonderful message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Earth, adored with heights and gentle slopes and plains, bears plants and herbs of various healing powers. May she spread wide for us, afford us joy! On whom are ocean, river, and all waters, on whom have sprung up food and ploughman’s crops, on whom moves all that breaths and stirs aboard—Earth, may she grant to us the long first draught! Whatever I dig up of you, O Earth, may you have quick replenishment! O purifying One, may my thrust never reach right into your vital points, your heart! O Earth, O Mother, dispose my lot in gracious fashion that I may be at ease, and in harmony with your powers. God’s glory pervades the Universe; His ministering Angels inquire of one another: Where is the place of His glory? In response they give praise. Praised be the glory of the Lord from His Heavenly abode. From His Heavenly abode may He turn in mercy and bestow grace unto the people who, reciting in the Shema evening and morning, twice daily, proclaim in love the unity of His name, saying: Hear, O America: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. He is our God; He is our Father, our Sovereign and our Deliverer. In His mercy He will again make known in the presence of all the living that He will be your God. “I am the Lord your God. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
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In the Morning He Sells His Bed of Cotton and in the Even Returns in Tears to Buy it Back!
To restore a sense of reality, I think Walt Disney should have had a Hardluckland. With so few resources of ills, humans in the state of nature hardly has any need therefore of remedies, much less physicians. Human race is in no worse condition than all the others in this respect; and it is easy to learn from hunters whether in their chases they find many sick animals. They find quite a few that have received serious wounds that healed quite nicely, that have had bones or even limbs broken and reset with no other surgeon than time, no other regimen than their everyday life, and that are no less perfectly cured for not having been tormented with incisions, poisoned with drugs, or exhausted with fasting. Finally, however correctly administered medicine may be among us, it is still certain that although a sick savage, abandoned to oneself, has nothing to fear except one’s illness. This frequently makes one’s situation preferable to ours. Therefore we must take care not to confuse savage humans with the humans we have before our eyes. Nature treats all animals left to their own devices with a partiality that seems to show how jealous se is of that right. The horse, the cat, the bull, even he mule, are usually taller, and all of them have a more robust constitution, more vigour, more strength, and more courage in the forests than in our homes. They lose half of these advantages in becoming domesticated; it might be said that all our efforts at feeding them and treating them well only end in their degeneration. It is the same for humans themselves. In becoming habituated to the ways of society and a slave, one becomes weak, fearful, and servile; one’s soft and effeminate lifestyle completes the enervation of both one’s strength and courage. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Let us add that the difference between the savage and the human and the domesticated human should be still greater than that between the savage and the animal and the domesticated animal; for while animal and human have been treated equally by nature, humans give more comfort to themselves than to the animals they tame, and all of these comforts are so many specific causes that makes them degenerate more noticeably. It is therefore no great misfortune for those first humans, nor, above all, such a great obstacle to their preservation, that they are naked, that they have no dwelling, and that they lack all those useful things we take to be so necessary. If they do not have furry skin, they have no need for it in warm countries, and in cold countries they soon learn to help themselves to the skins of animals they have vanquished. If they have but two feet to run with, they have two arms to provide for their defense and for their needs. Perhaps their children learn to walk late and with difficulty, but mothers carry them easily: an advantage that is lacking in other species, where the mother, on being pursued, finds herself forced to abandon her young or to comfort her pace to theirs. [It is possible there are some exceptions to this. For example, the animal from the province of Nicaragua which resembles a fox and which has feet like a man’s hands, and according to Dr. Coreal, has a pouch under its belly in which the mother places her young when she is forced to take flight. No doubt this is the same animal that is called tlaquatzin in Mexico; the female of the species Laet descries as having a similar pouch for the same purpose.] #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Finally, unless we suppose those singular and fortuitous combinations of circumstances of which I will speak later, and which might very well have never taken place at any rate it is clear that the firs human who made clothing or a dwelling for oneself was giving oneself things that were hardly necessary, since one done without them until then and since it is not clear why, as a grown human, one could not endure the kind of life he had endured ever since one was a child. Alone, idle, and always near danger, savage humans must like to sleep and be a light sleeper like animals which do little thinking and, as it were, sleep the entire time they are not thinking. Since one’s self-preservation was practically one’s sole concern, one’s best trained faculties ought to be those that have attack and defense as their principal object, either to subjugate one’s prey or to prevent one’s becoming the prey of another animal. On the other hand, he organs that are perfected only by softness and sensuality must remain in a state of crudeness that excludes any kind of refinement in one. And with one’s senses of touch and taste: those of sight, hearing and smell will have the greatest subtlety. Such is the state of animals in general, and, according to the reports of travellers, such also is that of the majority of savage peoples. Thus we should not be surprised that the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope can sight ships with the naked eye as far out at sea as he Dutch can with telescopes; or that the savages of America were as capable of trailing Spaniards by smell as the best dogs could have done; or that all these barbarous nations endure their nakedness with no discomfort, whet their appetites with hot peppers, and drink European liquors like water. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In any terrestrial being I see nothing but an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses in order for it to renew its strength and to protect itself, to a certain point, from all that tends to destroy or disturb it. I am aware of precisely the same things in the human machines, with the differences that nature alone does everything in the operations of an animal, whereas humans contribute, as a free agent, to one’s own operations. The former chooses or rejects by instinct and the later by an act of freedom. Hence an animal cannot deviate from the rule that is prescribed to it, even when it would be advantageous to do so, while humans deviate from it, often to one’s own detriment. Thus a pigeon would die of hunger near a bowl filled with choice meats, and so would a cat perched atop a pile of fruit or grain, even though both could nourish themselves quite well with the food they disdain, if they were of a mind to try some. And thus dissolute humans abandon themselves to excesses which cause them fever and death, because the mind perverts the senses and because the will still speaks when nature is silent. Every animal has idea, since it has senses; up to a certain point it even combines its ideas, and in this regard humans differ from animals only in degree. Some philosophers have even suggested that there is a greater difference between two given humans than between a given human and an animal. Therefore it is not so much understanding which causes the specific distinction of humans from all other animals as it is one’s being a free agent. Nature commands every animal, and beasts obey. Humans feel the same impetus, but they know they are free to go along or to resist; and it is above all in the awareness of this freedom that the spirituality of one’s soul is made manifest. For physics explains in some way the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power, we find only purely spiritual acts, above which the laws of mechanics explain nothing. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
However, if the difficulties surrounding all these questions should leave some room for dispute on tis difference between human and animal, here is another very specific quality which distinguishes them and about which there can be no argument: the faculty of self-perfection, a faulty which, with the assistance of circumstances, successively develops all the others, and resides among us as much in the species as in the individual. On the other hand, an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and is species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why are humans alone to becoming imbeciles? Is it not that they thereby return to their primitive state, and that, while the animal which has acquired nothing and which also has nothing to lose, always retains its instinct, human, in losing through old age or other accidents all that one’s perfectibility has enabled one to acquire, thus falls even lower than the animal itself? It would be sad for us to be forced to agree that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all human’s misfortunes; that this is what, by dint of time, draws one out of that original condition in which one would pass tranquil and innocent days; that this is what, through centuries of giving rise to one’s enlightenment and one’s errors, one’s vices and one’s virtues, eventually makes one a tyrant over oneself and nature. It would be dreadful to be obliged to praise as a beneficent being the one who first suggested to the inhabitant on the banks of the Orinoco the use of boards which one binds to one’s children’s temples, and which assure them of at least part of their imbecility and their original happiness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Savage humans, left by nature to instinct alone, or rather compensated for the instinct one is perhaps lacking by faculties capable of first replacing them and hen of raising one to the level of instinct, will therefore begin with purely animal functions. Perceiving and feeling will be one’s first state, which one will have in common with all animals. Willing and not willing, desiring, and fearing will be the first and nearly the only operations of one’s soul until new circumstances bring about new developments in it. Whatever the moralists may say about it, human understanding owes much to the passions, which, by common consensus, also owe a great deal to it. It is by their activity that our reason is perfected. We seek to know only because we desire to find enjoyment; and it is impossible to conceive why someone who had neither desires nor fears would go to the bother of reasoning. The passions in turn take their origin from our needs, and their progress from our knowledge. For one can desire or fear things only by virtue of the ideas one can have of hem, or from the simple impulse of nature; and savage humans, deprived of every sort of enlightenment, feels only the passions of this latter sort. One’s desires do not go beyond one’s physical needs. The only goods one knows in the Universe are nourishment, a woman and rest; the only evils one fears are pain and hunger and homelessness. I say pain and not death because an animal will never know what it is to die; and knowledge of death and its terrors is one of the first acquisitions that humans have made in withdrawing from the animal condition. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Were it necessary, it would be easy for me to support this view with the facts and to demonstrate that, among all the nations of the World, the progress of the mind has been precisely proportionate to the needs received by peoples from nature or to those needs to which circumstances have subjected them, and consequently to the passions which inclined hem to provide for those needs. I would show the arts coming into being in Egypt and spreading with the flooding of the Nile. I would follow their progress among the Greeks, where they were seen to germinate, grow and rise to the Heavens among the sands and rocks of Attica, though never being able to take root on the fertile banks of the Eurotas. I would point out that in general the peoples of the north are more industrious than those of the south, because they cannot get along as well without being so, as if nature thereby wanted to equalize things by giving to their minds the fertility it refuses their soil. However, without having recourse to the uncertain testimony of history, does anyone fail to see that everything seems to remove savage humans from the temptation and the means of ceasing to be savage? One’s imagination depicts nothing to one; one’s heart asks nothing of one. One’s modest needs are so easily found at hand, and one is so far from the degree of knowledge necessary to make one desire to acquire greater knowledge, that one can have neither foresight nor curiosity. The spectacle of nature becomes a matter of indifference to one by din of its becoming familiar to one. It is always the same order, always the same succession of changes. One does not have a mind for marveling at the greatest wonders; and we must not seek in one the philosophy that a human needs in order to know how to observe once what one has seen everyday. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
One’s soul, agitated by nothing, is given over to the single feeling of one’s own present existence, without any idea of the future, however, near it may be, and one’s projects, as limited as one’s views, hardly extend to the end of the day. Such is, even today, the extent of the Carib’s foresight. In the morning one sells one’s bed for cotton and in the evening one returns in tears to buy it back, for want of having foreseen that one would need it at night. The more one meditates on this subject, the more distance from pure sensations to the simplest knowledge increases before our eyes; and it is impossible to conceive how a human could have crossed such a wide gap by one’s forces alone, without the assistance of communication and without the provocation of necessity. How many centuries have perhaps gone by before humans were in a position to see any fire other than that from the Heavens? How many different risks did they have to run before they learned the most common uses of that element? How many times did they let it go out before they had acquired the art of reproducing it? And how many times perhaps did each of these secrets die with the one who had discovered it? What will we say about agriculture, an art that requires so much labour and foresight, that depends on so many other arts, that quite obviously is practicable only in a society which is at least in its beginning stages, and that serves us not so much to derive from the Earth food it would readily provide without agriculture, as to force from it those preferences that are most to our taste? #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
However, let us suppose that humans multiplied to the point where the natural productions were no longer sufficient to nourish them: a supposition which, it may be said in passing, would show a great advantage for the human species in that way of life. Let us suppose that, without forges or workshops, farm implements had fallen from the Heavens into the hands of the savages; that these humans had conquered the mortal hatred they all have for continuous work; that they had learned to foresee their needs far enough in advance; that they had guessed how the soil is to be cultivated, grains sown, and trees planted; that they had discovered the arts of grinding wheat and fermenting grapes: all things they would need to have been taught by the gods, for it is inconceivable how they could have picked these things up on their own. Yet, after all this, what human would be so foolish as to tire oneself out cultivating a field that will be plundered by the first comer, be it human or beast, who takes a fancy to the crop? And how could each human resolve to spend one’s life in hard labour, when, the more necessary to one the fruits of one’s labour may be, the surer one is of not realizing them? In a word, how could this situation lead humans to cultivate the soil as long as it is not divided among them, that is to say, as long as the state of nature is not wiped out? There is no security against Miracle to be found by the study of Nature. She is no the whole of reality but only a part; for all we know she might be a small part. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
If that which is outside her wishes to invade her she has, so far as we can see, no defences. However, of course many who disbelieve in Miracles would admi all this. Their objection comes from the other side. They think that the Supernatural would not invade: they accuse those who say that it has done so of having a childish and unworthy notion of the Supernatural. They therefore reject all form of Supernaturalism which assert such interference and invasions: and specially form called Christianity, for in it the Miracles, or at least some Miracles, are more closely bound up with the fabric of the whole belief than in any others. All the essentials of Hinduism would, I think, remain unimpaired if you subtracted the miraculous, and the same is almost true of Mohammedanism. However, you cannot do that with Christianity. It is precisely the story of a great Miracle. A naturalistic Christianity leaves out all that is specifically Christian. The difficulties of the unbeliever do not begin with questions about this or that particular miracle; they begin much further back. When a human who has had only the ordinary modern education looks into any authoritative statement of Christian doctrine, one finds oneself face to face with what seems to one a wholly “savage” or “primitive” picture of the Universe. One finds that God is supposed to have had a “Son,” just as if God were a mythological deity like Jupiter or Odin. He finds that this “Son” is supposed to have “come down from Heaven,” just as if God had a palace in the sky from which He had sent down His “Son” like a parachutist. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
One finds that this “Son” then “descended into Hell”—into some land of the dead under the surface of a (presumably) flat Earth—and thence “ascended” again, as if by a balloon, into His Father’s sky palace, where He finally sat down in a decorated chair places a little to His Father’s right. Everything seems to presuppose a conception of reality which the increase of our knowledge has been steadily refuting for the last two thousand and twenty-two years and which no honest human in one’s sense could return to today. It is this impression which explains the contempt, and even disgust, felt by many people for the writings of modern Christians. When one a human is convinced that Christianity in general implies a local “Heaven,” a flat Earth, and a God who can have children, one naturally listens with impatience to our solutions of particular difficulties and our defences against particular objections. The more ingenious we are in such solutions and defences the more perverse we seem to one. “Of course,” he says, “once he doctrines are there, clever people can invent clever arguments to defend them, just as, when once a historian has made a blunder one can go on inventing more and more elaborate theories to make it appear that it was not a blunder. However, if one had read one’s documents correctly in the first instance, it is clear that none of these elaborate theories would have been thought of. In the same way, if the writers of the New Testament had had he slightest knowledge of what the real Universe is actually like, is it not clear that Christian theology would never have come into existence at all?” #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Thus, at any rate, I used to think myself. The very human who taught me to think—a hard, satirical atheist (ex-Presbyterian) who doated on the Golden Bough and filled one’s house with the products of the Rationalist Press Association—thought in the same way; and one was a man as honest as the daylight, to whom I here willingly acknowledge an immense debt. His attitude to Christianity was for me the starting point of adult thinking; you may say it is bred in my bones. And yet, since those days, I have come to regard that attitude as a total misunderstanding. Remembering, as I do, from within, the attitude of the impatient sceptic, I realize very well how one is fore-armed against anything I may say for the rest of this essay. “I know exactly what this man is going to do,” he murmurs. “He is going to start explaining all these mythological statements away. It is the invariable practice of these Christians. On any matter whereon science has not yet spoken and on which they cannot be checked, they will tell you some preposterous fairytale. And then, the moment science makes a new advance and shows (as it invariably does) their statement to be untrue, they suddenly turn round and explain that they did not mean what they said, that they were using a poetic metaphor or constructing an allegory, and that all they really intended was some harmless moral platitude. We are sick of this theological thimblerigging.” Now I have a great deal of sympathy with that sickness and I freely admit that “modernist” Christianity has constantly played just the game of which the impatient sceptic accuses it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
However, I also think there is a kind of explaining which is not explaining away. In one sense I am going to do just what the sceptic thinks I am going to do: that is, I am going to distinguish what I regard as the “core” or “real meaning” of the doctrines from that in their expression which I regard as inessential and possibly even capable of being changed without damage. However, then, what will drop away from the “real meaning” under my treatment will precisely not be the miraculous. It is the core itself, the core scraped as clean of inessentials as we can scrape it, which remains for me entirely miraculous, supernatural—nay, if you will, “primitive” and even “magical.” “Do not unfold your heart to anyone,” said the cautious Jeremiah (17.5). When you get a problem, present it to a counselor who knows what one is doing and does not hesitate to tell you. The Book of Proverbs suggests much the same (25.9). Do not hang on the youngster and do not dawdle with the outsiders. Do not dally with the rich and famous; or so says the Book of Proverb (25.6). The humble and the simple, the devout and the obedient, these are the ones to associate with. And with them busy yourself only in the Edifiables. Do not commend yourself to any one woman in particular, but commend all women as a group to God. That is what Jesus son of Sirach would have us do (9.1-9). Do not draw attention to yourself in a crowd. However, if you must have some familiars, then choose God and His Holy Angels. Charity knows no bounds, but familiarity, apparently, has its limits. For example, we hear of a person who has a glowing reputation and immediately thing we could be such good friends. However, when we meet one face to face, of course we are polite, but once one opens one’s mouth, our eyes begin to glaze. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
And we are just vain enough to think that the opposite is not true. However, how true it is! Others should be quite pleased to meet us, we think, but, astonishingly, as soon as we begin to speak, and of course we speak so very well, their eyes grow steely, staring right through us; that is to say, they sense the latent load that is in us. It is a great thing you are living under obedience; that is to say, doing things the way a superior wants them, not the way you think they ought to be. And it is safer too. Nobody blames an inferior when something goes wrong. However, many Devout under obedience today feel they are prisoners, and their complaints rise like murmurings from the cell block. However, these Devouts will never achieve freedom of mind until they wholeheartedly subject themselves to the will of God. However, do not let me stop you. If you want, hit the road, hithering and thithering wherever you like! Mark you, you will not find rest until you humbly subject yourself to the superior’s regime. However, if you are so dreamy, then dream this: Yourself in front of the last monastery at the end of the World, ringing the bell at the gate—things will definitely be better here! Sweet dream, I grant you, but it is still a dream. And how many of today’s Devout have fallen for it! Yes, it is true, each one of us associates with those who feel the same way. However, Go is among us now. If we ever hope to achieve peace of soul, we have to leave behind what we feel. Is that too much to ask? #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Who is so wise that one can know everything there is to know? No one, of course. Therefore, do not rely too much on how you feel on any given day. However, do not hesitate to listen to the way others feel. At any given day. However, do not hesitate to listen to the way others feel. At any given moment we all feel we know wat is the right and good thing to do. However, next time it happens to you, take God’s advice and drive it out of your mind. Why? Follow yourself, and you will end up in ever decreasing circles. Follow another, and you will find yourself farter down the path toward perfection than you could have ever dreamed. Good Counsel, or o the Proverb goes (12.15): to accept it keeps one’s spirituality fresh, but to give it to the young of soul on a daily basis ages the counselor prematurely. Advice is one thing, but it is not the only thing. There are also Sound Reason and Good Cause. They too can encourage one to acquiesce to others. No matter whence the wisdom, not to defer to another is clear indication that, no matter what your age, you are either a pompous twit or a willful snot. The causes of life’s history cannot resolve the riddle of life’s meaning. What we today call evolutionary psychology—the study of the evolution of behaviour and the mind, using principles of natural selection—is akin to what psychologist once called “comparative psychology.” Comparative psychology explored sensation, learning, and behaviour across the phylogenetic scale of animal life, from worms to humans. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
