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For the First Time in Human History the Opportunity to Evolve Beyond their Enslaved Past Has Been Accepted!

If your thing is paradise, it may be hard to obtain, but worth keeping. I believe that the whole future of human culture depends upon our solving the problem of how to introduce into education processes the essence of the preventive and curative methods to avoid poverty and crime. Education will be preventive in the sense that it will limit and guide the fateful dichotomy which occurs early in life between conscious and preconscious processes on the one hand, and the inaccessible unconscious on the other. It will have to be curative as well, because we cannot expect prevention ever to work perfectly. Consequently we shall always have to build into the concepts and techniques of education certain types of therapeutic experiences, both for groups and for individuals, which will be designed to reintegrate unconscious with conscious and precious processes. Even to attempt this will require that we overcome not only the individual resistances and prejudices to which are floating about in society, but also the entrenched opposition of many existing social, cultural, religious, and educational institutions. This is no small order: and I would hesitate to offer the challenge, if I did not have so deep a conviction that all of our vaunted culture and education, as we have known them in the past, have failed humankind completely. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Some may feel these views to be unduly pessimistic. Yet I believe that these criticisms of our educational processes are rooted in optimism, and pursue an optimistic ideal. If our purpose in studying our failures is to learn how not to fail in the future, it is not pessimism to face the fact of past failure. It was neither pessimism nor a morbid fascination with death which led medicine to the autopsy table, but rather courage, optimism, spiritual humility, and a determination to avoid the endless repetition of past error. Humankind’s reward is scientific medicine; and we must now face the failure of education with the same combination of humility and determination. Because education has failed humankind in the past, it does not follow that it must necessarily continue to fail, unless we cling obstinately and defensively to methods which have already been tried without success. Yet the tendency to prescribe more of the old medicines is deep in us. For instance, when I read that a new college president declares that what we need in education is a greater emphasis on religion, I confess that my heart feels joy. Much like when someone says we need more humanities. Or when professors call for more of the great books by greater thinkers out of the past, or when a classicist calls for more of the classics, or a mathematician for more mathematics or a chemist for more chemistry. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

When in the face of our general culture failure each cultural specialist cries out for larger doses of one’s own specific remedy, it is not a pretty spectacle, nor a reassuring measure of the maturity of the educators. However, at least they can recognize that the human mind needs more cultivation and are speaking up because we cannot have an education system that is producing people with little wisdom or maturity. It is important to understand that scientists, including psychiatrists, are not immune to these frailties; and that they are equally true for all of those who carry the banners of culture. It is an old story of youthful idealism, of young confidence that the way to the good life is in their hands, then of a gradual disillusionment which usually is masked by a paradoxical defensiveness and a refusal to face the limitations of existing methods, turning instead in their anger against anyone who is honest and sceptical enough to challenge one’s particular road to salvation. All of us want to go on educating as we have in the past, making at most only trivial curricular changes. However, what humankind actually needs is a cultural stride of far grander dimensions. A little more or less general knowledge and more in-depth information. General information does not give power to train and grow. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

General information without knowing how to think, apply it, nor build will create novice who are not able to process information correctly because they have not studied long enough to see how trends and supply shocks may impact the future, and they may not know how to accurately forecast and avert disasters. After having devoted a lifetime to having honestly mastering some erudite discipline, and having thereby become a pew-holder in a towering cathedral with a limited seating capacity, it is indeed understandable to see why one would believe that their technique which they have mastered at such great costs is just enough. We can see why a doctor might say, “Give the patient more of my medicine. More of the same is what he needs. Pour it down his throat. It is just a maintenance dose we are slowly introducing and will increase overtime before we move to something stronger because it will surely get him in remission in the future.” We have to teach people more and give them more art, writing, history, science, theology so they can become more cultured and expand their minds and increase their attention spans and learn to see the truths. Those who represent the World of the mind and of the spirit must acquire the humility which leads doctors and law enforcement to prevent people from lying on the autopsy table. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