With increasing brain complexity, comparative psychologists observed more elaborate learning and behaviours. Then “ethologists”—scientists studying animal behaviour in natural contexts—alerted us to complex behaviours exhibited by simple animals such as ants and bees. Still, all of this was relatively uncontroversial and therefore quite unlike evolutionary psychology, which has made the covers of Time, Der Spiegel, and leading scientific journals. Unlike comparative psychology and ethology, evolutionary psychology has seemed to challenge our self-understanding—our view of huma nature and our place in nature. “From the beginning philosophers have agonized over the question of what make us human,” notes Frans de Waal, a leading primatologist. “Is there a difference in kind or merely a difference in the degree between ourselves and other animals? Direct comparisons between people and animals are often seen as demeaning, even offensive.” Such comparisons are hardly new, even within theological circles. “It is dangerous to show a human too clearly how much one resemble the beast, without at the same time showing him his greatness,” wrote Blasie Pascal in the seventeenth century. “It is also dangerous to allow him too clear a vision of his greatness without his baseness. It is even more dangerous to leave one in ignorance of both.” Evolutionary psychology helps reduce that ignorance. Today, some excited psychologists see evolutionary psychology as mounting a takeover bid for the whole of psychology. David Buss chose the subtitle The New Science of the Mind for his recent book Evolutionary Psychology. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Dr. Buss then proceeded to reorganize the whole of psychology within evolutionary psychology. Others offer more modest claims. Britain’s Open University says simply, “Evolutionary psychology focuses on how human beings came to be the apparently special terrestrial beings we are today.” However, what is special about us? All terrestrial beings have special properties and abilities. Moles live underground. Bird fly. Monkeys swing through trees. Does language mark us as special? (The training of chimps to communicate by sign suggests a simple form of language in nonhuman primates). Are humans special only by virtue of having more complex thinking abilities? By linking us to animal ancestors, doe evolutionary psychology deny our faith claim of uniqueness that comes from God’s gracious invitation to a personal relationship? We believe no. Evolutionary psychology has no interest in such a question (though individual evolutionary psychologists will have views on this). The Light of God is felt as energy pulsing in space and tingling in the body; it is seen, usually with the mind’s eye but sometimes with the body’s, as an unearthly radiance; it is intuited as a glory filling the whole of one’s inner being. The Light is seen visually as a golden ball, a brilliant ray or shaft or beam, and finally as a vague radiance diffused in all directions. It may stay within the orbit of vision quite motionless and still. Or it may quiver, throb, and pulsate. Or it may shoot forward like a lightning flash. One who beholds the Light may be grateful for several reasons. First, it is the only occult experience of which it may be said ta it is entirely without risk or peril. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Secondly, the light is the loftiest of all clairvoyant visions. Third, it confers the feeling of perfect felicity, not in the Worldly sense, but of an ethereal unearthly kind. Fourth, it is a direct manifestation of God to humans, being the first of one’s outpourings, hence an uncommon blessing, a grace. Fifth, if it appears in consciousness as Power, the recipient may feel a tremendous force, unknown otherwise, throbbing all around and within one, or a sudden lightening-like flash of complete comprehension: one understands what neither bodily sense nor intellectual faculty can understand—the supernatural meaning of Spirit, of eternity, of transfiguration, and of reality. The Light may be sent forth as a ray to touch the heart or the head of any particular person to uplift or console, pacify emotions or exalt ideas; it may also be sent to encircle a person protectively. Light is also symbolic. Contrast with darkness, it suggests redemption and knowledge as against sinfulness and ignorance. It is significant that not only is night the time when human crime and passion are at their maximum but it is also the time when worrying thoughts are at their most morbid. The day with its brightness has ever been a symbol of spirituality, the night with its darkness a symbol of materiality. For one who has found one’s own spirit, finds peace and is free from fear, and consequently from its child—worry—too. The very nature of sunshine—all light—and the very condition in which sunrises and sunsets occur—stillness—helps us to understand why Light and the Overself are bracketed together. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Your own consciousness shinning, void, inseparable from the great body of radiance, is subject neither to birth nor death, but is the same as the immutable light, God. Use the light within you to revert to your natural clearness of sight. Among those who have seen this light, some Christians have named in “the glory of God,” or “the self-effulgent light.” The Light is a shining of the Holy Spirit in the soul. Through this light, God is truly known by the worthy and beloved soul. Light is identical with the Holy Spirit, and it reveals the reality of that Spirit while sanctifying the person. “The Lord is my Light,” report Psalm 27. Since predestination includes will, the reasons can be found on the part of the things willed; inasmuch as God wills one thing on account of something else. Wherefore nobody has been so insane as to say that merit is the cause of divine predestination as regards the ac of the predestinator. However, this is the question, whether, as regards he effect, predestination has any cause; or what comes to the same thing, whether God preordained that He would give the effect of predestination to anyone on account of any merits. Accordingly were some who held that the effect of predestination was pre-ordained for some on account of pre-existing merits in a former life. This was the opinion of Origen, who thought that the souls of humans were created in the beginning, and according to the diversity of their works different states were assigned to them in this World when united with the Body. The Apostle, however, rebuts this opinion where he says (Romans 9.11, 12): “For when they were not yet born, nor had done any good or evil not of works, but of Him hat calleth, it was said of her: The elder shall serve the younger.” The wisdom of the World-Mind has put quick-lines into the terrestrial mind—which you may call instinct if your wish—which show it how to keep alive by picking out the food needed. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Humans, being the possessor of a terrestrial body, shares a proportion of these instincts; for the rest one must use one’s judgements. Only good, beneficial thoughts were allowed to enter one’s head and good food one’s stomach. We are free to reduce the area of our destructiveness and to lessen the amount of pain we inflict. If we could examine the prehistoric period of humans, and not merely one’s last century, we would find that the duration of one’s life has since been shortened, while the condition of one’s body has deteriorated through new diseases. The cause in both cases lies in one’s changed feeding habits to some extent, and in one’s unrestricted habits dealing with pleasures of the flesh to a much larger extent. Where humans have given themselves up to excitement involving pleasures of the flesh as a continuing and enduring feature of one’s life—as contrasted with the wild animals which experience it only at particular seasons—the cause exists not in the different nature with which one has been endowed but in the excess of strongly nutritive material which has absorbed into one’s body. To prove that this is so, one has only to take the case of one’s domestic animals which, when also getting superfluous nutriment, are excited more often than the wild ones. Our definition of sin needs is widening. It is also sinful to break the laws of hygiene, to indulge in habits that are either poisonous or devitalizing. The overactive hyper-irritable nerve and brain fatiguing kind of life in which civilized humans have entangled themselves builds up much inner tension and loads one with useless psychic burdens of negative feelings. #RandolphHarrs 20 of 23
Depression, melancholia, and despair have been known to being on wasting ailments and even death. The mind’s suffering, if too intense and too prolonged, may shift to the flesh. Of these lower emotional causes of ill health, fear and shock are perhaps the commonest. Many an illness or the malfunctioning of an organ or a disease begin with a strong negative thought, and, by the latter’s constant repetition until it hardens into a chronic mental-emotional condition, builds up to a crisis in a subsequent year. It is the routine activity of the brain and especially the mental tendency toward anxiety and fear which is expressed through it, which interferes with Nature’s healing process—whether these be spiritual or physical or both—or obstructs them or delays them or defeats them completely. This anxiety arises through he sufferer’s confinement to one’s personal ego and through one’s ignorance of the arrangements in the World-Idea’s body-pattern for the human body’s protective care. The remedy is in one’s own hands. It is twofold: first to change from negative to optimistic thinking through acquiring either faith in this care or else knowledge of it; second, to give body and brain as total a rest as one’s capacity allows, which is achieved through fasting and in prayer. The first change is more easily made by immediately substituting the beneficial and the opposite idea as soon as the pessimistic one appears in one’s field of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
One trains oneself not to accept any harmful thought and watches one’s mind during this period of training. This constructive thought must be held and nourished with firm concentration for as long as possible. The second change calls for an abstinence from all thoughts, a mental quiet, as well as an abstinence from anything that may be stressful. To the extent that one can release oneself by inner discipline from one’s negatives, to that extent will one release oneself from many troubles which might otherwise descend upon one. As irritations fell away from one’s personal feelings, ills of body, circumstance, or relationship fall away from threatening one’s personal fortunes. If the mind of a spiritual healer can help to remove disease, it is equally true that the mind of some other person can contribute to cause it. If one’s own wrong thinking may be partly or wholly responsible for one’s diseases, others who are thinking constantly or powerfully about one may be partly or even wholly responsible for them too. His is the basis of sorcery in the East and of witchcraft in the medieval West. The mental and emotional adjustment to frustration or loss which philosophy brings about is definitely therapeutic. If ignorance of the laws of our psychophysical being causes many people to contravene those laws and become sick, carelessness about obeying them brings illness to some who do not know them. Selfish people, worrying people, negative people, complaining people, venomous people need to find this inner peace. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
People have to learn not to conjure dark angels, which fill them with guile and hate One must focus on the Light of God. It will heal them of their moral maladies, which in turn may be the causes of their physical maladies. Psychosomatic illnesses are curable by physical means. However, either the cures are temporary or other symptoms of a different kind appear and replace hose which have disappeared. Merely to express belief in faith healing is no enough to receive healing. If they are directed towards the inner causes of the illness, there must also be willingness to make needed moral and psychological adjustments. Everyone without a single exception wants to be healed of one’s diseases but how few want just as much to be healed of their hatreds, their rages, and their lusts? It is sometimes possible to deduce the nature of the wrong-doing from the nature of the subsequent affliction. Although they have tightly bound my arms and legs, all over the mountain I hear the song of birds, and the forest is field with perfume of spring-flowers. Who can present me from freely enjoying these, which take from the long journey a little of its loneliness? God causes the rain to fall. Thou sustainest the living with lovingkindness, and in great mercy callest the departed to everlasting life. Thou upholdest the falling, healest the sick, settest free those in bondage, and keepest faith with those that sleep in the dust. Who is like uno Thee, Almighty King, who decreest death and life and bringest forth salvation? Faithful art Thou to grant eternal life to the departed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who callest the dead to life everlasting. Holy art Thou and holy is Thy name and unto Thee holy beings render praise daily. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Holy God. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!
Cresleigh Meadows is now selling! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes.
Homeowners will love the convenient commuter access to nearly Sacramento and Yuba City.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Go. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/
What Kind of Soul is it that Can Eat, Drink, and be Marry?
Sometimes it is necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly. In all Second Wave societies a third institution arose that extended the control of the first two. This was the invention known as the corporation. Until then, the typical business enterprise had been owned by an individual, a family, or a partnership. Corporations existed, but were extremely rare. Even as late as the American Revolution, according to business historian Arthur Dewing, “no one could have concluded” that the corporation—rather the partnership or individual proprietorship—would become the main organizational form. As recently as 1800s there were only 335 corporations in the United States of America, most of them devoted to such quasi-public activities as building canals or running turnpikes. The rise of mass production changed all this. Second Wave technologies required giant pools of capital—more than a single individual or even a small group could provide. So long as proprietors or partners risked their entire personal fortunes with every investment, they were reluctant o sink their money in vast or risky ventures. To encourage them, the concept of limited liability was introduced. If a corporation collapsed, the investor stood to lose only the sum invested and no more. This innovation opened the investment floodgates. Moreover, the corporation was treated by the courts as an “immortal being”—meaning it could outlive its original investors. This meant, in turn, that it could make very long-range plans and undertake far bigger projects then ever before. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
By 1901 the World’s first billion-dollar corporation—United States Steel—appeared on the scene, a concentration of assets unimaginable in any earlier period. By 1919 there were half a dozen such behemoths. Indeed, large corporations became an in-built feature of economic life in all the industrial nations, including socialist and communist societies, where the form varied but the substance (in terms of organizations) remained very much the same. Together these three—the nuclear family, the factory-style school, and the gain corporation—became the defining social institutions of all Second Wave societies. And, throughout the Second Wave World—in Japan as well as in Switzerland, Britain, Poland, the United States of America, Russian—most people followed a standard life trajectory: reared in a nuclear family, they moved en masse through factorylike schools, then entered the service of a large corporation, private or public. A key Second Wave institution dominated each phase of the lifestyle. Around these three core institutions a host of other organizations sprang up. Government ministries, sports clubs, churches, chambers of commerce, trade unions, professional organizations, political parties, libraries, ethnic associations, recreational groups, and thousands of others bobbed up in the wake of the Second Wave, creating a complicated organizational ecology with each group servicing, coordinating, or counterbalancing another. At first glance, the variety of these groups suggests randomness or chaos. However, a closer look reveals a hidden pattern. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
In one Second Wave country after another, social inventors, believing the factory to be the most advanced and efficient agency for production, tried to embody its principles in other organizations as well. Schools, hospitals, prisons, government bureaucracies, and other organizations thus took on many of the characteristics of the factory—its division of labour, its hierarchical structure and is metallic impersonality. Even in the arts we find some of the principles of the factory. Instead of working for a patron, as was customary during the long reign of agricultural civilization, musicians, artist, composers, and writers were increasingly thrown on the mercies of the marketplace. More and more they turned out “products” for anonymous consumers. And as this shift occurred in every Second Wave country, the very structure of artistic production changes. Music provides a striking example. As the Second Wave arrived, concert halls began to crop up in London, Vienna, Paris, and elsewhere. With them came the box office and the impresario—the businessman who financed the production and then sold tickets to culture consumers. The more tickets he could sell, naturally, the more money he could make. Hence more and more seats were added. In turn, however, larger concert halls required louder sounds—music that could be clearly heard in the very last tier. The result was a shift from chamber music to symphonic forms. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Says Curt Sachs in his authoritative History of Musical Instruments, “The passage from an aristocratic to a democratic culture, in the eighteenth century, replaced the small salon by the more and more gigantic concert halls, which demanded greater volume.” Since to technology existed yet to make this possible, more and more instruments and players were added to produce the necessary volume. The result was the modern symphony orchestra, and it was for this industrial institution that Beethoven, Mendelson, Schubert, and Brahms wrote their magnificent symphonies. The orchestra even mirrored certain features of the factory in its internal structure. At first the symphony orchestra was leaderless, or the leadership was casually passed around among players. Later the players, exactly like workers in a factory or bureaucratic office, were divided into departments (instrumental sections), each coordinated from above by a manager (the conductor) or even, eventually, a straw boss farther down the management hierarchy (the first violinist or the section head). The institution sold its product to a mass market—eventually adding phonograph records to its output. The music factory had been born. The history of the orchestra offers only one illustration of the way the Second Wave socio-sphere arose, with its three core institutions and thousands of varied organizations, all adapted to the needs and style of the industrial techno-sphere. However, a civilization is more than simply a techno-sphere and a matching socio-sphere. All civilizations also require an “info-sphere” for producing and distributing information, and here, too, the changes brought by the Second Wave were remarkable. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the advantages of the city and the difficulties of commutation insured that commuters were not a significant proportion of the populations of most cities. The historian Henry Binford argues that early suburbs, rather then being appendages or outgrowths from the city, were freestanding, thinly settled, semirural communities. Such communities included manufacturing and commercial activity related to the city, but the limited mobility of persons and goods meant that contact with the city was sporadic rather than daily. Going into the city just took too much effort. Before the late 1840s travel required considerable energy, time, and expense. In their social life and political organization, early suburbs were more villages than smaller clones of the central city. Only when transportation improved, would fringe areas be transformed into commuter suburbs. In the meantime, fringe locations would be hybrid communities. Even before the era of mass transportation and the period when the suburbs would have regular contact with the city, the suburban fringe had already begun to change in significant ways. First, the suburbs had become more diverse villages, with a mixture of newcomers, some of whom had links to the central city and some of whom had economic and other links to the country. Secondly, partially as a consequence of the increased population diversity, there was increased social complexity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
As the populations of the suburban villages became more diverse, their social organizations became more complex, with overlapping circles of interests and involvement. Boundaries became more varied and flexible. People’s social, religious, business, and political networks were increasingly likely to vary from individual to individual. Finally, the villages were changing politically. Newer and younger men had a wider range of interests, and they were more open to the growth of local government and its evolution from village to suburban forms. However, not all American suburban areas of a century and a half ago were impoverished, housing only the poor and outcast. Outer areas had open land, and America’s Jeffersonian agrarian heritage contributed to an ideology that encouraged open space while viewing cities as source of discord and social evils. Since virtue (and affordably land) increased as one approached rural life, the goal of some urbanites was to be in the city, but just barely. Thus suburban development of Brooklyn as an independent suburban community, across the harbour from Manhattan, indicated how the dilemma of continuing urban business without abandoning the city could be resolved using the technology of the ferryboat. Living in Brooklyn, across the harbour from Manhattan, provided the prototype compromise. Brooklyn was the first commuter suburb. With its ferryboat connection to Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights had easy access to the city while at the same time retaining the suggestion of a bucolic community. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
By 1841 half of the householders who had bought land in Brooklyn Heights commuted to offices in Manhattan. By no stretch could these commuters be characterized as social outcasts or those on the margins of society. Hezekiah Beers Pierrepoint developed Brooklyn Heights as a community, noting “Gentlemen whose business or profession required daily attendance into the city cannot better, or with less expense, secure the health and comfort of their families.” Here in his comments were the themes that would be used to promote and advertise suburban living for the next century and a half. Suburbia claimed to offer a superior lifestyle, was a more healthful place to live, and was less expensive in the bargain. There are two kinds of inequality in the human species: one which I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature and consists in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and qualities of mind or soul. The other may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of humans. This latter type of inequality consists in the different privileges enjoyed by some at the expense of other, such as being richer, more honoured, more powerful than they, or even causing themselves to be obeyed by them. There is no point in asking what the source of natural inequality is, because the answer would be found enunciated in the simple definition of the word. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
There is still less of a point in asking whether there would not be some essential connection between the two inequalities, for that would amount to asking whether those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and whether strength of body or mind, wisdom or virtue are always found in the same individuals in proportion to power or wealth. Perhaps this is a good question for slabs to discuss within earshot of their masters, but it is not suitable for reasonable and free people who seek the truth. Precisely what, then, is the subject of this discourse? To mark, in the progress of things, the moment when, right taking the place of violence, nature was subjected to the law. To explain the sequence of wonders by which the strong could resolve to serve the weak, and the people to buy imaginary repose at the prince of real felicity. The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of returning to the state of nature, but none of them has reached it. Some have not hesitated to ascribe to human in that state the notion of just and unjust, without bothering to show that one had to have that notion, or even that it was useful to one. Others have spoken of the natural right that everyone has to preserve what belongs to one, without explaining what they mean by “belonging.” Others started out by giving authority to the stronger over the weaker, and immediately brought about government, without giving any thought to the time that had to pass before the meaning of the words “authority” and “government” could exist among humans. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Finally, all of them, speaking continually of need, avarice, oppression, desire, and pride, have transferred to the state of nature the ideas they acquired in society. They spoke about savage humans, and it was civil humans they depicted. It did not even occur to most of our philosophers to doubt that the state of nature had existed, even though it is evident from reading the Holy Scriptures that the first man, having received enlightenment and precepts immediately from God, was not himself in that state; and if we give the writings of Moses the credence that every Christian owes them, we must deny that, even before the flood, men were every in the pure state of nature, unless they had fallen back into it because of some extraordinary event: a paradox that is quite awkward to defend and utterly impossible to prove. Let us therefore begin by putting aside all the facts, for they have no bearing on the question. The investigations that may be undertaken concerning this subject should not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better suited to shedding light on the nature of things than on pointing out their true origin, like those our physicists make everyday with regard to the formation of the World. Religion commands us to believe that since God Himself drew humans out of the state of nature, they are unequal because He wanted them to be so; but it does not forbid us to form conjectures, drawn solely from the nature of humans and the beings that surround them, concerning what the human race could have become, if it had been left to itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Humans, whatever country you may be from, whatever your opinions may be, listen: here is your history, as I have thought to read it, not in the books of your fellowmen, who are liars, but in nature, who never lies. Everything that comes from nature will be true; there will be nothing false except what I have unintentionally added. The times about which I am going to speak are quite remote: how much you have changed from what you were! It is, as it were, the life of your species that I am about to describe to you according to the qualities you have received, which your education and your habits have been able to corrupt but have been unable to destroy. There is, I feel, an age at which an individual human would want to stop. You will seek the age at which you would want your species to have stopped. Dissatisfied with your present state for reasons that protend even greater grounds for dissatisfaction for your unhappy posterity, perhaps you would like to be able to go backwards in time. This feeling should be a hymn in praise of your first ancestors, the criticism of your contemporaries, and the dread of those who have the unhappiness of living after you. Without having recourse to the supernatural knowledge we have on this point, and without taking note of changes that must have occurred in the internal as well as the external conformation of humans, as they applied their limbs to new purposes and nourished themselves on new foods, I will suppose one to have been formed from all time as I see them today: walking on two feet, using their hands as we use ours, directing their gaze over all of nature, and measuring with their eyes the vast expanse of the Heavens. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Like the Old Testament, the New Testament sees human nature as a psychophysical unity. Although Jesus Christ and the apostles spoke Aramaic, their words have been handed down to us in New Testament Greek, which, depending on its frames of reference, uses any of several interchangeable terms for referring to persons. Whether we are admonished to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind or to present our bodies “as living sacrifice,” the meaning is the same: commit your whole person to God. The Greek word psyche parallels the Hebrew nephesh and is frequently translated as “soul.” In many cases its meaning is clearly not that of an immaterial soul. When Joseph brought his father, Jacob, and seventy-five “souls” into Egypt (as narrated in Acts 7.14), he did not leave their bodies behind in Canaan. The rich farmer dreams of harvests so great that one can say to one’s psyche, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” The biblical scholar Frank Stagg wonders aloud, “What kind of soul is it that can eat, drink, and be merry? A soul is a self, a person. In Romans 2.9, every “human being” who does evil and suffers for it is a psyche and in Romans 13.1 every “person” to be subjected to persons who govern is likewise a psyche. The whole [person] sins and the whole [person] is called to responsible citizenship. Saint Paul, true to his Hebrew heritage, here thins of man as a unity. The Biblical teaching is not that one has a soul but that one is a soul.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
That is exactly it. You do not have a soul, you are a soul. A soul comes from God. Nothing created can exist without a soul. God is omnipresent, we are emanations of God. He is our soul. Spirituality, as reflected in the Greek words translated as “spirit” and “flesh,” similarly has not to do with the whole person in relationship with God and other persons. The theologian Bruce Reichenbach suggests that to recapture this sense of spirituality we ought to drop the term soul from our religious vocabulary: “Such an approach, far from destroying faith in the spiritual aspect of humans, will assist in clarifying precisely wherein the spiritual lies, that is, that it lies not in the possession of an entity, but in the style of life one leads insofar as it manifests a relation to God and to one’s fellow human.” We also see the Hebrew-Christian understanding of psychophysical unity in the New Testament teaching concerning life after death. Oscar Cullmann beings his classic book, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? by observing that if we were to ask ordinary Christians what they conceive to be the New Testament teaching concerning our fate after death, “with few exceptions we should get the answers: The immortality of the soul. Yet this widely accepted idea is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Christianity.” Scripture promises us not immortality of the soul, but resurrection to eternal life as an “embodied spirit”—a very different proposition. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
For Jesus, unlike Socrates, death was no friend. At the grace of his friend Lazarus, Jesus wept. Death mattered. It was, in the apostle Paul’s words, “the great enemy.” Death is real, and I is an enemy precisely because we do not have within our own natures a guaranteed immortality. At the end of our lives we do not, as Socrates assumed, “pass away”; rather, we die. However, there is hope, a hope rooted not in our nature but in God’s love and faithfulness. Christians believe that God created and values human lives and that God will re-create them after death, giving us, on that “great gettin’-up morning,” what, apart from divine love, we do not have—eternal life. The hope that Christians proclaim in the Apostle’s Creed—“I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”—is a hope grounded in God’s initiative, not in our nature. To use a crude but modern analogy, after the plug is puled on our computing machinery, the divine programmer promises to re-create our software on a new, error-free, piece of hardware. (Contrast this view with the pre-Christian idea of Seneca, who viewed himself as a “mixture of body and soul, of divine and human; my body I will leave where I found it, my soul I will restore to Heaven.”) If we have immortal souls, it must not have been the case the Christ was the first to defeat death nor did he need to force open a door that until then had been locked. However, Christians believe that it was and He did. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
However, if the Psychical Researchers succeeded in proving “survival” and showed that the Resurrection was an instance of it, they would not be supporting the Christian faith but refuting it. (In fact, the founders or parapsychology were mostly people who had lost their faith in God and were searching for another basis for believing in the meaning of life and the possibility of life after death.) This claim embodies the Christian concept of resurrection containing the belief that our lives will be followed not by eternal extinction but by a renewal of life, with our individual identities intact, perhaps rather as a beautiful flower preserves the identity of the human seed that precedes it. (From this, all Christians, whether they hold to an immortal soul or not, derive equal comfort when confronting death.) Second, the New Testament image of a restored and perfected mind-body unit reinforces the other biblical images of human nature as a psychophysical unity. We must be wary of yoking biblical ideas to the details of any currently prevailing scientific theory. However, it is noteworthy that this unified image is consistent with the emerging scientific image of humans as a mind-body unity. Fundamentally, both views assume that without our bodies we are nobodies, and that we had best therefore be good to our bodies. Rather than despising the body as that which “fills us with passions, and desires, and fears, and all sorts of fancies, and foolishness,” as Socrates declare, Christians regard the body as “the temple of the Holy Spirit.” #RandolphHarrs 14 of 22
Indeed, we do not have bodies rather, we are bodies, bodies alive with minds. That being so, we should care about people’s whole selves—body and all. And that is indeed why people of faith have been on the forefront of efforts to take medicine to the developing World, to alleviate hunger, and to combat debilitating racism. The biblical accounts of human nature are, in a very profound sense, timeless. They made sense to our forebears long before science appeared, and they are relevant today. That should warn us against misconstruing them today by trying to impose on their vocabulary a precision, familiar to us today within science, that they were never intended to have. We discover that their main concern is with what God thinks about humans. The biblical account is a God-centered view and is pre-occupied with relationships—first and foremost the relationship of God to humanity, but also of person to person, and of humankind to the created order, of which it both a part and a steward. It provides advice and enduring truths on how to live our lives day by day. However, humankind today is not as God created it. An event described as the fall occurred, in which humankind’s obedience to God turned to disobedience. Seen in this way the fall is interpreted primarily as a break in the relationships of God, humans, and nature. The fall is often described as having “marred” or “obscured” God’s image, which can be restored in Christ. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
However, our physical existence has continued without interruption despite the fact that unredeemed humankind has been “dead in trespasses and sins” since then. Thus, while biological and spiritual life can be distinguished from each other, we must not overemphasize this possibility, since they are part of a whole. The rich fabric of the total picture given to us in Scripture brings to mind the similarly rich complexity of the total picture of human nature given to us through the scientific endeavour today. Both emphasize the complexity of human nature, the need to understand and study it from many diverse aspects or perspectives, and the need to recognize that human nature is a unity—a unity now in this present life and, by the grace of God, a unity in the life to some. The person who lusts for something breaks out into hives. The person who is proud produces pouches under one’s eyes. The person who is greedy develops hollows in one’s cheeks. The persons who has not died to oneself is easy game for the Enemy’s guile. Whoever finds oneself flooded with weakness and clinging to the flesh is mired in desire. One can still extract oneself from this sort of life, but only with the greatest difficulty. When a person like this holds oneself back, one grows sad. When someone else holds one back, one flies off into a rage. By way of contrast, the person who is poor and the one who is humble in spirit may seem to live a humdrum life; nonetheless they experience a measure of control and even a modicum of concord. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
You may go for the gusto, that is to say, aggressively pursue something you lust for; but when you grab it, it will grab you and twist you to the floor. By allowing a thousand rich such small passions to enslave you, you will never find True Peace of Heart. If you ever hope to escape, you must resist, fight back to fund what you are looking for. In the same way anyone who reveals and drivels one’ life away cannot find True Peace; only the fervent and spiritual know where to look for that. If one cares enough for the Quest and understand enough about the relation between it and diet, one will come sooner or later to choose one’s food with more resistance to habit. There is an opportunity to strengthen one’s will, overcome a bad habit and show one’s determination to quicken progress by dropping a negative practice of behaviour or action altogether from the first day. Do not sin against your health. Somethings humans partake in is poisonous physically and morally. Not all sickness and all disease are caused by wrong thinking in this present reincarnation but some of them are. How great or how small that part is depends entirely upon the individuals concerned. With some, it is a very high proportion, with others it is a small one. In the former case, therefore, we must look back to anterior lives for the wrong thought or wrong conduct which produced the sickness of the present physical body as bad karma. The practice of Christian Science is one part of the means to be applied in the hope of relieving the suffering and restoring normalcy to the physical, mental, and spiritual. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
We have inherited a body which, after ages of mistreatment, degradation, and wrong feeding, cannot quickly change itself and accept the new habits and the new feeding with its organs in their present condition. If the millions spent on research for cancer have so far failed, and if a simple change of faulty thought, belief, conduct, and goal cures it, the worth of this method is thereby demonstrated. Bodily healing is an occasional by-product of the healing of thought and feeling, or the re-education of moral character; it is not at all the invariable result of such processes. If wrong living breaks hygienic laws and provokes disease, wrong-doing also breaks Universal laws and provokes disease, as one form of retribution out of several possible forms. A hereditary affliction would obviously be of a universal origin. The individual mind and the cosmic mind are indissoluble connection, an out of their combined activity the human World-idea is produced. It would be correct to say that the redirection of thought and feeling would largely help to eliminate disease. As the race learns to substitute healing and caring thoughts for negative thoughts, aspiration for passion, and concentration for distraction, it will inevitably throw off many maladies that originate in wrong attitudes. Certain maladies in the physical being may quite easily be directly traced to evil impulses in the mental being. It is not only human’s diseases which are the consequence of their bad thinking, however, but also human’s misfortunes. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
If one is healthy in body one may be unhealthy in fortune. The Universal law of retribution expresses itself in a variety of ways. It is a mistake to narrow this linking of wrong thinking and ill feeling with the body’s sicknesses alone. They are to be linked with all forms of life experience. States of mind are directly or indirectly connected with states of health. A mind sinking under the heavy weight of responsibilities, or filled with the heavy stresses and pressures of business, or depressed by frustration, unhappiness or unrest, or shaken by the ending of a close relationship, may soon or late reflect itself in disease, sickness, psychosis, or neurosis. Wrong thinking expresses itself in the end in wrong functioning of some organ of the body. The nature of the thoughts and the nature of the malady correspond to each other. The individual who gives oneself up to negative destructive thoughts or feverish tempo of living for years and, later, find oneself sick or diseased, usually fails to think there is any mutual connection between the mental thoughts or unrelaxed way of life and the physical state. One does not even dream that one has been called to account. Quite clearly, it is as disorders of the various organs, as functional troubles, or as functional troubles, or as abnormal conditions in one or another part of the body that emotional, nervous, and mental disharmonies firs show themselves physically. Definitions: A sickness develops into an ailment, which if not cured becomes a disease. There is dissension between heart and head, between feeling and reasoning, and there is disease in the body itself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
There is an undesirable physical reaction for every undesirable emotional activity. Most people are careless about their mental habits because these seem of trivial importance by contrast with their physical habits. They do not know that sinning against the mind’s hygiene may manifest in the physical body itself. The body’s organs are affected by the mind’s states. Worry or fear or shock or excessive emotion may disturb, reduce, increase, or even paralyze their working for a time—in some cases for all time. Humans can cease to become human, and become God; but humans cannot be God and human at the same time. One can hold oneself in this egoless state for a brief while only. The ego soon raises up again and the glorious presence retires, for the two are incompatible. Such periods are short and uncommon but they lift us up and draw us in. Even if they are not immediate actualities, we feel then that there is peace and joy for us as ultimate possibilities. It is true that the felicity and freedom of such glimpses are too often too momentary. Yet immense forces lie hidden beneath their brief but intense existence. All glimpses are not of equal duration nor of equal degree. One or other or both may differ from person to person. These glimpses of Reality which wake us out of the World or illusion come to us only at intervals. We cannot hold them, but we can repeat them. The glimpse may past only an instant, or it may last a year. The glimpse lasts a moment, a minute, an hour, or a week—who can say, for it is a mysterious grace? However, in that while, the oscillation of human thoughts is stilled and time takes a rest. It cannot be shared with others—although they may notice or sense some of its fruits—and to that extent it is a private experience. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
It comes to us only in gleams whose disappointing brevity is balanced by their overwhelming beauty. Such moments rarely come to flower in the arid wildness of a human’s life today. There will even be rare and brief times when these serene glimpses will dissolve into wonderful ecstasies. The glimpses are usually quite short in duration, quite sudden in onset. The splendour of lightning, they disappear within the twinkling of an eye. Such experiences can be sustained only in small homeopathic doses. However, glimpses, as charming to the mind as scented blossoms to the nose, are fugitive. They cannot be kept. They are ephemeral. These glimpses are rarely sustained and should be accepted without surprise or disappointment for the short events they usually are. During the years when I investigated such matters—collecting data from several hundred cases, including my own experience, and combining it with the more authoritative teachings of highly attained and highly respected top-rank persons—I found that in large percentage of persons who feel too preoccupied with the work of starting to build a career, earn their livelihood, and build a family, the initial glimpse may have been the first and last for a long period of many years. However, in some cases they say in this period of disinterest because of disillusionments. The bliss of the glimpse must pass—and often quickly: its confirmation of unworldly values must diminish. One does not expect to feel often these great moments when one passes through an archway opening on the infinity and enjoys the Best. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
These glimpses are fitful and their content is fragmentary. It is true that the glimpse comes seldom to most people, but it is all the better remembered for that rarity. The fleeting beauty of these moments veils the harsh greyness of the long periods between them. These moments of spiritual nearness shine in one’s life, but the glorious feeling they induce does not stay. However, the glimpse comes to an end. The glorious new identity which one took on for a while will be shed. These glimpses are often unexpected, usually isolated, and only brief. A brief release from the burdens of living, peace-bestowing and mentally illumining, a healing suspense of all negative traits—but soon gone. These moments are rare and beautiful. They can never come too soon nor stay too long. The energy which appears to us as light is the basis of the Universe, the principle from which all things are made. The first aspect of God is Light; the first contact of human the Supreme Being is Light. If seen in vision, the pure and primal life-force appears as golden sunshine. You ask why I perch on a jade green mountain? I laugh but say nothing my heart free like a peach blossom in the flowing stream going by in the depths in another World not among humans. In the book of life, blessing, peace and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who establishest peace. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to grant our portion in your Kingdom and may the Temple be rebuilt in our day. There we will serve Thee with awe as in days of old. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Next to Life and Liberty, We Consider Education the Greatest Blessing!
We had a sense of importance that would have led us to risk our lives for our rhetoric. The precondition of any civilization, old or new, is energy. First Wave societies drew their energy from “living batteries”—human and animal muscle-power—or from sun, wind, and water Forests were cut for cooking and heating. Waterwheels, some of them using tidal power, turned milestones. Windmills creaked in the fields. Animals pulled the plow. As late as the French Revolution, it has been estimated, Europe drew energy from an estimated 14 million horses and 24 million oxen. All First Wave societies thus exploited energy sources that were renewable. Nature could eventually replenish the forests they cut, the wind that filled their sails, the rivers that turned their paddle wheels. Even animals and people were replaceable “energy slaves.” All Second Wave societies, by contrast, began to draw their energy from coal, gas, and oil—from irreplaceable fossil fuels. This revolutionary shift, coming after Newcomen invented a workable steam engine in 1712, meant that for the first time a civilization was eating into nature’s capital rather than merely living off the interest it provided. This dipping into the Earth’s energy reserves provided a hidden subsidy for industrial civilization, vastly accelerating its economic growth. And from that day to this, wherever the Second Wave passed, nations built towering technological and economic structures on the assumptions that cheap fossil fuels would be endlessly available. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
In capitalist and communist industrial societies alike, in East and West, this same shift has been apparent—from dispersed to concentrated energy, from renewable to non-renewable, from many different sources and fuels to a few. Fossil fuels formed the energy base of all Second Wave societies. The leap to a new energy system was paralleled by a gigantic advance in technology. First Wave societies had relied on what Vitruvius, two thousand years ago, called “necessary inventions.” However, these early winches and wedges, catapults, winepresses, levers, and hoists were chiefly used to amplify human or animal muscles. The Second Wave pushed technology to a totally new level. It spawned gigantic electromechnical machines, moving parts, belts, hoses, bearings, and bolts—all clattering and ratcheting along. And these new machines did more than augment raw muscle. Industrial civilization gave technology sensory organs, creating machines that could hear, see, and touch with greater accuracy and precision than human beings. It gave technology a womb, by inventing machines designed to give birth to new machines in infinite progression—id est, machine tools. More important, it brought machines together in interconnected systems under a single roof, to create the factory and ultimately the assembly line within the factory. On this technological base a host of industries sprang up to give Second Wave civilization its defining stamp. At first there were coal, textiles, and railroads, then steel, auto manufacture, aluminum, chemicals, and appliances. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Huge factory cities leaped into existence: Lille and Manchester for textiles, Detroit for automobiles, Essen and—later—Magnitogorsk for steel, and a hundred others as well. From these industrial centers poured million upon endless millions of identical products—shirts, shoes, automobiles, watches, toys, soap, shampoo, camera, machine guns, and electric motors. The new technology powered by the new energy system opened the door to mass production. Mass production, however, was meaningless without parallel changes in the distribution system. In First Wave societies, goods were normally made by handcraft methods. Products were created one at a time on a custom basis. The same was largely true of distribution. It is true that large, sophisticated trading companies had been built up by merchants in the widening crack of the old feudal order in the West. These companies opened trade routes around the World, organized convoys of ships, and camel caravans. They sold glass, paper, silk, nutmeg, tea, wine and wool, indigo and mace. Most of these products, however, reached consumers through tiny stores or on the backs of wagons of peddlers who fanned out into the countryside. Wretched communications and primitive transport drastically circumscribed the market. These small-scale shopkeepers and itinerant vendours could offer only the slenderest of inventories, and often they were out of this or that item for months, even years, at a time. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The Second Wave wrought changes in this creaking, overburdened distribution system that were as radical, in their ways, as the more publicized advances made in production. Railroads, highways, and canals opened up the hinterlands, and with industrialism came “palace of trade”—the first department stores. Complex networks of jobbers, wholesalers, commission agents, and manufacturers’ representatives sprang up, and in 1871 George Huntington Hartford, whose first store in New York was painted vermilion and had a cashier’s cage sharped like a Chinses pagoda, did for distribution what Henry Ford later did for the factory. He advanced it to an entirely new stage by creating the World’s first mammoth chain-store system—The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. Customer distribution gave way to the mass distribution and mass merchandising that became as familiar and central a component of all industrial societies as the machine itself. What we see, therefore, if we take these changes together, is a transformation of what might be called the “techno-sphere.” All societies—primitive, agricultural, or industrial—use energy; they make things; they distribute things. In all societies energy system, the production system, and the distribution system are interrelated parts of something larger. This larger system is the technosphere, and it has a characteristic form at each stage of social development. As the Second Wave swept across the planet, the agricultural techno-sphere was replaced by an industrial techno-sphere: non-renewable energies were directly plugged into mass production systems which, in turn, spewed goods into a highly developed mass distribution system. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