What then must education achieve? It must make it possible for human beings to change. That is the necessary goal of education. America is a city on a hill, a holy experiment, whose success would prove that God’s plan for His churches could be successfully realized in the American wilderness. This is why militant Protestants work diligently to promote the prosperity of the church. Uniformity of religion must exist in any given society. This conviction rests on the belief tat there is one true religion and that it is the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in the interest of saving the souls of its citizens. Religion will liberate the savages from their inhumane ways. It is a way to control the sinful, Worldly people. It also allows for authority figures to worship closely with the people and monitor and help them keep their Godly ways through counseling and education. This is a unique moment in human culture. And as we do this, let us stop to remind ourselves that when a patient dies, the doctor does not blame the patient, unless he or she was not following medical orders, otherwise the doctor feels it was his or her fault. However, when humanity fails, people do not blame themselves. They do not turn their pitiless scrutiny on themselves, their beliefs, and their techniques. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Our culture is supposed to be revered as though it were a creative and moving force in the Divine Kingdom. An education not only gives humans sophistication, tastes, historical perspective, manners, erudite parlor conversation, and knowledge of how to use and control the forces of nature on the human spirit, it teaches you to appreciate life. We see it is the uneducated and students, who have failed humankind, not humankind which has failed us. Science and art and philosophy and religion and learning have succeeded; just as it is medicine which as succeeded when it keeps a patient alive, and prevents them from becoming a corpse. The next goal of education is a progressive freeing of humans—not merely from external tyrannies of nature and of others humans, but from internal enslavement by their own unconscious automatic mechanisms. Therefore, all of education and all of art and culture must contribute to this. It has been long recognized that in spite of technological process, and in spite of art, literature, religion, and scholarly learning, the heart of humans has not changed. This is basically a challenge and a rebuke to the TV News Media culture and its devastating commentary on culture. It is possible to break through the sonic barrier between conscious and unconscious processes, and thereby to bring to humans for the first time in human history the opportunity to evolve beyond their enslaved pass. That is why this thesis can claim for itself a realistic spiritual optimism. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Just as the battle for political freedom must be won over and over again, so too in every life the battle for internal psychological freedom must be fought and won again and again, if humans are to achieve and retain freedom from the tyranny of their own unconscious processes, the freedom to understand the forces which determine their thoughts, feelings, purposes, goals, and behaviour. This freedom is the fifth and ultimate human freedom; and like every other freedom, it demands eternal vigilance. Without this dedicated to truth and honour, education will sell humanity own the river—back into slavery. And this will continue to be true until we rescue humans from their present oblivion this forgotten human of education. Self-knowledge in depth is not all there is to wisdom, but that is what makes maturity and understanding possible; and what is even more important, it frees us from the tyranny of those rigid compulsive mechanisms which have made impossible our psychological evolution. Without self-knowledge in depth, we can have dreams but not art, we can have the neurotic raw material of literature, but not mature literature. Without it we have no adults, but only aging deviants armed with words, paints, clay, and atomic weapons, none of which they understand. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
It is aging, uneducated deviants which makes a mockery of the illustrious claims of education, or religion, of the arts, and science. Self-knowledge is the Forgotten Human of our entire educational system and indeed of human culture in general. Without self-knowledge it is possible to be erudite, but never wise. My challenge to all of us is to have the humility to face this failure, and the determination to do something effective about it before it is too late. We have to relate to each other as people, trusting each other, and sharing the energy of our lives in meaningful, honest ways. In the milieu of trust and openness we create, I think we all discover more capacities in ourselves and in each other than we had thought possible. This will allow spontaneity, courage, and integrity of the people to emerge. The spirit of self-determination, freedom, and growth (like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) lives on in people like the Sun on a Summer in California with a light of trust, understanding, compassion, and awareness shining on the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is an attitude embodying a respect for the integrity and worth of persons; it is a way of seeing and relating to the World and others. This is the experience of responsible freedom. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The way to utilize power is when dealing with people, trust the, have no desire to control or manipulate them, and have it be a shared responsibility. We want to foster an environment of mutual trust, openness, sharing, excitement, creative and self-responsible actions. Cooperation will replace competition. Self-discipline takes the place of external discipline. Each person will be able to experience and freely utilize one’s own power. We have all experienced the smarting hurt, the feeling of being blow away, exterminated, by the injustice of the action of oppression. It gives us a tiny view of the destruction of self that has been felt by millions of persons who have been the object of the crushing force of impersonal, arbitrary, blind power. However, the politics of power and control can be devastating, even when exercised by those who are only trying to protect and care for the young. Leadership, creativity, imagination spring up everywhere as individuals resist the encroachment of their rights as persons. There are also tremendous advantages for growth, support, and community in our present relationships. If anyone gets depressed, there are others to give one support. Though so many of us have been through so many changes in the past year—from ecstasy to terror—we have to accept each day as it comes. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