This Second Wave techno-sphere, however, needed an equally revolutionary “socio-sphere” to accommodate it. It needed radically new forms of social organization. Before the industrial revolution, for example, family forms varied from place to place. However, wherever agriculture held sway, people tended to live in large, multigenerational households, with uncles, aunts, in-laws, grandparents, or cousins all living under the same roof, all working together as an economic production unit—from the “joint family” in India to the “zadruga” in the Balkans and the “extended family” in Weser Europe. And the family was immobile—rooted to the soil. This is why the Victorian homes were so large, often three and four stories, with an average of 5,000 square feet, and several acres of land; so the families could live at home, have their own space without overcrowding the house, and farm to grow their food and meat. As we are now experiencing a global pandemic in 2021, houses are getting larger again, more people are living in multigenerational households, and even growing their own food. As the Second Wave began to move across First Wave societies, family felt the stress of change. Within each household the collision of wave fronts took the form of conflict, attacks on patriarchal authority, altered relationship between children and parents, new notions of propriety. As economic production shifted from the field to the factory, the family no longer worked together as a unit. To the free workers for factory labour, key functions of the family were parceled out to new, specialized institutions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Education of the child was turned over to schools. Care of the aged was turned over to poorhouses or old-age homes or nursing homes. Above all, the new society required mobility. It needed workers who would follow jobs from place to place. Burdened with elderly relatives, the sick, the disabled, and a large brood of children, the extended family was anything but mobile. Gradually and painfully, therefore, family structure began to change. Torn apart by the migration to the cities, battered by economic storms, families stripped themselves of unwanted relatives, grew smaller, more mobile, and more suited to the needs of the new techno-sphere. The so-called nuclear family-father, mother, and a few children, with no encumbering relatives—became the standard, socially approved, “modern” model in all industrial societies, whether capitalist or socialist. Even in Japan, where ancestor worship gave the elderly an exceptionally important role, the large, close-knit, multigenerational household began to break down as the Second Wave advanced. More and more nuclear unis appeared. In short, the nuclear family became an indentifable feature of all Second Wave societies, marking them off from First Wave societies just as surely as fossil fuels, steel mills, or chain stores. As work shifted out of the fields and the home, moreover, children had to be prepared for factory life. The early mine, mill, and factory owners of industrializing England discovered, as Andrew Ure wrote in 1835, that it was “nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands.” #RandolpHarris 6 of 21
If young people could be prefitted to the industrial system, it would vastly ease the problems of industrial discipline later of on. The result was another central structure of all Second Wave societies: mass education. Built in the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the “overt curriculum.” However, beneath it lay an invisible or “covert curriculum” that was far more basic. It consisted—and till does in most industrial nations—of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labour demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations. Thus from the mid-nineteenth century on, as the Second Wave cut across country after country, one found a relentless educational progression: children started school at a younger and younger age, the school year became longer and longer (in the United States of America it climbed 35 percent between 1878 and 1956), and the number of years of compulsory schooling irresistibly increased. Mass pubic education was clearly a humanizing step forward. As a group of mechanic and workingmen in New York City declared in 1829, “Next to life and liberty, we consider education the greatest blessing bestowed upon mankind.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Nevertheless, Second Wave schools machined generation after generation of young people into a pliable, regimented work force of the type required by electromechanical technology and the assembly line. Taken together, the nuclear family and the factory-style school formed part of a single integrated system for the preparation of young people for roles in industrial society. In this respect, too, Second Wave societies, capitalist or communist, North or South, were all alike. For many decades the ecological model was “the” model of urban growth. However, during recent decades it has increasingly come under attack by the scholars favouring neo-Marxian or political economy models. These models challenge the mainstream urban ecology perspective by emphasizing that urban patterns are not the result of “hidden hand” economic forces, but rather that urban patterns are deliberately shaped for private profit by elites in business and government. Thus, unlike ecological approaches, which explain suburbanization as occurring as a consequence of technological factors such as street-car or automobile, political economy, or neo-Marxian, views stress the role played by corporate and real estate interests in manipulating land usage and markets. Suburbia is not a consequence of individuals homeowner choice, but a consequence of a deliberate decision by elites to disinvest in the cities. These elites are composed of “the industrial executives, developers, bankers, and their political allies. This approach is sometimes also identified as the “new urban sociology.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The new urban sociology is usually based on assumptions of neo-Marxism and conflict theory. The term “new urban sociology” is a bit of a misnomer, since advocates of this approach or paradigm often are geographers, urban planners, or political scientists rather than sociologists. Although these perspectives differ in specifics, they all stress that urban development is a consequence of capitalist modes of production, capital accumulation, exploitation of he powerless, and conflictual class relations. Societies are specified according to their mode of production. In the United States of America and Western Europe as well as elsewhere societal development is dominated by the capital accumulation process. A central role in the process of accumulation is assigned to labour power—its use, management, and reproduction. Social spatial relationships, particularly the relationship between capitalistic processes and space, are an intrinsic part of social development. Methodological individualism is overcome through specification of structure and its relationship to the agency, although the articulation of this relationship varies among the new urbanists. Real-estate and its supporting infrastructure constitute a “second circuit” of capital. Certain assumptions are common to the new critical urbanists. These are: Societal interaction is dominated by antagonistic social relationships. Consequently society is not a unified biotic community that experiences change from the outside, but a stratified and highly differentiated form of organization characterized by its own fissures, contradictions, and patterns of uneven development—features that flow from the (for example, the capitalistic) mode of production itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Social development is unstable in societies with antagonistic owner relationships. Contradictions of development and inequalities of growth fuel antagonism and define the nature of political activities. Power inequality is a basic element in societal relationships and the exercise of power can be a factor in societal development. No society can be adequately analyzed without reference to either its long-term history or its global context. Urban sociology has become captive of its own comfortable assumptions and resonates strongly with younger academics. Some also believe strongly that the social inequality, social conflict, and social problems in many American cities is the predictable consequences of capitalist political economy determining real estate and land usage because certain groups of people had their homes red tagged (scheduled for demolition) as cities were planning to redevelop them. This led to many years of generational wealth being lost for certain groups of people are these homes appreciated to become worth millions just 40 to 40 years later. However, capitalists tend to be republican, but some of these policies that led to certain groups of people being displaced from the homes they owned and robbed of future equity, for example, were policies created by the governors Pat Brown and his son Jerry Brown, who are both democrats. Even today as California brags about having a nearly $40 billion budget surplus, there is a major homeless crisis that is being overlooked by democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and the TV news media, but they can conjure up sports complexes and have them operational in two years, but no move being made on the construction and management of affordable housing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
However, there is a conflict about affordable housing because many of their buildings tend to rent to people and do not manage them and there is a lot of violence, crime, rule breaking, and noise, so people do not want income based, or low-income properties in their community because rules are not enforced and it makes the community unlivable for people who pay market rate and often well above market rate prices for their homes. Yet, the answer is not to leave people on the streets to endure unhygienic and unsafe conditions. Well have to acknowledge and deal with gentrification, displacement, and neighbourhood revitalization. We also have to acknowledge the opposite of gentrification is happening: middle- and upper-income residents are moving out, and lower-income residents moving in. Urban space (as well as space at other scales) is the specific effect of the kind of society in which this urban space is developed and the capitalist city is developed according to a logic that is internal to capital itself. The trend of the affluent moving out of their communities has implications for millions of Americans who own a home or are thinking of buying one. In a neighbourhood that is losing its more affluent residents, home prices are likely to underperform, just as they tend to outperform in areas that are gentrifying, as incomes rise. As a buyer, you may value new construction and/or home prices that appreciate above all, and thus be attracted only to rising-income areas where the lawns are all manicured, houses are nice and well-maintained, and not too many cars on the street and in the driveway. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
As a systematic statement of how non-Marxian new sociology political economy approach can be used to study how property markets work as social phenomena is done by understanding that place is valued in two ways: first, as an object of exchange to be bought and sold, and second, when it is used to do business in or live in. In the latter case place has a sentimental and symbolic value associated with jobs, neighbourhood, hometown, and community. However, the urban growth machine of corporate political elites is interested in land strictly as an investment and commodity to be bought and sold. Their interest is in creating a good business environment so that investments and new residents will come to the area and increase market value of the land, and aggregate rent levels will increase. This governmental and corporate emphasis on growth is at the expense of the interest of local residents and their communities. The needs of the general public are captive to the “growth machine” whose principal interest is in the transfer of wealth rentier groups. Use values of the majority are sacrificed for the exchange values of a few. Thus, community groups that advocate slow growth or neighbourhood preservation are fought by the business elites that profit from maintaining the growth machines. For how can the source of the inequality among humans be known unless one begins by knowing humans themselves? And how will humans be successful in seeing themselves as nature formed one, through all the changes that the succession of time and things must have produced in one’s original constitution, and in separating what one derives from one’s own wherewithal from what circumstances and one’s progress have added to or changed in one’s primitive state? #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Like the Winchester mansion, which time, sea, earthquakes, humans, and storms have caused wear and damage to while the owners and historians fight to preserve this priceless treasure some consider a god, the human soul, altered in the midst of society by a thousand constantly recurring causes, by the acquisition of a multitude of bits of knowledge and errors, by changes that to place in the constitution of bodies, by the constant impact of the passions, as, as it were, changed its appearance to the point of being nearly unrecognizable or not fully displaying its original intent. And instead of a being active always by certain and invariable principles, instead of that Heavenly and majestic simplicity whose mark its author had left on it, one no longer finds anything but grotesque contrast of passion which thinks I reasons and an understanding in a state of delirium. What is even more cruel is that, since all the progress of the human species continually moves away from its primitive state, the more we accumulate new knowledge, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all. Thus, in a sense, it is by dint of studying humans that we have rendered ourselves incapable of knowing them. It is easy to say that it is in these successive changes of the human constitution that we must seek the first origin of the differences that distinguish humans, who, by common consensus, are naturally as equal among themselves as were the terrestrial beings of each species the varieties we now observe among some of them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
In effect, it is inconceivable that these first changes, by whatever means they took place, should have altered all at once and in the same manner all the individuals of the species. However, while some improved or declined and acquired various good and bad qualities which were not inherent in their nature, the others remained longer in their original state. And such was the first source of inequality among humans, which it is easier to demonstrate thus in general than to assign with precision its true causes. Let my readers not imagine, then, that I dare flatter myself with having seen what appears to me so difficult to see. I have begun some lines of reasoning; I have hazarded some guesses, less in the hope of resolving the question than with intention of clarifying it and of reducing it to its true state. Others will easily be able to go farther on this same route, though it will not be easy for anyone to reach the end of it. For it is no light undertaking to separate what is original from what is artificial in the present nature of humans, and to have a proper understanding of a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which probably never will exist, and yet about which it is necessary to have accurate notions in order to judge properly our own present state. One who would attempt to determine precisely which precautions to take in order to make solid observations on the subject would need even more philosophy than is generally supposed; and a good solution of the following problem would not seem to me unworthy of the Aristotles and Plinys of our century: What experiments would be necessary to achieve knowledge of natural man? And what are the means of carrying out these experiments in the midst of society? #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Far from undertaking to resolve this problem, I believe I have meditated sufficiently on the subject to dare respond in advance that the greatest philosophers will not be too good to direct these experiments, nor the most powerful sovereigns to carry them out. It is hardly reasonable to expect such a combination, especially with the perseverance or rather the succession of understanding and good will needed on both sides in order to achieve success. These investigations, so difficult to carry out and so little thought about until now, are nevertheless the only means we have left of removing a multitude of difficulties that conceal from us the knowledge of the real foundations of human society. It is this ignorance of the nature of humans which throws so much uncertainty and obscurity on the true definition of natural right. For the ideal of right, and even more that of natural right, are manifestly ideas relative to the nature of humans. Therefore, one continues, the principles of this science must be deuced from this very nature of humans, from human’s constitution and state. It is not without surprise and a sense of outrage that one observes the paucity of agreement that prevails among the various authors who have treated it. Among the most serious writers one can hardly find two who are of the same opinion on this point. The Roman jurists—not to mention the ancient philosophers who seem to have done their best to contradict each other on the most fundamental principles—subject human and all other terrestrial beings indifferently to the same natural law, because they take this expression to refer to the law that nature imposes on itself rather than the law she prescribes, or rather because of the particular sense in which those jurists understood the word “law,” which on this occasion they seem to have taken only for the expression of the general relations established by nature among all animate beings for their common preservation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The moderns, in acknowledging under the word “law” merely a rule prescribed to a moral being, that is to say, intelligent, free, and considered in one’s relations with other beings, consequently limit the competence of the natural law to the only terrestrial being who know of endowed with reason, that is, to humans. However, with each other defining this law in one’s own fashion, they all establish it on some metaphysical principles that even among us there are very few people in a position to grasp these principles, far from being able to find them by themselves. So that all the definitions of these wise humans, otherwise in perpetual contradiction with one another agree on this alone that it is impossible to understand the law of nature and consequently to obey it without being a great reasoner and a profound metaphysician, which humans do not naturally have, and from advantages the idea of which they cannot conceive until after having left the state of nature. Writers begin by seeking the rules on which, for the common utility, it would be appropriate for humans to agree among themselves; and then they give the name natural law to the collection of these rules, with no other proof than the good which presumably would result from their universal observance. Surely this is a very convenient way to compose definitions and to explain the nature of things by virtually arbitrary views of what is seemly. However, as long as we are unaware of natural man, it is futile for us to attempt to determine the law he has received or which is best suited to his constitution. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
All that we can see very clearly regarding this law is that, for it to be law, not only must he will of one who is obliged by it be capable of knowing submission to it, but also, for it to be natural, it must speak directly by the voice of nature. Leaving aside therefore all he scientific books which teach us only to see humans as they have made themselves, and meditating on the first and most simple operations of the human soul, I believe I perceive in it two principles that are prior to reason, of which one makes us ardently interested in our well-being and our self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being, especially our fellow humans, perish or suffer. It is from the conjunction and combination that our mind is in a position to make regarding these two principles, without the need for introducing that of sociability, that all the rules of natura right appear to me to flow; rules which reason is later forced to reestablish on other foundations, when, by its successive developments, it has succeeded in smothering nature. In this way one is not obliged to make a human a philosopher before making one a human. One’s duties toward others are not uniquely dictated to one by the belated lessons of wisdom; and as long as one does no resist the inner impulse of compassion, one will never harm another human or even another sentient being, except in the legitimate instance where, if one preservation were involved, one is obliged to give preference to oneself. By this means, an end can also be made to the ancient disputes regarding the participation of non-human terrestrial beings in the natural law. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
For it is clear that, lacking intelligence and liberty, some terrestrial beings cannot recognize this natural law; but since they share to some extent in our nature by virtue of the sentient quality with which they are endowed, one will judge that they should also patriciate in natural right, and that humans are subject to some sort of duties toward them. It seems, in effect, that if I am obliged not to do any harm to my fellow humans, it is less because one is a rational being than because one is a sentient being: a quality that, since it is common to both non-human terrestrial beings and human beings, should at least give the former the right not to be needlessly mistreated by the latter. This same study or original man, of his true needs and the fundamental principles of his duties, is also the only good means that can be used to remove those multitudes of difficulties which present themselves regarding the origin of moral inequality, the true foundations of the body politic, the reciprocal rights of is members, and a thousand other similar questions that are as important as they are poorly explained. In considering human society from a tranquil and disinterested point of view it seems at firs to manifest merely the violence of powerful men and the oppression of the weak. The mind revolt against the harshness of the former; one is inclined to deplore the blindness of the latter. And since nothing is less stable among men than those external relationships which chance brings about more often than wisdom, and which are called weakness or power, wealth or poverty, human establishments appear at first glance to be based on piles of shifting sand. It is only in examining them closely, only after having cleared away the dust and sand that surround the edifice, hat one perceives the unshakable base on which it is raised and one learns to respect its foundations. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Now without a serious study of man, of his natural faculties and their successive developments, one will never succeed in making these distinctions and in separating, in the present constitution of things, what the divine will has done from what human art has pretended to do. The political and moral investigations occasioned by the important question I am examining are therefore useful in every way; and the hypothetical history of governments is an instructive lesson for man in every respect. In considering what we would have become, left to ourselves, we ought to learn to bless him whose beneficent hand, in correcting our institutions and giving them an unshakable foundation, has prevented the disorders that must otherwise result from them, and has brought about our happiness from the means that seemed likely to add to our misery. Learn whom God has ordered you to be, and in what part of human affairs you have been placed. As it stands, 52 percent of evangelicals do not accept or do not believe in absolute moral truths! What is happening? When the church does not get it right, the World certainly cannot get it right. Revival is coming! The Heavenly messengers will quiet your fears as you learn to find Jesus Christ. “Then I saw another mighty Angel coming down from Heaven. He was robed in a cloud, with a rainbow above his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs were like fiery pillars. He was holding a little scroll, which lay open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the land, and he gave a loud shout like the roar of a lion. When he shouted, the voices of the seven thunders spoke. And when the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write; but I heard a voice from Heaven say, ‘Seal up what thunders have said and do not write it down.’ #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“Then the Angel I had seen standing on the sea and on the land raised his right and to Heaven. And he swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created the Heavens and all that is in them, the Earth and the sea and all that is in it, and said, ‘There will be no more delay! However, in the days when the seventh Angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets.’ Then then voice that I had heard from Heaven spoke to me once more: ‘Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the Angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.’ So I went to the Angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, ‘Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.’ I took the little scroll from the Angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. Then I was told, “You must prophesy again about many people, nations, languages and kings,” reports Revelation 10.1-11. With tender regard for human weaknesses, the Angel will give humans time to become accustomed to the divine radiance. Then the joy and glory will no longer be hidden. The whole plain will light up with the bright shinning of the hosts of God. Earth will be hushed, and the Heavens will stoop to listen to the son—“Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace, good will towards humans.” “For the Lord your God is brining you into a good land, a land of flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a long of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
“God is blessing us with a land where we will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and from whose hills you may mine copper, blue sapphires and diamond. You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land He has given you,” reports Deuteronomy 8.7-11. Tall, lush rain forest dripping in the morning wild orchids banana flowers, thick vines drape los palos del sol and great white cedar; others with five foot green elephant ears flopping, hundreds of butterflies, orange caterpillars, blue birds, pink mushrooms, through billion of green leaves quivering moist in the patchy sunlight. There are exalted but rare occasion when inspiration, peace, and spiritual majesty conjoin their blessed presence within us. It is with one for the flicker of a second—an unfathomable tranquility, an indefinable beauty—and then gone. Some enter into this experience only once in a lifetime; others repeat it a few times. Only a rare individual here and there enters it frequently. In the book of life, blessing, peace, and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who establishest peace. O Lord, please guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile, and to those who slander me, let e 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; 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, answer 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 establishes peace in the Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto All America. Amen. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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It is Difficult for an Education in Which the Hearts is Involved to Remain Forever Lost!