Feel good about your present life-style. Many of us could not imagine ourselves living a closed, possessive, and jealous existence. It is a blessing to have the freedom to be who one is; to explore the many facets of one’s personality with many people without fear of being caught or criticized. It is nice to meet people who are gentle, loving—caring. People want others in their lives who balance them. Others who share their past as well as present life; both the sad and happy times. Thanksgiving Day has always been a warm, beautiful day, a day of happiness among all Americans. It makes people glad to be alive to know that people can be happy, relating freely without jealousy and possessiveness. People can communicate with their loved ones freely, and express loving and joyful feelings. The growth that families are encouraged to experience is continuously infused back into their loved ones, keeping them strong and alive—a process rather than a fixed entity. However, we must also learn to recognize interpersonal abuse and crippling coming from the avoidance of jealousy or the experience of it. In addition to the Angels of faith, hope, charity, wisdom, and loving, are also the Angels of doubt, despair, need, passion, and hate. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

The morbid Angels are part of us all, I believe. However, many of the people in our community come across as pre-Raphaelite saints, there are no characteristics of evil in them. In our environment, jealousy, greed, competitiveness, and anger are equated with being imperfect. To not allow oneself or others the right to both feel and express emotions is to hold the person in an emotional strait jacket. When emotions are allowed to be legitimate and valued part of interaction, difficulties can be dealt with more flexibly and more humanely than when they are suppressed. From my understanding, for many people, along with the intense pain of jealousy, comes a shame at having the feeling at all. People, instead of experiencing and owning their jealousy, often try to find other rationalizations for their pain as a way of making sense of their feelings. I guess they can make sense of their jealousy; it comes from a place deeper in them than “sense” goes. Indeed it has its own sense, and their minds have little understanding of it. Perhaps one learns to be jealous, and in many cultures that seems to be an approved lesson. One can also learn not to be jealous. People just have to understand to what extent do they feel fraudulent in their personal life? #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
One has to know those feelings of jealousy are wrong, so unbelievable, so shameful. What exactly is love? It is will to good or “Bene-volence.” We love something or someone when we promote its good for its own sake. Love’s contrary is malice, and its simple absence is indifference. Its normal accompaniment is delight, but a twisted soul may delight in evil and take no pleasure in good. Love is not the same thing as desire, for I may desire something without even wishing it well, much less willing its good. I might desire a vanilla ice cream cone, for example. However, I do not wish it well; I wish to eat it. This is the difference between lust (mere desire) and love, as between two intimate partners. Desire and love are of course, compatible when desire is ruled by love; but most people today would, unfortunately, not even know the difference between them. Hence, in our World, love constantly falls prey to lust. That is a major part of the deep sickness of contemporary life. By contrast, what characterizes the deepest essence of God is love—that is, will to good. His very creation of the World is an expression of will to good, and it is then to be expected that His World would be found by Him to “very good,” reports Genesis 1.31. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

God’s love and goodwill towards humans is, therefore, not an add on to a nature that is fundamentally careless or even hostile. It is another expression—one of the more important ones, of course—of what He always and in every respect is. It is not hard for God to love, but it is impossible, given His nature, for Him not to love. Our human World as we find it is not like God, though it was intended to be. We have already expanded on this in the past, but must take note of it again here. Love is not natural in our World, though desire or lust certainly is. “The lust of the flesh, the lust f the eyes and the pride of life,” the apostle said, is “all that is in the World,” 1 John 2.16. Pride is defined by desire, not by love. It is, above all, the presumption that my desires should be fulfilled and that it is an injustice, a crying shame, and an injury if they are not. Lust and pride all around us inevitably result in a World of fear. For they bring us into a World of little dictators; and the most likely thing is that each person will be used and abused by others, possibly destroyed, and at least not helped and cared for. Our families, which should be a refuge from such a World, often turn out to be places where victimization is at its worst. “The dark places of the land are full of the habitations of violence,” reports Psalm74.20. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