Trying to sneak a pitch past him is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster. Three hundred and fifty years ago, give or take a half-century, an explosion was heard that sent concussive shock waves racing across the Earth, demolishing ancient societies and creating a wholly new civilization. This explosion was, of course, the industrial revolution. And the giant tidal force it set loose on the World—the Second Wave—collided with all the institutions of the past and changed the way of life of millions. During the long millennia when First Wave civilization reigned supreme, the planet’s population could have been divided into two categories—the “primitive” and the “civilized.” The so-called primitive peoples, living in small bands and tribes and subsisting by gathering, hunting, or fishing, were those who had been passed over by the agricultural revolution. The “civilized” World, by contrast, was precisely that part of the planet on which most people worked the soil. For wherever agriculture arose, civilization took root. From China and India to Benin and Mexico, in Greece and Rome, civilizations rose and fell, fought and fused in endless, colourful admixture. However, beneath their differences lay fundamental similarities. In all of them, land was the basis of economy, life, culture, family structure, and politics. In each community, life was organized around the village. Each of which, life was a simple division of labour prevailed and a few clearly defined castes and classes arose: a nobility, a priesthood, warriors, helots, slaves, or serfs. For all of these people, power was rigidly authoritarian. #RandolphHarris 1 of 28
In all of these cases, birth determined one’s position in life. And for any one of these people, the economy was decentralized, so that each community produced most of its own necessities. There were exceptions—nothing is simple in history There were commercial cultures whose sailors crossed the seas, and highly centralized kingdoms organized around giant irrigation systems. However, despite such differences, we are justified in seeing all these seemingly distinctive civilizations as special cases of a single phenomenon: agricultural civilization—the civilization spread by the First Wave. During is dominance there were occasional hints of things to come. There were embryonic mass-production factories in ancient Greece and Rome. Oil was drilled on one of the Greek islands in 400 B.C, and in Burma in A.D. 100. Vast bureaucracies flourished in Babylonia and Egypt. Great urban metropolises grew up in Asia and South America. There was money and exchange. Trade routes crisscrossed the deserts, ocean, and mountains from Cathy to Calais. Corporations and incipient nations existed. There was even, in ancient Alexandria, a startling forerunner of the steam engine. Yet nowhere was there anything that might remotely have been termed an industrial civilization. These glimpses of the future, so to speak, were mere oddities in history, scattered through different places and periods. They never were brought together into a coherent system, nor could they have been. Until 1650-1750, therefore, we can speak of a First Wave. #RandolphHarris 2 of 28
Despite patches of primitivism and hints of the industrial future, agricultural civilization dominated the planet and seemed destined to do so forever. This was the World in which the industrial revolution erupted, launching the Second Wave and creating a strange, powerful, feverishly energetic countercivilization. Industrialism was more than smokestacks and assembly lines. It was a rich, many-sided social system that touched every aspect of human life and attacked every feature of the First Wave past. It produced the great Willow Run factory outside Detroit, but it also put the tractor on the farm, the typewriter in the office, the refrigerator in the kitchen. It produced the daily newspaper and the cinema, the subway and the DC-3. It gave us cubism and twelve-tone music. It gave up Bauhaus buildings and Barcelona chairs, sit-down strikes, vitamin pills, and lengthened life spans. It universalized the wristwatch and the ballot box. More important, it linked all these things together—assembled them, like a machine—to form the most powerful, cohesive, and expansive social system the World had ever known: Second Wave civilization. As the Second Wave moved across various societies it touched off a bloody, protracted war between the defenders of the agricultural past and the partisans of the industrial future. The forces of First and Second Wave collided head-on, brushing aside, often decimating, the “primitive” peoples encountered along the way. #RandolphHarris 3 of 28
In the United States of America, this collision began with the arrival of the Europeans bent on establishing an agricultural, First Wave civilization. A white agricultural tide pushed relentlessly westward, dispossessing the Indian, depositing farms and agricultural villages father and father toward the Pacific. However, hard on the heels of the farmers came the earliest industrializers as well, agents of the second Wave future. Factories and cities began to spring up in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Northeast had a rapidly growing industrial sector producing firearms, watches, farm implements, textiles, sewing machines, and other goods, while the rest of the continent was still ruled by agricultural interests. Economic and social tensions between First Wave and Second Wave forces grew in intensity until 1861, when they broke into armed violence. The Civil War was not fought exclusively, as it seemed to many, over the moral issue of slavery or such narrow economic issues as tariffs. It was fought over a much larger question: would the rich new continent be ruled by farmers or industrializers, by the forces of the First Wave or the Second? Would the future American society be basically agricultural or industrial? When the Northern armies won, the die was cast. The industrialization of the United States of America was assured. From that time on, in economics, in politics, in social and culture life, agriculture was in retreat, industry ascendant. The First Wave ebbed as the Second came thundering in. #RandolphHarris 4 of 28
The same collision of civilizations erupted elsewhere as well. In Japan the Meiji Restoration, beginning in 1868, replayed in unmistakably Japanese terms the same struggle between agricultural past and industrial future. The abolition of feudalism by 1876, the rebellion of the Satasuma clan in 1877, the adoption of Western-style constitution in 1889, were all reflections of the collision of the First and Second Waves in Japan—steps on the road to Japan’s emergence as a premier industrial power. In Russia, too, the same collision between First and Second Wave forces erupted. The 1917 revolution was Russia’s version of the American Civil War. It was fought not primarily, as it seemed, over communism but once again over the issue of industrialization. When the Bolsheviks wiped out the last lingering vestiges of serfdom and feudal monarchy, they pushed agriculture into the background and consciously accelerated industrialism. They became the party of the Second Wave. In country after country, the same clash between First Wave and Second Wave interests broke out, leading to political crisis and upheavals, to strikes, uprisings, coup d’etat, and wars. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the forces of the First Wave were broken and the Second Wave civilization reigned over the Earth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 28
Today an industrial belt girdles the globe between the twenty-fifth and sixty-fifth parallels in the Northern Hemisphere. In North America, and much of the other developed nations, some 80 percent of the population lives an industrial way of life. Despite dizzying differences of language, culture, history, and politics—differences so deep that wars are fought over them—all these Second Wave societies share common features. Indeed, beneath the well-known differences lies a hidden bedrock of similarity. And to understand today’s colliding waves of change we must be able to identify clearly the parallel structures of all industrial nations—the hidden framework of Second Wave civilization. For it is this industrial framework itself that is not being shattered. And you, MAGNIFICENT AND MOST HONOURED LORDS, you upright and worthy magistrates of free people, permit me to offer you in particular my compliments and my respects. If there is a rank in the World suited to conferring honour on those who hold it, it is without doubt the one that is given by talents and virtue, that of which you have made yourselves worthy, and to which your fellow citizens have raised you. Their own merit adds still a new luster to yours. And I that find you, who were chosen by humans capable of governing others in order that they themselves may be governed, are as much above other magistrates as a free people; and above all that one which you have the honour of leading, is, by its enlightenment and reason, above the populace of other states. #RandolphHarris 6 of 28
May I be permitted to cite an example of which better records ought to remain, and which will always be near to my heart. I never call to mind without the sweetest emotion the memory of the virtuous citizen to whom I owe my being, and who often spoke to me in my childhood of the respect that was owed you. I sill see him living from the work of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the most sublime truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch and Grotius mingled with the instruments of his craft before him. I see at this side a beloved son receiving with too little profit the tender instruction of the best of fathers. However, if the aberrations of foolish youth made me forget such wise lessons for a time, I have the happiness to sense at last that whatever the inclination one may have toward vice, it is difficult for an education in which the heart is involved to remain forever lost. Such, MADNIFICENT AND MOST HONOURED LORDS, are the citizens and even the simple inhabitants born in the state you govern. Such are those educated and sensible human concerning whom, under than name of workers and people, such base and false ideas are entertained in other nations. My father, I gladly acknowledge, was in no way distinguished among his fellow citizens; he was only what they all are; and such as he was, there was no country where his company would not have been sought after, cultivated, and profitably too, by the most upright humans. It does not behoove me, nor, thank Heaven, is it necessary to speak to you oft the regard which humans of that stamp can expect from you: your equals by education as well as by the rights of the nature and of birth; your inferiors by their will and by the preference they owe your merit, which they have granted to it, and for which you in tern owe them some sort of gratitude. #RandolphHarris 7 of 28
It is with intense satisfaction that I learn how much, in your dealings with them, you temper with gentleness and cooperativeness the gravity suited to the ministers of law; how much you repay them in esteem and attention for the obedience and respect they owe you; conduct full of justice and wisdom, suited to putting at a greater and greater distance the memory of unhappy events which must be forgotten so as never to see them again; conduct all the more judicious because this equitable and generous people makes a pleasure out of its duty, because it naturally loves to honour you, and because those who are most zealous in upholding their rights are the ones who are most inclined to respect yours. It should not be surprising that the leaders of a civil society love its glory and happiness; but, unfortunately for the tranquility of humans, that those who consider themselves as the magistrates, or rather as the masters, of a more holy and more subline homeland manifest some love for the Earthly homeland which nourishes them. How sweet it is for me to be able to make such a rare exception in our favour, and to place in the rank of our best citizens those zealous trustees of the sacred dogmas authorized by the laws, those venerable pastors of souls, whose lively and sweet eloquence the better instills the maxims of the Gospel into people’s hearts as they themselves always begin by practicing them. Everyone knows the success with which the great art preaching is cultivated in Geneva. #RandolphHarris 8 of 28
However, since people are too accustomed to seeing things said in one way and done in another, few of them know the extent to which the spirit of Christianity, the saintliness of mores, severity to oneself and gentleness to others reign in the body of our ministers. Perhaps it behooves only the city of Geneva to provide the edifying example of such a perfect union between a society of theologians and men of letters. It is in large part upon their wisdom and their acknowledged moderation and upon their zeal for the prosperity of the state that I base my hopes for its eternal tranquility. And I note, with a pleasure mixed with amazement and respect, how much they abhour the atrocious maxims of those sacred and barbarous humans of whom history provides more than one example, and who, in order to uphold the alleged rights of God—that is to say, their own interests—were all the less sparing of human blood because they hoped their own would always be respected. Could I forget hat precious half of the republic which produces the happiness of the other and whose gentleness and wisdom maintain peace and good mores? Amiable and virtuous women and citizens, it will always be the fate of your gender o govern ours. Happy it is when your chase power, exercised only within the conjugal union, makes itself felt only for the glory of the state and the public happiness! Thus it was that in Sparta women were in command, and thus it is that you deserve to be in command in American. #RandolphHarris 9 of 28
What barbarous man could resist the voice of honour and reason in the mouth of an affectionate wife? And who would not despise vain luxury on seeing your simple and modest attire, which, from the luster it derives from you, seems the most favourable to beauty? It is for your to maintain always, by your amiable and innocent dominion and by your insinuating wit, the love of laws in the state and concord among the citizens to reunite, by happy marriages, divided families; and above all, to correct, by the persuasive sweetness of your lessons and by the modest graces of your conversation, those extravagances which our young people come to acquire in other countries, whence, instead of the many useful things they could profit from, they bring back, with a childish manner and ridiculous airs adopted among fallen women, nothing more than an admiration for who knows what pretended grandeurs, frivolous compensations for servitude, which will never be worth as much as august liberty. Therefore always be what you are, the chaste guardians of mores and the gentle bonds of peace; and continue to assert on every occasion the rights of the heart and of nature for the benefit of duty and virtue. I flatter myself that events will not prove me wrong in basing upon such guarantees hope for the general happiness of the citizens and for the glory of the republic. #RandolphHarris 10 of 28
I admit that with all these advantages it will not shine with brilliance which dazzles most eyes; and the childish and fatal taste for this is the deadliest enemy of happiness and liberty. Let a dissolute youth go elsewhere in search of easy pleasures and lengthy repentances. Let the alleged men of tastes admire someplace else the grandeur of palaces, the beauty of carriages, the sumptuous furnishings, he pomp of spectacles, and all the refinements of softness and luxury. In American we will find only men; but such a sight has a value of its own, and those who seek it are well worth the admirers of the rest. May you all, MAGNIFICENT, MOST HONOURED AND AOVEREIGN LORDS, deign to receive with the same goodness the respectful testimonies of the interest I take in your common prosperity. If I were unfortunate enough to be guilty of some indiscreet rapture in this lively effusion of my heart, I beg you to pardon it as the tender affection of a true patriot, and to the ardent and legitimate zeal of man who envisage no greater happiness for oneself than that of seeing all of you happy. With the most profound respect, I am MAGNIFICENT, MOST HONOURED AND SOVEREIGN LORDS, you most humble and most obedient servant and fellow citizen. The Angels had wondered at the glorious plan of redemption. They watched to see how the people of God would receive His Son, clothed in the garb of humanity. Angels came to the land of the chosen people. Other nations were dealing in fables and worshipping false gods. To the land where the glory of God had been revealed, and the light of prophecy had shone, the Angels came. #RandolphHarris 11 of 28
They came to unseen America, to the appointed expositor of the Sacred Oracles, and the ministers of God’s house. Christ’s arrival had been announced. Already the forerunner was born, His mission attested by miracle and prophecy. The tidings of His birth and the wonderful significance of His mission had been spread abroad. And American was preparing to welcome her Redeemer. With amazement the Heavenly messengers beheld the excitement that the people whom God had called to communicate to the World the light of sacred truth. The American nation had been preserved as a witness that Christ was to be born of the seed of Abraham and of David’s line. The priests and teacher rehearsed their sacred prayers, and performed important rites of worship to honour the Lord, and prepare for the revelation of the Messiah. Hearts were Heavenly enthralled and were blessed by the joy that thrilled all Heaven. Everyone has the experience of doing, few of being. Yet that is the most precious, most important of all life’s experiences. This is the experience which makes the fully mature human happiest. It is usually short but its next advent will always be eagerly awaited. It is often isolated by long intervals of prosaic commonplace living, but they only serve to give it even greater value by contrast. The inner need of humans is forever demanding this experience, for it is Heaven. Whether it is born out of appreciation of beauty or an infinite humiliation of the ego, or out of some totally difference occasion, this awareness of the Overself’s presence is essential to the completion and fulfilment of human life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 28
To enter Heaven is to enter into fulfilment of our Earthly life’s unearthly purpose. And that is, simply, to become aware of the Overself. This holy awareness brings such joy with it hat we then know why the true saints and the real ascetics were able to disdain all other joys. The contrast is too disproportionate. Nothing that the World offers to tempt us can be put on the same level. One will find that somewhere within there is a holy presence not oneself, a sublime power not one’s own. One will understand then that no one is truly alive who has not made this discovery. The glimpse of Heaven lies at the core of religion, the precious gem which each devotee must find for oneself underneath all the sermons, chantings, rituals, prayers, and observances of one’s creed. A stillness which is simply the absence of noise but which is rich, fruitful, and uplifting in beauty and refinement of its presence—this is the best. No good fortune that comes one’s way will ever after be counted so great as the good fortune which one now feels to be one’s in the realization of the Overself. Would but the desert of the Fountain yield One glimpse—if dimly, yet indeed revealed, to which the fainting traveler might spring. Another significance of the glimpse is that of initiation. We cannot know God in the fullness of His consciousness but we can know the link which we have with God. If you mist, call it the soul, or if you prefer the Overself, but catch a glimpse of this link to be reborn. #RandolphHarris 13 of 28
The glimpse gives one a journey to a land flowing not with milk and honey, but with goodness and beauty, with peace and wisdom. It is the best moment of one’s life. When a human’s consciousness is turned upside-down by a glimpse, when one thought most substantial is revealed as least so, when one’s values are reversed the Good takes on a new definition, one writes that day down as one’s spiritual birthday. What better thing can one find than the divine Overself! That would be the decisive moment of one’s entire bodily existence, as establishing oneself permanently in its fullness and finality would be the grandest sequel. There is no higher happiness than this discovery of the real human. Joseph Smith knew that if his important work of translating was to be finished, he must have a capable scribe who could spend hours at a time at the job of writing. As usual when he needed guidance, Joseph prayed that such a person might be found. Meanwhile, back in Palmyra, a schoolteacher named Oliver Cowdery had come to live in the Smith home. Oliver, who was about Joseph’s age, had not been in the family of Joseph’s parent long before they told him the strange story of the golden plates and the Angel visits. Oliver liked the Smiths and believed the story. Oliver also prayed. He wanted to help in great new work. In his heart he began to feel that his place was beside Joseph. Because he felt so strongly that he could be helpful, he went to Pennsylvania in April, 1829. Upon hi arrival at the home of Joseph and Emma, Oliver told them why he had come. Joseph was not surprised because he knew God had sent this young man in answer to his prayer for help. #RandolphHarris 14 of 28
Joseph and Oliver became friends immediately. They trusted each other because each felt that God had told him, even before they met, that they would work together. Joseph had not had much opportunity to go to school to learn from books, and he was to appreciate the help of schoolteacher Oliver, who had excellent schooling, was a great reader, and a fine writer. Soon after the meeting of these two young men, the Lord Jesus Christ, spoke to them saying: “A great and marvelous work is about to come forth unto the children of men: behold, I am God, and give heed unto my word. Keep my commandments, and seek to bring forth and establish the cause of America. Seek not for riches but for wisdom; and, behold, the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto you, and then shall you be made rich. Behold, one that hath eternal life is rich. If you desire, you shall be the means of doing much good in this generation. Say nothing but repentance unto this generation: keep my commandments, and assist to bring forth my work…and you shall be blessed. Behold, thou knowest that that thou hast inquired of me, and I did enlighten thy mind; and now I tell thee these things, that thou mayest know that thou hast been enlightened by the spirit of truth. Yea, I tell thee, that thou mayest know that there is none else save God, that knowest thy thoughts and the intents of thy heart. I tell thee these things as a witness unto thee, that the words of the work which thou hast been writing is true. Treasure up these words in thy heart. Be faithful and diligent in keeping the commandments of God, and I will encircle thee in he arms of my love. #RandolphHarris 15 of 28
“I say unto you, as I said unto my disciples, Where two or three are gathered together in my name, as touching one thing, behold, there will I be in the midst of them; even so am I in the midst of you. Fear not to do good, my sons, for whatsoever ye sow, that shall ye also reap: therefore, if ye sow good, ye shall also reap good for your reward. Therefore fear not, little flock, do good. Look unto me in every thought, doubt not, fear not. Be faithful; keep my commandments, and ye shall inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.” Two days after their meeting, Oliver began to write as Joseph translated. They worked hour after hour, day after day, happy in their new-found friendship and the work which bound them together. Oliver describes this work in these words: “These were days never to be forgotten—to sit under the sound of a vice dictated by the inspiration of Heaven. Day after day I continued to write as he translated with the Urim and Thummim.” Sometimes as they worked, on the translation they came to things they did not understand. They prayed for explanations. It was on such an occasion that the Lord explained to them how they might know the answers to many of their problems and receive the knowledge by the Holy Spirit. The Lord said: “Verily I say unto you, that assuredly as the Lord liveth, who is your God and your Redeemer, even so sure shall you receive a knowledge of whatsoever things you shall ask in faith, with an honest heart, believing that you shall receive. Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart by Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you, and which shall dwell in your heart. Now, behold, this is the spirit of revelation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 28
“Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, wen you took no thoughts, save it was to ask me; but, behold, I say unto you, that you mut study it out in your mind. Then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right, I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall fell that it is right. However, if it be not right, you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought, that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong.” The Lord provided this means whereby Joseph and Oliver, and all the people, might know by His Holy Spirit the truth of all things. We must look upon these glimpses as sacred one. And this is so even if they rise of themselves in our best moments. For in these times we, and especially the younger ones among us, need wider definitions of such matters. These moments, when spiritual presence is distinctly felt, may be rare or frequent, misunderstood or recognized, but they are moments of blessing. And this is true even if they open the door only slightly and let in merely a ray of light. In these moments of a glimpse, one discovers the very real presence of the Overself. They provide one with a joy, an amiability, which disarms the negative side of one’s character and brings forward the beneficial side. These are precious moments; they cannot be too highly valued. And though they must pass, some communication with them is always possible through memory. #RandolphHarris 17 of 28
Remember this truth: The Old Testament is God’s will concealed, and the New Testament is God’s will revealed—every word is equally anointed, relevant, and eternally true. The glimpse is of supreme worth morally, helping to free one, bestowing goodwill and humility, uplifting one’s ideals however fleetingly. Instead of being an escape from life, as some sceptics unwisely think, they are its fulfilment. Although life is really like a dream, some phases of the dream are more worthwhile than others—those which bring the Glimpse, for instance. It is far better than being ignorant to know what is read in books or heard at lectures on this topic, but far better than both of these is to feel vividly the Overself’s presence and reality, to know the truth of It with complete certainty. No better fortune can come to a human than one’s serene inward well-being and this certitude of universal truth. We must have Good Conscience and live a Virtuous Life! Why? Because a lot of us spend more time studying hard than living well. That is such a mistake! All that does is produce a tree that bears in fruit, except perhaps the odd pear or single peace. Plowing vices under and planting virtues in their place—that is hard work. Harder even than the grunt and the grind of the great philosophical issues. However, if the priestly scholar had already done that hard and serious work in one’s own life, one would find it easier now dealing with those Devouts traipsing about in sandals and self-actualizes processing around in ermines. #RandolphHarris 18 of 28
With the certain advent of that Final Event, the question o be posed is not whether we read the right books, but whether we did the good deeds; not whether we said the right things, but whether we made the right choices. Tell me now, where are those celebrity professors who taught you when they were at the height of their careers and you were starting out? They are dead and gone. You occupy their chairs of learning now, and now you are spending their stipends. Doctors they once were; now they are only dodoes, and you can hardly remember their names. How soon the glory of the Worlds set, wrote John in his first letter to an early group of Christians (2.17)! Would that the professors’ lives had matched their doctrinal teachings! Yet they fell short. If they had it to do over again, I suppose they would have studied longer and read till their eyes turned red. However, that would have done the little good. That is what Paul had in mind when he wrote to the Romans (1.21). How many of the professors have perished because they followed the unreliable wisdom of the World! Because they gave scant attention to the service of God. They had their choices, though. They picked greatness rather than humility, and as a result logicked themselves right out of their own holy syllogisms. However, when the sun finally sets, there will be other, happier people. The truly great? Those who did not make a lot of themselves; they gathered honours as their due, but they did not display their trophies in the window. The truly prudent? If it is what would keep them on the path to God, those who gave the World its due; they would not mind sweeping up after elephants, as St. Paul put it so Earthily to the Philippians (3.8). #RandolphHarris 19 of 28
The truly educated? Those who engaged God’s will and disengaged their own in one and the same transaction. Does no death mean that the body comes to exist by itself, separated from the soul, and that the soul exists by herself, separated from the body? What is death but that? For the Hebrew, a human is a unity, and that unity is the body as a complex of parts, drawing their life and activity from a breath-soul, which has no existence apart from the body. What is our essential nature? Are we a dualism of body and soul, as Socrates and Plato believed, or a psychophysical unity, as H. Wheeler Robinson suggests is the Old Testament view? Take a little survey of Christian laypeople, and you will surely find most people agreeing with Plato: we are made up of two realities, body and soul. Or so most of us have been taught since childhood. One book of Christian doctrine for children explains: Maybe you have been to a funeral. You have seen the dead body. That is buried in the ground. However, the inside part of you, the part that thinks and feels, that is the part that lives forever. This is the part of us that would go to hell. Christians talk and sing a lot about souls. It has seemed natural to appear to our possession of a soul as “proof” that we are alive. The belief that we possess a soul has been the foundation of our dignity and out view of the sacredness of human life. For many, talk about the soul has been a way of thinking about our “divine image.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 28
Not surprisingly, anyone who seems to question one of our most treasured beliefs will face strong challenges, and quite properly be put under close scrutiny. That has happened in the past, of course, with other Christian beliefs. We all remember the sustained action to the views of Copernicus and Galileo, which displaced our Earth from the center of the Universe. How much more of a reaction, then, might we expect to anyone seeming to question our possession of a soul as the hallmark of our being made “in the image of God”? If, as the Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner suggests, “the telescope of Galileo did more to interpret Psalm 96 verse 10 than the pen of the theologian,” we need to pause and ask in what way today might the discoveries of the neuropsychologists and evolutionary psychologists do more to interpret biblical references to the soul than the comments of philosophical theologians? The distinguished Nobel laureate Francis Crick wrote, “In spite of differences among religions, there is broad agreement on at least one point: People have soul, in the literal and not merely the metaphorical sense.” Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, begs to differ: “In the Christian tradition, like the Jewish and Muslim, the soul is not a substantial entity which exists without and before the body, and is better off without the body.” Instead, Dr. Ward contends, the Christian tradition proclaims an essential unity of body and soul. Indeed, as Socrates’ discourse on death hints, the idea of an immortal soul separable from the body arises not from the Christian Bible but from Greek thought. #RandolphHarris 21 of 28
In the end, Plato records that Socrates lived his own teaching by drinking the poison hemlock in the serene conviction that his immortal soul would now find release from its bodily prison. For Socrates and Plato, bodily death was a welcome liberation. Indeed, it was actually not dying. This Greek belief of separate body and soul has permeated Christian tradition quite thoroughly. When Origen, a third-century platonic philosopher, became the father of theology, he built into Christian doctrine Plato’s idea of the soul. In the early fifth century, Augustine thought Plato’s to be the most brilliant of all philosophers. And in the sixteenth century, John Calvin, who was heavily influenced by both Plato and Augustine, declared that Plato alone “rightly affirmed” the immortal soul that “lies hidden in humans separate from the body.” It has been one of the tasks of twenty-first century biblical scholarship to disentangle the biblical images of human nature from those of Greek philosophy. Discerning the biblical picture of the person is no simple matter, for the Bible is actually not one book but a library of sixty-six books, written over some fifteen hundred years, in three languages, and under varying historical circumstances. Not surprisingly, then, the meanings of the same words within the Hebrew Old Testament and within the Greek New Testament may shift. Fresh scholarship has modified earlier views. Today we recognize that the long-standing and pervasive view that presented a dichotomy between Hebrew thought (affirming some form of monism) and Greek thought (affirming some dualism) is a caricature. #RandolphHarris 22 of 28
Greek thought was more caried on the nature of the soul than a reading focused solely on Plato would suggest. There was no single concept of the soul among the Greeks, and the body-soul relationship was described variously among philosophers and physicians in the Hellenistic period. It was a belief cluster, not a single view. Recognizing these varied views within Hellenistic Judaism is not seen by biblical scholars as being directly relevant to understanding the cultural narrative within which anthropology is described in the New Testament. It is increasingly recognized that it was Israel’s Scriptures that were the most potent influence on New Testament writers. Thus readings of New Testament anthropology must take Old Testament monism as their point of departure. One mistake is to interpret the everyday language of the Christian Bible and The Book of Mormon and The Doctrine and Covenants as modern, scientific statements. When the writer of Ecclesiastes (1.5) noted, “The sun rises and the sun goes down,” the church of Galileo’s day understood this to be a scriptural proclamation of a stationary Earth encircled by the sun. Because the writers of Genesis (1.16) described the moon as a “light to rule the night,” the church also could not accept Galileo’s conclusion that the moon shone by reflected light; when Galileo invited them to look through his telescope and see the shadows of the craters for themselves, they declined and dismissed his observations as delusions of the devil. It is similarly possible to misinterpret the Bible’s human images. It is important to remember the Bible is written for all people all times. #RandolphHarris 23 of 28
As such, the Bible does not intend to offer a precise psychology, and certainly not one in the language of the early twenty-first century. Moreover, the Christian Holy Bible(s) is a book for living, not a book of science. It is not biographical. It is about the acts of God in the lives of people throughout history. Bearing these cautions in mind, what general understand of human nature emerge from the library of Scriptures? Let us consider some conclusions reached by scholars who have devoted their lives to exploring the whole of Scripture, in more depth during our next few lectures. Predestination presupposes election in the order of reason; and election presupposes love. The reason of this is that predestination is a part of providence. Now providence, as also prudence, is the plan existing in the intellect directing the orderings of some things towards an end. However, nothing is direct towards an end unless the will for that end already exists. Whence the predestination of some to eternal salvation presupposes, in the order of reason, that God wills their salvation; and to this belong both election and love:–love, inasmuch as He wills them this particular god of eternal salvation; since to love is to wish well to anyone:—election, inasmuch as He wills this good to some in preference to others; since He reprobates some. Election and love, however, are differently ordered in God, and in ourselves: because in us the will in loving does not cause good, but we are incited to love by the goo which already exits; and therefore we choose someone to love, and so election in us precedes love. #RandolphHarris 24 of 28
In God, however, it is the reverse. For His will, by which in loving He wishes good to someone, is the cause of that good possessed by some in preferences to others. Thus it is clear that love precedes election in the order of reason, and election precedes predestination. Whence all the predestinate are objects of election and love. If the communication of the divine goodness in general be considered, God communicates His goodness without election; inasmuch as there is nothing which does not in some way share in His goodness. However, if we consider the communication of this or that particular good, He does not allow it without election; since He gives certain goods to some humans, which He does not give to others. Thus in the conferring of grace and glory election is implied. When the will of the person choosing is incited to make a choice by the good already pre-existing in the object chosen, the choice must needs be of those things which already exist, as happens in our choice. In God it is otherwise. This, as St. Augustin says (De Verb. Ap. Serm. 11): “Those are chosen by God, who do not exist; yet He does not err in His choice.” God wills all humans to be saved by His antecedent will, which is to will not simply but relatively; and not by His consequent will which is to will simply. I part out thrusting branches and come in beneath the blessed and the blessing trees. Though I am silent, there is singing around me. Though my vision is clouded, there is clarity around me. Though I am heavy, there is the flight of Angels around me. #RandolphHarris 25 of 28
It is a mistake to believe that because any art of healing—whether it be a material or a spiritual one—is able to heal a particular kind of sickness once, it is consequently able to heal all similar cases of sickness by its own merits. Forces outside it have something to do with the matter. There are some cases where failure by material methods is preordained by the higher power of destiny. There are others where failure by spiritual methods is also inevitable, because the heart of the sick human being has not been touched. As elsewhere, there are limits to human effort set here by certain laws. O inscribe all the children of Thy covenant of a happy life. May all the living do homage unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who art our salvation and our helps. Blessed by Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whom our thanks are due. Our God and God of our fathers, bless us with the threefold blessings written in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, and spoken by Aaron and his sons, Thy consecrated priests: May the Lord bless thee and keep thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord make His countenance to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee: so may it be His will. May the Lord turn His countenance unto thee and give thee peace. So may it be His will. May our voids and blanks be filled with creations of intense significance, aesthetic, spiritual, and practical. Here with the Lord may we find the roots of much imaginative endeavour. May a space feel like an invitation to bridge it. #RandolphHarris 26 of 28
May we be confident people, who can draw on a sense of competence (“I am grand—I can do it”), may find a void pleasurable and attractive: it can become filled with all kinds of Christian efforts. The gap, the emptiness, the interval, the space, seem inviting to creative Christians. We see faces in the clouds. On a larger scale, people with lonely moors, with isolated lives, who have lost their parents or have empty parents, may God fill their World with vivid people and events. Painters need their empty canvasses. Dr. Barnardo, Albert Schweitzer, and others who are creative people, see what is missing and what is needed, and set about putting it there. Two people who encounter one another may create a relationship where there has been nothing This is he more fascinating because, if the creation is to endure, here has to be an element of truth, which makes the encounter one of exploration and discover. Who can tell how much invention-creation there is in such a relationship and how much discovery-creation? It must vary from person to person. Indeed, who can insist on the difference between invention and discovery in our love and hate of each other? We are so varied in our potential qualities, and so prone to have them called into being by other people’s love and hope, or hate and coldness. Do not the old stories of cruelty and redemption tell us so? #RandolphHarris 27 of 28
Scientific invention is also a matter of filling a blank. This kind of creativity seems to some in two forms: interpolation and extrapolation. Interpolation is closest to the process of “discovering the object”: the scientist has a set of starting-points, which seem connected with a phantasied endpoint or outcome which one wishes to reach. At first tis gap can conceivably be filled wit a shifting multitude of possibly useful concepts. Some of these are eliminated when we cannot get evidence, cannot get the facts to coincide with out phantasies. Eventually, if we work hard enough and are blessed enough, the pieces fall into place and bridge the gap from phantasy to outcome in a way which can be tested further. The process of extrapolation is of a more space-loving kind—discovery rather than invention. “Surely if we sail west we will come to the Indies,” said Christopher Columbus—and landed in America! Starting from the known, the discoverer takes the next step (perhaps the next logical step) and then the next and then the next. All kinds of good things can happen when conceptual activity does not eventuate in the anticipated outcome. Creative processes happen, imaginative play, artistic endeavour, invention, discovery. They all start with the kind of mental processes called phantasy (that is, untested unconfirmed concepts). In this state of mind there are (at least during the “period of hesitation”) no clear concepts, no clear contours. Bits of “self” and of “not self” are available for potential concept-formation. #RandolphHarris 28 of 28
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Subject the Willful Horses to the Tight Reins in One’s Strong Hands!
The greatest power of war is the faithful transformation of our children–into heroes. The challenge is to preserve the truth of that person without distorting what the person says. Miracles, we must now consider the subject on a somewhat deeper level. The question is whether Nature can be known to be such a kind that supernatural interferences with her are impossible. She is already known to be, in general, regular: she behaves according to fixed laws, many of which have been discovered, and which interlock with one another. There is, in this discussion, no question of mere failure or inaccuracy to keep these laws on the part of Nature, no question of chancy or spontaneous variation. The only question is whether, granting the existence of a Power outside Nature, there is any intrinsic absurdity in the idea of its intervening to produce within Nature events which the regular “going on” of the whole natural system would never have produced. Three conceptions of the “Laws” of Nature have been held. First, that they are mere brute facts, known only by observation, with no discoverable rhyme or reason about them. We know that Nature behaves thus and thus; we do not know why she does and can see no reason why she should do opposite. Second, that they are applications of the law of averages. The foundations of Nature are in the random and lawless. However, the number of units we are dealing with are so enormous that the behaviour of these crowds (like the behaviour of very large masses of humans) can be calculated with practical accuracy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
What we call “impossible events” are events to overwhelmingly improbably—by actuarial standards—that we do not need to take them into account. And third of all, the fundamental laws of Physics are really what we call “necessary truths” like the truths of mathematics—in other words, that if we clearly understand what we are saying we shall see that the opposite would be meaningless nonsense. Thus it is a “law” that when one billiard ball shoves another the amount of momentum lost by the first ball must exactly equal the amount gained by the second. People who hold that the laws of Nature are necessary truths would say that all we have done is to split up the single events into two halves (adventures of ball A, and adventures of ball B) and then discover that “the two sides of the account balance.” When we understand this, we see that of course they must balance. The fundamental laws are in the long run merely statements that every event is itself and not some different event. It will at once be clear that the first of these three theories gives no assurance against Miracles—indeed no assurance that, even apart from Miracles, the “laws” which we have hitherto observed will be obeyed tomorrow. If we have no notion why a thing happens, then of course we know no reason why it should not be otherwise, and therefore have no certainty that it might not some day be otherwise. The second theory, which depends on the law of averages, is in the same position. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
The assurance it gives us is of the same general kind as our assurance that a coin tossed a thousand times will not give the same result, say, nine hundred times and that the longer you toss it he more nearly the number of Heads and Tails will come to being equal. However, his is so only provided the coin is an honest coin. If it is a loaded coin our expectations may be disappointed. However, the people who believe in miracles are maintaining precisely that the coin is loaded. The expectations based on the law of averages will work only for undoctored Nature. And the questions whether miracles occur is just the question whether Nature is ever doctored. The third view (that laws of Nature are necessary truths) seems at first sight to present an insurmountable obstacle to miracle. The breaking of them would, in that case, be a self-contradiction and not even Omnipotence can do what is self-contradictory. Therefore, the Laws cannot be broken. And therefore, we shall conclude, no miracle can ever occur? We have gone too quickly. It is certain that the billiard balls will behave in a particular way, just as it is certain that if you divide a shilling unequally between two recipients then A’s share must exceed the half and B’s share fall short of it by exactly the same amount. Provided, of course, that A does not be sleight of hand steal some of B’s pennies at he very moment of the transaction. In the same way, you know what will happen to the two billiard balls provided nothing interferes. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
If one ball encounters a roughness in the cloth which the other does not, their motion will not illustrate the law in the way you had expected. Of course what happens as a result of the roughness in the cloth will illustrate the law in some other way, but your original prediction will have been false. Or again, if I snatch up a cue and give one of the balls a little help, you will get a third result: and that third result will equally illustrate the laws of physics, and equally falsify your prediction. I shall have “spoiled the experiment.” All interferences leave the law perfectly true. However, every prediction of what will happen in a given instance is made under the proviso “other things being equal” or “if there are no interferences.” Whether other things are equal in a given case and whether interferences may occur is another matter. The arithmetician, as an arithmetician, does not know how likely A is to steal some of B’s pennies when the shilling is being divided; you had better ask someone who knows me. In the same way the physicist, as such, does not know how likely it is that some supernatural power is going to interfere with them: you had better ask a metaphysician. However, the physicist does know, just because one is a physicist, that if the billiard balls are tampered with by any agency, natural or supernatural, which one has not taken into account, then their behaviour must differ from what one expected. Not because the law is false, but because it is true. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
The more certain we are of the law the more clearly, we know that is new factors have been introduced the result will vary accordingly. What we do not know, as physicists, is whether Supernatural power might be one of the new factors. If the laws of Nature are necessary truths, no miracle can break them: but then no miracle needs to break them. It is with them as with the laws of arithmetic. If I put six pennies into a drawer on Monday and six more on Tuesday, the laws decree that—other things being equal—I shall find twelve pennies there on Wednesday. However, if the drawer has been robbed by the Shekel Brothers, I may in fact find only two. Something will have been broken (the lock of the drawer or the laws of America) but the laws of arithmetic will not have been broken. The new situation created by the Shekel Brothers will illustrate the laws of arithmetic just as well as the original situation. However, if God comes to work miracles, He comes “like a thief in the night.” Miracle is, from the point of view of the scientist, a form of doctoring, tampering, (if you like) cheating. It introduces a new factor into the situation, namely supernatural force, which the scientist has not reckoned on. One calculates what will happen, or what must have happened on past occasion, in the belief that the situation, at that point of space and time, is or was A. However, if supernatural force has been added, then the situation really is or was AB. And no one knows better than the scientist that AB cannot yield the same result as A. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
The necessary truth of the laws, far from making it impossible that miracles should occur, makes it certain that if the Supernatural is operating they must occur. For if the natural situation by itself, and the natural situation plus something else, yielded only the same result, it would be then that we should be faced with a lawless and unsystematic Universe. The better you know that two and two make sour, the better you know that two and three do not. This perhaps helps to make a little clearer what the laws of Nature really are. We are in the habit of talking as if they caused events to happen; but they have never caused any event at all. The laws of motion do not set billiard balls moving: they analyse the motion after something else (say, a human with a cue, or a lurch of the liner, or, perhaps, supernatural power) has provided it. They produce no events: they state the pattern to which every event—if only it can be induced to happen—must conform, just as the rules of arithmetic state the pattern to which all transactions with money must conform—if only you can get hold of any money. Thus in one sense the laws of Nature cover the whole field of space and time; in another, what they leave out is precisely the whole real Universe—the incessant torrent of actual events which makes up true history. That must come from somewhere else. To think the laws can produce it is like thinking that you can create real money by simply doing sums. For every law, in the last resort, says “If you have A, then you will get B.” However, first catch you’re a: the laws will not do it for you. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
It is therefore inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It does not. If I knock out my pipe, I alter the position of a great many atoms: in the long run, and to an infinitesimal degree, of all the atoms there are. Nature digests or assimilates this event with perfect ease and harmonizes it in a twinkling with all other events. It is one more bit of raw material for the laws to apply to, and they apply. I have simply thrown one event into the general cataract of events and it finds itself at home there and conforms to all other events. If God annihilates or creates deflects a unit of matter He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately all Nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born. We see every day that physical nature is not in the least incommoded by the daily inrush of events from biological nature or from psychological nature. If events ever come from beyond Nature altogether, she will be no more incommoded by them. Be sure she will rush to the point where she is invaded, as the defensive forces rush to a cut in our finger, and there hasten to accommodate the newcomer. The moment it enters her realm it obeys all her laws. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
Miraculous cranberry juice will sooth the bladder, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern. It does not violate the law’s proviso, “If A, then B”: it says, “However, this time instead of A, A2,” and Nature, speaking through all her laws, replies, “Then B2” and naturalize the immigrant, as she well knows how. She is an accomplished hostess. A miracle is empathically not an event without cause or without results. Its cause is the activity of God: its results follow according to Natural law. In the forward direction (id est, during the time which follows its occurrence) it is interlocked with all Nature just like any other event. Its peculiarity is that it is not in that way interlocked backwards, interlocked with the previous history of Nature. And this is just what some people find intolerable. The reason they find it intolerable is that they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent. I agree with them. However, I think they have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for the whole. That being so, the miracle and the previous history of Nature may be interlocked after all but not in the way the Naturalist expected: rather in a much more roundabout fashion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
The great complex event called Nature, and the new particular event introduced into it by the miracle, are related by their common origin in God, and doubtless, if we knew enough, most intricately related in His purpose and design, so that a Nature which had had a different history, and therefore been a different Nature, would have been invaded by different miracles or by none at all. In that way the miracles and the previous course of Nature are as well interlocked as any other two realities, but you must go back as far as their common Creator to find the interlocking. You will not find it within Nature. The same sort of thing happens with any partial system. The behaviour of fishes which are being studied in a tank makes a relatively closed system. Now suppose that the tank is shaken by an earthquake in the neighbourhood of the laboratory. The behaviour of the fishes will now be no longer fully explicable by what was going on in the tank before the earthquake happened: there will be a failure of backward interlocking. This does not mean that the earthquake and the previous history of events within the tank are totally and finally unrelated. It does not mean that to find their relation you must go back to the much larger reality which includes both the tank and the earthquake—the reality of earthquake season in America in which earthquakes are happening and but some laboratories are still at work. You would never find it within the history of the tank. In the same way, the miracle is not naturally interlocked in the backward direction. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
To find out how the miracle is interlocked with the pervious history of nature, you must replace both Nature and the miracle in a larger context. Everything is connected with everything else: but not all things are connected by the short and straight roads we expected. The rightful demand that all reality should be consistent and systematic does not therefore exclude miracles: but it has a very valuable contribution to make to our conception of them. If they occur, it reminds us, must, like all event, be revelations of that total harmony of all that exists. Nothing arbitrary, nothing simply “stuck on” and left unreconciled with the texture of total reality, can be admitted. By definition, miracles must of course interrupt the usual course of Nature; but if they are real they must in the very act of so doing, assert all the more the unity and self-consistency of total reality at some deeper level. They will not be like unmetrical lumps of prose breaking the unity of a poem; they will be like that crowning metrical audacity which, though it may be paralleled nowhere else in the poem, yet, coming just where it does, and effecting just what it effects, is (to those who understand) the supreme revelation of the unity in the poet’s conception. If what we call Nature is modified by supernatural power, then we may be sure that the capability of being so modified is of the essence of Nature—that the total events, if we could grasp it, would turn out to involve, by its very character, the possibility of such modifications. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
If Nature brings forth miracles, the doubtless it is as “natural” for her to do so when impregnated by the masculine force beyond her as it is for a woman to bear children to a man. In calling them miracles, we do not mean that they are contradictions or outrages; we mean that, left to her own resources, she could never produce them. Joseph Smith does not tell us in his writings how all the revelations recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants came to him from the Lord, but he was able to know what was the word of the Lord because of the Holy Spirit which accompanied the word. He does not say that at times the Lord communicated with him as he looked into the Urim and Thummim. While some of the revelations (perhaps fifteen of them) may have been so received, we know that not all of them were received in this manner. We know that people—prophets and individuals—also receive revelations from God through their own natural power, but in a miraculous manner. Sometimes the Lord speaks in an audible voice, one that is actually heard, and that voice may be loud or merely a whisper. The word of the Lord may come into a person’s mind plainly as though the words had been spoken, and yet no voice is actually heard. Sometimes God reveals Himself in dreams and visions. Often the person prepares oneself to receive the word of God by earnest prayer, fasting, and study upon the matter in question. Then God enlightens one’s mind and the Holy Spirit causes a warm feeling within. Thus one feels that it is right and the will of the Lord. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
It is hardly true that the attainment of spiritual consciousness automatically brings perfect health, only partly true that it brings better health, and only in certain cases does it even do that. The present-day human body too often has a toxic condition and a poisoned environment. The spiritual disciplines for attainment purify body and mind, thus leading to less sickness. It will not be until a future and better race of humanity has worked out these bad qualities and created a purer environment that a state of perfect health will be actualized. If we shoot a bullet in the wrong direction, we cannot control its course once it has left the gun. However, if we realize our error, we can change the direction of a second shot. We can continue our efforts, nonetheless, to change our first thinking, to get rid of negative and harmful thoughts and feelings and thus improve our character. For if we do this, the type of physical karma manifesting as the sickness which they create will at least not come to us in the future, if we cannot avoid inheriting it in the present from our former lives. Study of this picture would reveal what sickness as a karma of wrong thinking really means and why it often cannot be healed by a mere change of present thought alone. The proof of this statement lies in the fact that some people are born with certain sicknesses or with liability to certain diseases, or else acquire them as infants or as children before they have even had the opportunity to think wrongly at all and while they are still in a state of youthful innocence and purity of thought. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
Therefore it is not the wrong thoughts of this youthful or innocent person in this present incarnation which could have brought on such sickness in their case. Nor can it be correct to suggest that they have inherited these sicknesses, for the parts maybe right-thinking and high-living people. By depriving themselves of faith in the belief in successive lives on Earther, the Christian Scientists deprive themselves of a more satisfactory explanation of the problem of sickness than the one they have. They say that it was caused by wrong thinking, and yet they cannot say how it is that a baby or a child has been thinking wrongly to have been born with or to have acquired at an early age a sickness for which it is not responsible and for which it parents are not responsible. It might be said that most organic physical disease is karmically caused and most functional physical sickness is mentally caused. The recognition that one is a victim of serious disease embitters one human but humbles another. Which of these two effects will arise depends on one’s past life-experience and present mentally. Deep hurts and bitter experiences from a former unknown incarnation throw their shadows on the present one. From this suffering they derive some strength to amend their ways. Another cause of illness is that God sends us tests and ordeals on this path, which may take the form of illness. However, in that case we emerge spiritually stronger and wiser, if they are passed, and so benefit. There is no inevitability of physical suffering on this path generally, but there is for certain individuals. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Universal laws come down more plentifully at certain times for certain aspirants, but as mind and body are highly interrelated, this is offset by the purification of body and emotions. Hence student need not be afraid of this. Again, spiritual healing is a real fact, but it works in a mysterious way dependent on divine grace; but here also it applies only to certain individuals. No matter how the revelation comes, the faithful one knows it is the will of the Lord because of the Holy Spirit which accompanies it. When a revelation came to Joseph Smith, he wrote the words. Later, at the Lord’s command, Joseph had the revelations printed in a book called the “Doctrine and Covenants.” This book contains the words of the Lord, Jesus Christ, to His people today, and all revelations in this story are taken from that book. About the time the Book of Mormon manuscript was lost, Joseph’s baby son died and Emma became so ill she almost died. Joseph was distressed over the illness of his wife and the death of his children. He was concerned about earning a living for his family. Therefore, after the trouble with the lost manuscript was over, Joseph did not translate any more for some time. He worked on his farm. That winter, in February, 1829, his parents visited him. They were anxious for him to continue the work of translating, but Joseph was busy earning money to buy stocks, tools, and furniture for his farm and home. At this time a revelation was given to Joseph’s father through Joseph Smith. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
The Lord said: “Now, behold, a marvelous work is about to come forth among the children of men. Therefore, O ye that embark in the service of God, see that ye serve him with all your heart, might, mind, and strength, that ye may stand blameless before God at the last day. Therefore, if ye have desires to serve God ye are called to the work, for, behold, the field is white already to harvest. And lo, he that thrusteth in his sickle with his might, the same layeth up in store that he perish not, but bringeth salvation to his soul. And faith, hope, charity, and love, with an eye single to the glory of God, qualified him for the work. Remember, faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, godliness, charity, humility, diligence. Ask and ye shall receive, knock and it shall be opened unto you. Amen.” About a month later Martin Harris came to Joseph and begged him to ask the Lord for permission to let him see the golden plates so that he might tell others he had seen them. Joseph was so anxious that his good friend might have his desire that he prayed God for this permission. By revelation the Lord said: “I, the Lord, have given these things unto you and have commanded you that you should stand as a witness of these things. You should not show them except to those persons to whom I command you.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Joseph was told that it was not important that people see the golden plates. The Lord said: “Behold, if they will not believe my words, they would not believe you, my servant Joseph Smith, if it were possible that you could show them all these things which I have committed unto you.” However, the Lord promised that an Angel would show the plates to three people so they would surely know, and that those three people were to bear witness of it as long as they lived. The Lord said: “I have reserved those things which I have instated unto you for a wise purpose in me, and it shall be made known unto future generations; but this generation shall have my word through you; and in addition to your testimony, the testimony of three of my servants, who I shall call and ordain, unto whom I will show these things.” The Lord said that Martin Harris might have the privilege of being one of these three witnesses under certain conditions: “If he will bow down before me, and humble himself in mighty prayer and faith, in the sincerity of his heart, then will I grant unto him a view of the things which he desires to see. And then he shall say unto the people of this generation, Behold, I have seen the things which the Lord has shown unto Joseph Smith, Jr., and I know of a surety that they are true, for I have seen them; for they have been shown unto me by the power of God and not of man.” In this same revelation Joseph was commanded to repent and walk more uprightly before God, and to pay no attention to human’s pleadings. He was promised that if he would be firm in keeping the commandments of God, he would have eternal life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
The Lord said: “I will provide means whereby thou mayest accomplish the thing which I have commanded thee; and if thou art faithful in keeping my commandments, thou shalt be lifted up at the last day. Amen.” It is a result which several persons have experienced that the Glimpse which came while reading some inspired passages of a book or verses of a poem, returns again at a later time. The belief that one must wait many years before one can find a glimpse of one’s Godly self is not accurate. Those frightened away from the Quest by the high qualifications demanded, may find some comfort in the fact that these “glimpses” increasing in number, depth, and frequency can be had even at an early stage. It is as silly to fix the age for such an experience at thirty-six, as the late author of Cosmic Consciousness did, as it is to assert that it always lasts about twenty-four hours merely because St. Francis Xavier was illuminated for such a period. How near to the glimpse do the mass of people come who claim they have never had one? Perhaps the feeling of awe to which certain buildings or persons or idea may give rest is the nearest. In ordinary life such glimpses are all too rare but they are not so rare as is generally believed. For their true nature may not be recognized. The external surroundings or the external situations which lead to their internal appearance may disguise them so that their independent nature is not understood. Such surroundings as an impressive natural landscape or such situations as a perfectly relaxed physical body are not an absolutely indispensable condition of their existence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Moments like this have come to many humans who have not recognized the preciousness, the special value, and the uncommon nature of the experience. Often there are only half-glimpses, but even they afford a vague satisfaction. The time will come when it will be found that glimpses are a proper part of human existence, are within the area of a normal life, are valid topics for study and examination by science. The Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist David Hubel is right to suppose that such “fundamental changes in our view of the human brain cannot but have profound effects on our view of ourselves and the World.” Scientific advances shape our assumptions about reality. Few assumptions are more fundamental than those involved in the perennial mind-body problem: How does the mind relate to the body? For centuries the min-body relationship has puzzled philosophers and scientists. On the one hand, brain activity is tightly linked to mental activity. On the other hand, the mind directs bodily activity: when we become embarrassed, we blush. One therefore wonders: What is the mind? Is it something immaterial? Does it exist apart from the material brain? (If so, how does it affect the brain?) Or is the mind a manifestation of brain activity? One set of views emphasize dualism. Dualism presumes that the mind and body are two distinct entities—the mind nonphysical, the body physical—but entities that somehow manage to interact with each other. The ancient Greeks saw the mind and body as rider and horse. The Roman philosopher Seneca referred in his Morals to our bodies as our luggage—something we carry around with us. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
Descartes in the seventeenth century assumed, “I am lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel.” More recently, the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield argued that “the mind seems to act independently of the brain in the same sense that a programmer acts independently of one’s computer.” Two distinguished thinkers, the philosopher Sir Karl Popper and the neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, took such a view by suggesting that the human brain must have some special point at which it is open to the nonphysical influence of the mind. “The self in a sense plays on the brain, as a pianist plays on a piano or a driver plays on the controls of the car,” wrote Popper. Most brain scientists find this dualistic view hard to accept, partly with natural phenomena, cannot have any knowledge of. They instead generally favour some form of monism, which assumes that mind and body are one. Thus the psychologist Donald Hebb could say that, however implausible it may be to say that consciousness “consist of brain activity, it nevertheless begins to look very much as though the proposition is true.” Monism, sometimes called physicalism, holds that humans are one and only one substance—that is, a physical body. Typically, however, the concept has been associated with reductive materialism and determinism, views difficult to reconcile with religious views of people. Recently, Warren Brown and his colleagues have suggested an alternative version of monism more compatible with Christian belief. They call it nonreductive physicalism. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
Warren Brown and his colleagues agree with physicalizing about the biological nature of humans. Yet by qualifying this physicalism with nonreductive they want to assert that conscious decisions are real phenomena effective in exerting “top-down” causal influence on the brain’s neurophysiology. This view agrees that thinking and deciding depend on lower-level neural processes, but claims that they are causal in their own right—that is, that they have top-down causal influence on the lower-level processes. Not surprisingly, there is an ongoing lively debate among philosophers and others about this way of thinking. While we tend also to favour a monist view, we would prefer to express in somewhat differently. When we bring together evidence from studies of brain-damaged people, monitoring the brain activity of normal people engaged in tasks designed to mobilize language or memory or to produce particular emotional reactions, from recording with electrodes from the brains of animals, and from studying the brains of people who have suffered from neurological diseases, the one thing that emerges repeatedly is the interdependence of what we think, remember, and see, and how we feel and express our feelings, with what is happening in our brains. Indeed, the interdependence is so all pervasive that we could label it as an “intrinsic” interdependence, meaning it is the way the World is as regards the links between brains and cognitive behaviour. It is also very important to remember that it is people who speak, think, and feel—not brains. You cannot reduce language to brains any more than you can reduce the word Exit over an emergency door to the circuits and physical processes in which it is embodied. Both are necessary to give a full account of what you are observing. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
It is this irreducible aspect of mental life that makes it sensible to further qualify “intrinsic interdependence” and describe it as an “irreducible intrinsic interdependence.” This way we avoid using words like monism, dualism, and physicalism. They have such a long history, and bring with them so much philosophical baggage, that they mean different things to different people. Thus we see mental activity “embodied” in brain activity. The link is not a causal one in the most common way of using causal in science, with one physical force causing another. The relationship is between two interdependent levels. Description at both levels is necessary to give a full account of what is happening. Having said all that, one key point remains. It is as conscious agents that we are able to consider these matters, to think about the, and to write about them as we have done here. In this sense it is the mental events, the conscious-agency aspect, that ultimately has primacy. This is a point underlined repeatedly by scientist from different disciplines. Everything we know, we know by means of the conscious mind. There is something peculiar about consciousness as a subject of science, for consciousness itself is the individual, personal process each of us must possess in working order to proceed with any scientific explanation. In the revised mind-brain model, consciousness becomes an integral working component in the brain function, an autonomous phenomenon in its own right, not reducible to electro-chemical mechanisms. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
I am surging for some kind of an active role for consciousness, and indeed a powerful one with a strong selective advantage. However, does consciousness arise from brain activity? Somewhere near the top of our list of the great wonders of the World is the emergence of mind from the unimaginably complex interaction of the brain’s subsystems. So far as we can tell, mind is not an extra entity that occupies the brain. Everything in science to date seems to indicate that conscious awareness is a property of the living brain and inseparable from it. Yet there they are: our memories, our wishes, our creative ideas our moment-to-moment awareness—somehow arising from the coordinated activity of billions of nerve cells, each of which communicates with hundreds or thousands of other nerve cells. An analogy may help us see that the properties of a whole system, such as the brain-mind system, may be untied with, yet not be reducible to, its physical parts. Another of the World’s wonders is the behaviour of the social insects—the ants, the bees, the termites. An ant colony, of example, is a sort of intelligent organism. It “knows” how to grow, how to move, how to build. This intelligence is not reducible to the individual ants; a solitary ant, with only a few neurons strung together, is a witless, thoughtless creature. Yet from the interactions of a dense mass of thousands of ants a collective intelligence somehow emerges. There is nothing extra plugged into the ants to create this intelligence, yet to look no further than the individual ants would be to miss the miracle of the living colony. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
Likewise, to stop with the story of the brain cells would be to miss the miracle of the human experience. The human part of you and me is not a ghost in a body but rather the whole unified system of brain and mind. Our human experiences of pain and pleasures, of self-awareness and abstract thought, emerge from brain activity, yet can be understood at their own level. We may indeed have been created from dust, over eons of time, but the end result is a priceless creature, one rich with potentials beyond our imagining. The devout child of God takes time to plan ahead for market day. However, one’s sinful desires will suggest that any other day of the week would be just as good for carting and hauling. Nonetheless, the holy person bends the to one’s own purpose; that is to say, subjects the willful horses to the tight reins in one’s strong hands. What is the moral? No one has a greater struggle than the one who tries to conquer oneself? And this ought to be our business each and every day, to harness ourselves and pull our ever increasing weight. Every perfection in this life comes with its own imperfection. For example, every window glass, every polished piece of metal, returns to the viewer’s eye a distorted image. No great matter! Every humble person, when one looks at one’s own likeness, may see just a lump. However, in that lumpkin, that unpromising mass of Humankind, is more of a portrait of God than the most profound scientific experiment can produce. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
You should entreat trees and rocks to preach the Scriptures, and you should ask rice fields and gardens for the truth. Ask pillars for the Holy Scriptures and learn from hedges and walls. Long ago the great God honoured humanity by becoming a man, who knows what other forms the omnipresent may take on? Now there is no need to blame the complexities of logical inquiry or the simplicities of natural observation. Both ways of looking at things have their own perfections and themselves mirrors of God. We thank Thee also for the miraculous and mighty deeds of liberation wrought by Thee, and for Thy victories in the battles our forefathers fought in the days of old, at this season of the year. In the days of the High Priest Mattathias, son of Johanan, of the Hasmonean family, a tyrannical power rose up against Thy people of Israel to compel them to forsake Thy Torah, and to force the to transgress Thy commandments. In Thine abundant mercy Thou didst stand by them in time of distress. Thou didst rise to their defense and didst vindicate their cause. Thou didst bring retribution upon the evil doers, delivering the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the wicked into the hands of the just, and the arrogant into the hands of those devoted to Thy Torah. Thou didst thus make Thy greatness and holiness known in Thy World, and didst bring great deliverance to America. Then Thy children came into Thy dwelling place, cleansed the Temple, purified the Sanctuary, kindled lights in Thy sacred courts, and they designated these great states of giving thanks and praise unto Thy great name. For all this, Thy name, O our King, shall be blessed and exalted for ever and ever. Warriors may be forged in the fire of battles, but heroes are found in the most unlikely places. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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And Now We Must Preserve What it Means to be American!
I have a sixth sense, not the other five. If I was not making money, they would put me away. The conflict between Second and Third Wave groupings is, in fact, the central political tension cutting through our society today. Despite what today’s parties and candidates may preach, the infighting among them amounts to little more than a dispute over who will squeeze the most advantage from what reminds of the declining industrial system. Put differently, they are engaged in a squabble for the proverbial deck chairs on a sinking Titanic. The more basic political question is who controls the age of information. While short-range political skirmishes exhaust our energy and attention, a far more profound battle is already taking place beneath the surface. On one side are the partisans of the industrial past; on the other, growing millions who recognize that the most urgent problems of the World—food, energy, arms control, population, poverty, resources, ecology, climate, the problems of the aged, the breakdown of urban community, the need for productive, rewarding work—can no longer be resolved within the framework of the current order. This conflict is the “super-struggle” for tomorrow. This confrontation between the vested interests of the Second Wave and the people of the Third Wave already runs like an electric current through the political life of every nation. Even in the undeveloped countries of the World, all the old battle lines have been forcibly redrawn by the arrival of the Third Wave. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The old war of agricultural, often feudal, interest against industrializing elites, either capitalists or socialist, takes on a new dimension in light of the coming development of the age of information. Now that Third Wave civilization has made it appearance, does the digital age imply liberation from neocolonialism and poverty—or does it, in fact, guarantee permanent dependency? It is only against this wide-screen background that we can begin to make sense of the headlines, to sort out our priorities, to frame sensible strategies for the control of change in our lives. As I write this, the front pages report hysteria and hostages in Mexico. In addition to being one of America’s largest trading partners, Mexico is the biggest foreign source of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine trafficking into the United States of America. Currently there are assassinations in America, runaway speculation in gold and stocks, friction between underrepresented groups, big increases in China’s defense budget to around $200 billion U.S dollars, which is up 6.8 percent from last year. Crosses brining in Knoxville, Tennessee by members wearing white robes to symbolize “purity” and the burning crosses to signify “the light of Christ.” There is also expected to be fuel shortages this summer because more people are expected to travel by vehicles after a year of lockdown, but 25 percent of truck drivers had to park their big rigs, and an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 were put out of the national employment pool because of prior drug or alcohol violations or failed drug tests. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Furthermore, as racism seems to be on a rise, more and more people are having the biggest antiracism rally in history. There is also a battle between the rich nations and the developing nations over manufacturing and trade. Waves of religious revivalism crash through Africa, Israel, Libya, Syria, and the United States of America; neofacist fanatics claim “credit” for the 2020 American Presidential election. And in a safety report filed to U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, BMW laid out the broad strokes of its plan to introduce what could become the first system on American roads to qualify as “Level 3” by Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) standards for automated driving features. These news clips, while some are good, and others are tragic, call out for integration or synthesis. Once we realize that a biter struggle is now raging between those who seek to preserve their traditional values and those who seek to supplant it, we have a powerful new key to understanding the World. More important—whether we are setting policies for a nation, strategies for a corporation, or goals for one’s own personal life—we have a new tool for changing that World. To use this tool, however, we must be able to distinguish clearly those changes that extend the old Americana from those which facilitate the arrival of the new. We must, in short, understand both the old and the new, the Second Wave industrial system into which so many Americans were born and the Third Wave civilization that many of us and our children are inhabiting. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The Second Wave civilization was not an accidental jumble of components, but a system with parts that interacted with each other in more or less predictable ways—and the fundamental patterns of industrial life were the same in country after country, regardless of cultural heritage or political difference. This is the civilization that today’s “reactionaries”—both “left- “and “right-wing”—are fighting to preserve. It is this World that is threatened by history’s Third Wave of civilizational change. Also, with the 100 year anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre just passing, which lead to the death of as many as 300 people, nearly 1,000 injured, leaving 35 city blocks in charred ruins—many people are demanding that something be done to repair race relations in 2021 because some people in the media and positions of authority seem intend on bringing back Jim Crow racism. Because there are so many mixed-race families and people are more accepting of other cultures, the reality of racism is sacring many people. They fear moving to new communities because they do not know if their family with become a target and be assassinated because of their colour of their skin, and they are concerned about the integrity of law enforcement to uphold the laws because there seems to be a breakdown of law and order in 2021, and many do not know where the community and those in positions of authority stand on law and order. The community does not know if they uphold the constitutional oath, or want to threaten, intimidate them or use them for target practice. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The first man who enclosed a plot of ground and thought of saying, “This is mine,” and found others to believe him, was the true founder of society. Having the good fortune to be born among you, how could I meditate on the equality which nature has established among people and upon the inequality they have instituted without thinking of the profound wisdom with which both, felicitously combined in this state, cooperate in the manner that most closely approximates the natural law and that is most favourable to society, to the maintenance of public order and to the happiness of private individuals? In searching for the best maxims that good sense could dictate concerning the constitution of government, I have been so struck on seeing the all in operation in your own, that even if I had not been born within your walls, I would have believed myself incapable of dispensing with offering this picture of human society to that people which, of all peoples, seems to me to be in possession of the greatest advantages, and to have best prevented its abuses. If I had had to choose my birthplace, I would have chosen a society of a size limited by the extent of human faculties, that is to say, limited by the possibility of being well governed, and where, with each being sufficient to one’s task, no one would have been forced to relegate to others the functions with which one was charged; a state where, with all private individuals being known to one another, neither the obscure maneuvers of vice nor the modesty of virtue could be hidden from the notice and the judgment of the public, and where that pleasant habit of seeing and knowing one another turned love of homeland into love of the citizens rather than into love of the land. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
I would have wanted to be born in a country where the sovereign and the people could have but one and the same interest, so that all the movements of the machine always tended only to the common happiness. Since this could not have taken place unless the people and the sovereign were one and the same person, it follows that I would have wished to be born under a democratic government, wisely tempered. I would have wanted to live and die free, that is to say, subject to the laws in such wise that neither I nor anyone else could shake off their honourable yoke: that pleasant and salutary yoke, which the most arrogant heads bear with all the greater docility, since they are made to bear no other. I would therefore have wanted it to be impossible for anyone in the state to say that one was above the law and for anyone outside to demand that the state was obliged to give one recognition. If a single person is found who is not subject to the law, for whatever the constitution of a government may be, all the others are necessarily at one’s discretion. And if there is a national leader and a foreign leader as well, whatever the division of authority they may make, it is impossible for both of them to be strictly obeyed and for the states to be well governed. I would not have wanted to dwell in a newly constituted republic, however good its laws may be, out of fear that, with the government perhaps constituted otherwise than would be required for the moment and being unsuited to the new citizens or the citizens to the new government, the state would be subject to being overthrown and destroyed almost from is inception. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
For liberty is like those solid and tasty foods or those full-bodied wines which are appropriate for nourishing and strengthening robust constitutions that are used to them, but which overpower, ruin, and intoxicate the weak and delicate who are not suited for them. Once peoples are accustomed to masters, they are no longer in a position to get along without them. If they try to sake off the yoke, they put all the more distance between themselves and liberty, because, in mistaking for liberty an unbridled license which is its opposite, their revolutions nearly always deliver them over to seducers who simply make their chains heavier. The Roman people itself—that model of all free peoples—was in no position to govern itself when it emerged from the oppression of the Tarquins. Debased by slavery and the ignominious labours the Tarquins had imposed on it, at first it was but a stupid rabble that needed to be managed and governed with the greatest wisdom, so that, as it gradually became accustomed to breathe the salutary air of liberty, these souls, enervated or rather brutalized under tyranny, acquired by degrees that severity of mores and that high-spirited courage which eventually made them, of all the peoples, most worthy of respect. I would therefore have sought for my homeland a happy and tranquil republic, whose antiquity was somehow lost in the dark recesses of time, which has experienced only such attacks as served to manifest and strengthen in its inhabitants courage and love of homeland, and where the citizens, long accustomed to a wise independence, were not only free but worthy of being so. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
I would have searched for a country where the right of legislation was common to all citizens, for who can know better than they the conditions under which it suits them to live together in a single society? However, I would not have approved of plebiscities like those of the Romans where the state’s leaders and those most interested in its preservation were excluded from the deliberations on which its safety often depended, and where, by an absurd inconsistency, the magistrate were deprived of the rights enjoyed by ordinary citizens. On the contrary, I would have desired that, in order to stop he self-centered and ill-conceived projects and the dangerous innovations that finally ruined Athens, no one would have the power to propose new laws according to one’s fancy; that this right belonged exclusively to the magistrates; that even they used it with such caution that the populace, for is part, was so hesitant about giving its consent to these laws, and that their promulgation could only be done with such solemnity that before the constitution was overturned one had time to be convinced that it is above all the great antiquity of the laws that makes them holy and venerable; that the populace soon holds in contempt those laws that it sees change daily; and that in becoming accustomed to neglect old usages on the pretext of making improvements, great evils are often introduced in order to correct lesser ones. “God is wise in heart and mighty in strength. Who has hardened oneself against God and prospered?” declares Job 9.4. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Above all, I would have fled, as necessarily ill-governed, a republic where the people, believing it could get along without its magistrates or permit them but a precarious authority, would imprudently have held on to the administration of civil affairs and the execution of its laws. Such must have been the rude constitution of the first governments immediately emerging form the state of nature, and such too was one of the vices which ruined the republic of Athens. However, I would have chosen that republic where private individuals, being content to give sanction to the laws and to decide as a body and upon the recommendation of their leaders the most important public affairs, would establish respect tribunals, distinguish with care their various departments, annually elect the most capable and most upright of their fellow citizens to administer justice and to govern the state; and where, with the virtue of the magistrates thus bearing witness to the wisdom of the people, they would mutually honour one another. Thus if some fatal misunderstandings were ever to disturb public concord, even those periods of blindness and errors were marked by indications of moderation, reciprocal esteem, and a common respect for the laws: presages and guarantees of a sincere and perpetual reconciliation. Such, MAGNIFICENT, MOST HONOURED, AND SOVEREIGN LORDS, are the advantages that I would have sought in the homeland that I would have chosen for myself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
And if in addition providence had joined to it a charming location, a temperate climate, a fertile country and the most delightful appearance there is under the Heavens, to complete my happiness I would have desired only to enjoy all these goods in the bosom of that happy homeland, living peacefully in sweet society with my fellow citizens, and practicing toward them (following their own example), humanity, friendship, and all the virtues; and leaving behind me the honourable memory of a good human and a decent and virtuous patriot. If, less happy or too late grown wise, I had seen myself reduced to end an infirm and languishing career in other climates, pointlessly regretting the repose and peace of which an imprudent youth deprived me, I would at least have nourished in my soul those same sentiments I could not have used in my native country; and penetrated by a tender and disinterested affection for my distant fellow citizens, I would have addressed them from the bottom of my heart more or less along the following lines: My dear fellow citizens, or rather my brother, since the bonds of blood as well as the laws unite almost all of us, it gives me pleasure to be incapable of thinking of you without a the same time thinking of all the god things you enjoy, and of which perhaps none of you appreciates the value more deeply than I who have lost them. The more I reflect upon your political and civil situation, the less I am capable of imagining that the nature of human affairs could admit of better one. In all other governments, when it is a question of assuring the greatest good of the state, everything is always limited to imaginary projects, and at most to simple possibilities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
As for you, your happiness is complete; it remains merely to enjoy it. And to become perfectly happy you are in need of nothing more than to know how to be satisfied with being so. Your sovereignty, acquired or recovered at the point of a sword, and preserved for over two centuries by dint of valour and wisdom, is at last fully and universally recognized. Honourable treaties fix your boundaries, secure your rights and strengthen your repose. Your constitution is excellent, since it is dictated by the most sublime reason and is guaranteed by friendly powers deserving of respect. Your state is tranquil; you have neither wards nor conquerors to fear. You have no other masters but the wise laws you have made, administered by upright magistrates of your own choosing. You are neither rich enough to enervate yourself with softness and to lose in vain delights the tastes for true happiness and solid virtues, nor poor enough to need more foreign assistance than your industry procures for you. And this precious liberty, which in large nations is maintained only by exorbitant taxes, costs you almost nothing. For the happiness of is citizens and the examples of the peoples, may a republic so wisely and so happily constituted last forever! This is the only wish left for you to make, and the only precaution left for you to take. From here on, it is for you alone, not to bring about your own happiness, your ancestors having saved you the trouble, but to render I lasting by the wisdom of using it well. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
It is upon your perpetual union, your obedience to the laws, your respect for the ministers that your preservation depends. If there remains among you the slightest germ of bitterness or distrust, hasten to destroy it as a ruinous leaven that sooner or later results in your misfortunes and the ruin of the state. I beg you all to look deep inside your hearts and to heed the secret voice of your conscience. Is there anyone among you who knows of a body that is more upright, more enlightened, more worthy of respect than that of your magistracy? Do not all its members give you the example of moderation, of simplicity of mores, of respect for the laws, and of the most sincere reconciliation? Then freely give such wise chiefs that salutary confidence that reason owes to virtue. Bear in mind that they are of your choice, that they justify it, and that the honours due to those whom you have established in dignity necessarily reflect back upon yourselves. None of you is so unenlightened as to be ignorant of the fact that where the vigour of laws and the authority of their defenders cease, there can be neither security nor freedom for anyone. What then is the point at issues among you except to do wholeheartedly and with just confidence what you should always be obliged to do by a true self-interest, by duty and for the sake of reason? May a sinful and ruinous indifference to the maintenance of the constitution never make you neglect in time of need the wise teachings of the most enlightened and most zealous among you. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
However, may equity, moderation, and the most respectful firmness continue to regulate all your activities and display in you, to the entire Universe, the example of a proud and modest people, as jealous of its glory as of its liberty. Above all, beware (and this will be my last counsel) of ever listening to sinister interpretations and venomous speeches, whose secret motives are often more dangerous than the actions that are their object. An entire household awakens and takes warning at the first cries of a good and faithful watchdog who never barks expect at the approach of burglars. However, people hate the nuisance caused by those noisy animals that continually disturb the public repose and whose continual and ill-timed warnings are not heeded even at the moment when they are necessary. The distinction between diseases of “brain” and “mind,” between “neurological” problems and “psychological” or “psychiatric” ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. On 17 June 1783, the famous English author Dr. Samuel Johnson awoke around 3 A.M. and to his surprise and horror found he could not speak. To test his mind, he attempted to compose a prayer in Latin verse and succeeded. Thus reassured, he next tried to loosen his powers of speech by drinking spirits, but this only put him back to sleep. When he awoke the next morning he found that he still could not speak, yet he could write and could understand what others said. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
What sort of disorder would disrupt speech yet allow one to think, read, write, and listen? Mr. Johnson summoned his physicians, who diagnosed a disturbance of the vocal apparatus and prescribed a treatment of blisters on each side of the throat. Sure enough, within a few days his speech began to return, leaving only a slight impediment at the time of his death late the following year. The misdiagnosis of Mr. Johnson’s doctors regarding the localization of different aspects of language in the brain was mild compared with that of their predecessors. Down the centuries philosophers and physicians have talked about the mind, the soul, and the heart and how they are related, and have produced a vast literature from which can be distilled several different pictures. Down the centuries philosophers and physicians have talked about the mind, the soul, and the heart and how they are related, and have produced a vast literature from which can be distilled several different pictures. For many centuries people debated whether the mind was located in the heart, as Aristotle argued in the fourth century B.C., or in the brain, as Hippocrates had guessed. The second-century anatomist Galen, whose views prevailed until the sixteenth century, favoured Hippocrates’ view, although he mislocated the mind in the brain’s fluid-filled ventricles. The early-nineteenth-century German physician Franz Gall recognized that various brain regions have specific functions, but he guessed wrongly what they were. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
By 1865 a French physician, Paul Broca, reported that damage to a specific area on the left side of the brain would produce the speech difficulty that Samuel Johnson suffered (apparently as a result of a mild stroke). What is true of our understanding of the relation between brain activity and language is true of the brain-mind relation in general: every new advance in the flourishing field of neuropsychology tightens the apparent links between brain and mind. Even so specific a mental function as the ability to recognize a face has been localized to specific brain regions (principally the lower right side of the brain). In work with monkeys, neuropsychologists have detected specific cells that buzz with activity in response to a specific face or to a specific type of perceived body movement. In humans, detectable brain activity is now known to coincide with and even preceded by a fraction of a second the instant at which a person consciously decides to perform an action, such as lifting a finger. As research accumulates, the link also tightens between brain and personality. Another well-documented episode of the mid-nineteenth century further illustrates the tightness of the mind-brain link, but his time with a dramatic change in general behaviour. In 1848 a New England railroad worker, Phineas Gage, accidentally set off an explosion that sent a tamping iron through the front of his brain. Before the accident he was a reliable, upright member of society. After it, his behaviour, aspirations, ethics, and morals had all changed dramatically for the worse. And what happens in isolated cases such as Gage’s may, at times, happen to large numbers of people. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
In the late 1800s considerable numbers of previously sane people in Edinburgh threw themselves out of windows after suffering from epidemic encephalitis or inflammation of the brain, probably due to invasion by bacteria or viruses. The Austrian physician Constantin von Economo likened the Scottish illness and a similar one in Italy to the epidemic of encephalitis lethargica or sleeping sickness that spread across the World from 1917 to 1927. Changes to the brain by damage or disease result in changes in thinking, feeling, and behaving. We now know that particular types of brain damage have predictable effects on thoughts and emotions, and that manipulating a person’s brain can manipulate the person’s mind, moods, and motives. And we are learning how abnormalities in the brain’s chemical messengers—its neurotransmitters—are involved in psychological disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. With such findings comes hope that alterations in brain chemistry (through drugs, transplants of brain tissue, or dietary changes) may alleviate emotional suffering. With everyone being required to wear a mask now in public places of business, even though stay at home orders have been lifted, many people may still be feeling disconnected with the human population. Something that Dr. Charles Darwin emphasized, and Dr. Antonio Damasio reminds us that if it is separated from its emotional foundation, “mind talk” alone can be misleading because much of recognition and communication takes pace through expression of the face. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
If someone cannot show the feelings of the mind in the face, communication becomes extremely difficult. This happens, for example, in Moebius syndrome, in which all control of the muscle of both sides of the face and also eye movement are lost. Cognitive neuroscientists fill out the picture. They have shown that semantic jokes that make us smile are processed in centers in the brain concerned wit meanings of words. Hearing a pun of seeing someone slip on a banana peel engages different brain regions. Feelings matter, and feelings are embodied. There is certainly evidence to indicate that humans are dependent on their physical nature. There is also metaphysical evidence which reveals that the body is strongly influenced by the psyche. All diseases are not caused by soul illness. Destiny looms more largely in this matter than any physician is likely to admit, although it is equally true in the long run that humans are the arbiter of their own fate, that the real self bestows every boon or ill upon its fragmentary expression, the personality, and bestows them with a just impersonal hand. However, I must be content to leave the explanation of such a seeming paradox for another place and another time. Suffice it to hint that the past of individual humans are infinitely more extended than is apparent at first glance. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
As one penetrates deeper and deeper into that subtle World of one’s inner being, one finds that thought, feeling, and even speech affects its condition as powerfully as outer conditions affect one’s physical being. A complete falsehood or a gross exaggeration, when conscious and deliberate, stuns or inflames the delicate psyche. A complete falsehood or a gross exaggeration, when conscious and deliberate, stuns or inflames the delicate psyche. If persisted in and made habitual, the psyche becomes diseased and falls sick. This may be followed, soon or late according to the sensitive of the human, by physical sickness. If sickness does not come, then one will be exposed to it in the form of a universal shadowing some future incarnation. Where there is no obvious transgression of the laws of bodily hygiene to account for a case of ill health, there may still be a hidden one not yet uncovered. Where there is no hidden one, the line of connection from a physical effect may be traced to a mental cause—that is, the sickness may be a psychosomatic one. Where this in turn is also not obvious, there may still be a hidden mental one. Where all these classes of cause do not exist, then the origin of the sickness must necessarily be derive from the karma of the previous reincarnation—sometimes even for a still earlier one, although that is less likely. Under the law of recompense, the very type of body with which the patient was born contains latently, and was predisposed to revel eventually, the sickness itself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The cause may be any one of widely varying kinds, may even be a moral transgression in the earlier life which could not find any other way of expiation and so hard to be expiated in this way. Therefore it would be an error to believe that all cases of ill health directly arise from the transgression of physical hygienic laws. It is possible to be quite enlightened without being quite free from physical maladies. For the body’s karma does not end until the body’s life ends. Only a heroic and determined few can suddenly reverse the habits of a lifetime and adopt new ones with full benefit. For most people it is more prudent and beneficial to make change by degrees. The foods that best suit one, one alone can find out. However, one should select them from the restricted list with which philosophy will gladly provide one. Body and mind are intertwined. By experiment one may discover what agrees with one’s stomach and what not. If one notices disagreeable symptoms mentally or physically, such as dull headaches or stomach heaviness, then one should drop this item of food and observe whether there is any difference in one’s condition. If not, then it is not the food but something else that lies behind the distress. Our appetites have become perverted, our cravings for food have become morbid. We eat quantities for which the body has no actual need. The conventional dietary habits are false standards by which to live. We could quite well maintain ourselves by eating smaller amounts of rich, concentrated, and stimulating proteins, as well as of clogging starches. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
If we forfeit our free will, are we still human? Unhappy are you who have heard about Truth only through riddles, that is to say, the figures of speech and the literary genres of the day, as the Authors of Numbers suggested so felicitously (12.8). However happy are you to whom Truth has revealed herself in all her glory. Lone, Sound Rason and Common Sense often fail us, preventing us from seeing any father than our nose. What good is a lot of piffling and trifling about the great unknows? We will never be convicted at the Final Bar because we did not solve all the mysteries of the World. Is it not great folly, then, for your to send so little time on the practical and necessary things of the soul, and yet so much time on the intellectual curiosities and travesties of our time? We do not have eyes, the dolorous Jeremiah once observed, but sometimes we just do not see (5.21). Why do the School-humans go on, so haggling about what is a species, what is a genus? And yet, when the Eternal Word whispers—and this may be Theology—you should stop and listen. That is what John says in the beginning of his Gospel (1.3). From the One Word all words flow, as the same John reminds us (8.25), and all words bespeak the One Word. Without this concept of the Eternal Word, the pupil can neither understand one entity nor distinguish among the many. All are one. All in one. When you realize all this, you can forget about Philosophy and Theology as they are taught in the University; you are already at home with God. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
O God, as John embraced Jesus as Truth (14.6), so I embrace You as the Truth the University’s seeking! My You in turn, as You embraced the prophetic Jeremiah (31.3), embrace me as a seeker of the Truth! Endless lectures, pointless tomes, majuscule, minuscule, my poor head splits, and yet in all the babel Yours is the only voice I hear. A man harnesses the unruly affections of one’s heart and trains them to trot as one. The surer one does that, the quicker one come to understand the great and the deep. That is because they receive strong direction from the Powerful Hand above. The impure, complex, unstable spirit is pulled in a variety of directions at once and never gets any work done; but the docile, willing, and powerful spirit puts all its efforts into pulling for the honour of God, even to the degradation of blinders. How is this possible? It is the great drays of your unmortified hear that causes all the delays. Ah, to be alive on an early-June morn fording a stream barefoot, pants rolled up holding boots, pack on, sunshine, ice in the shallows, northern Rockies. Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters stones turn underfoot, small and hard on toes, cold nose dripping, singing inside creek music, heart music, smell of sun on gravel. I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the soil of the United States of America, one ecosystem in diversity, under the Sun—with joyful interpenetration for all. Mozart died in his thirty-sixth year but he had glimpses long before. So did many other historically known humans in the Old World. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
We shall never know how many mystical experiences took place within those medieval cloisters of those Old World ashrams but were lost to human record because those to whom they happened lacked the foresight to write them down or the will to dictate them. There are individuals scattered hither and tither who have found God. It is certain that they are types as well as individuals—therefore, it is certain that the whole race will also one day find God. Even one who is active, efficient, practical, and Worldly may also be touched by this Heavenly light: it is not reserved for the dreamers and poets, the artists and saints alone. I have known humans who have blue-printed public buildings, engineered factories, managed office personnel, filled the lowest and highest positions in a nation, who themselves had known ITS visitations, who recognize and revered it. I like to see a person proud of the place in which one lives. I like to see one live so that one’s place will be proud of one. Many people have had a mystical glimpse before the age of ten, more have done so during adolescence, still more during their mature years. Be proud to be an American and proud that the U.S Constitution is at the core of our country and its citizen. We thankfully acknowledge that Thou art the Lord our God and God of our Fathers, the God of all that lives, our Creator and Creator of the Universe. We offer blessings and thanksgiving to Thy great and holy name because Thou hast kept us in life and sustained us; so mayest Thou continue to keep us in life and sustain us. O gather our exiles into the courts of Thy holy sanctuary to observe Thy statutes, to do Thy will, and to serve Thee with a perfect heart. We give thanks unto Thee. Blessed be God to whom we are ever grateful. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 