The tender young are initiated into an adult World hardened in evil. Some babies are not even safe from people in their mother’s womb. “And one who turns aside from evil makes oneself a prey,” reports Isaiah 59.15. Injury brings pain and loss, then fear and anger, which mingle with resentment and contempt and settle into postures of coldness and malice, with brutal feelings that drain the body of health and strength and shatter social well-being. “And now it came to pass that Samuel, the Lamanite, did prophesy a great many more things which cannot be written. And behold, he said unto them; Behold, I give unto you’re a sign; for five years more cometh, and behold, then cometh the Son of God to redeem all those who shall believe on his name. And behold, this will I give unto you for a sign at the time of his coming; for behold, there shall be great light in Heaven, insomuch that in the night before he cometh there shall be no darkness, insomuch that it shall appear unto humans as if it was day. Therefore, there shall be one day and a night and a day, as if it were one day and there were no night; and this shall be unto you for a sign; for ye shall know of the rising of the Sun and also of its setting; therefore they shall know of a surety that there shall be two days and a night; nevertheless that night shall not be darkened; and it shall be night before he is born. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
“And behold, there shall a new star arise, such and one as ye never have beheld; and this also shall be a sign unto you. And be this is not all, there shall be many signs and wonders in Heaven. And it shall come to pass that ye shall all be amazed, and wonder, insomuch that ye shall fall to the Earth. And it shall come to pass that whosoever shall believe on the Son of God, the same shall have everlasting life. And behold, thus hath the Lord commanded me, by his angel, that I should come and tell this thing unto you; yea; he hath commanded that I should prophesy these things unto you; yea, he hath said unto me: Cry unto this people, repent and prepare the ways of the Lord. And now, because I am a Lamanite, and have spoken unto you the words which the Lord hath commanded me, and because it was hard against you, ye are angry with me and do seek to destroy me, and have cast me out from among you. And ye shall hear my words, for this intent have I come up upon the walls of this city, that ye might hear and know of the judgment of God which do await you because of your iniquities, and also that ye might know the conditions of repentance; and also that ye might know of the coming of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Father of Heaven and of Earth, the Creator of all things from the beginning; and that ye might know of the signs of his coming of the intent that ye might believe on his name. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

“And if ye believe on his name ye will repent of all your sins, that thereby ye may have a remission of them though his merits. And behold, again, another sign I give unto you, yea, a sign of his death. For behold, he surely must die that salvation may come; yea, it benooveth him and becometh expedient that he dieth, to bring to pass the resurrection of the dead, that thereby humans may be brought int the presence of the Lord. Yea, behold, this death bringeth to pass the resurrection, and redeemth all humankind from the first death—that spiritual death; for all humankind, by the Fall of Adam being cut off from the presence of the Lord, are considered as dead, both as to things temporal and to things spiritual. However, behold, the resurrection of Christ redeemth humankind, yea, even all humankind, and bringeth to pass the condition of repentance, that whosoever repentance the same is not hewn down and cast into the fire; and there cometh upon them again a spiritual death, yea, a second death, for they are cut off again as to things pertaining to righteousness. Therefore repent ye, repent ye, lest by knowing these things and not doing them ye shall suffer yourselves to come under condemnation, and ye are brought down unto this second death. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

“However, behold, as I said unto you concerning another sign, a sign of his death, behold, in that day that he shall suffer death the Sun shall be darkened and refuse to give his light upon the face of this land, even from the time that one shall suffer death, for he space of three days, to the time that he shall rise again from the dead. Yea, at the same time that he shall yield up the ghost there shall be thunderings and lightnings for the space of many hours, and the Earth shall shake and tremble; and the rocks which are upon the face of this Earth, which are both above the Earth and beneath, which ye know at this time are solid, or the more par of it is one solid mass, shall be broken up; yea, they shall be rent in twain, and shall ever after be found in seams and in cracks, and in broken fragments upon the face of the whole Earth, yea, both above the Earth and beneath. And behold, there shall be great tempests, and there shall be many mountains laid low, like unto a valley, and there shall be many places which are now called valleys which shall become mountains, whose height is great. And many highways shall be broken up, and many cities shall become desolate. And many graves shall be opened, and shall yield up many of their dead; and many saints shall appear unto many. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

“And behold, thus hath the angel spoken unto me; for he said unto me that there should be thunderings and lightnings for the space of many hours. And he said unto me that while the thunder and the lightning lasted, and the tempest, that these things should be, and that darkness should cover the face of the whole Earth for three days. And the angel said unto me that many shall see greater things than these, to the intent that they might believe that these signs and these wonders should come to pass upon all the face of this land, to the intent that there should be no cause for unbelief among the children of humans—and this to the intent that whosoever will believe might be saved, and that whosoever will not believe, a righteous judgment might come upon them; and also if they are condemned thy bring upon themselves their own condemnation. And now remember, remember, my brethren, that whosoever perisheth, perisheth unto oneself; and whosoever doeth iniquity, doeth it unto oneself; for behold, ye are free; ye are permitted to act for yourselves; for behold, God hath given unto you a knowledge and he hath made your freed. He hath given unto you that ye might know good from evil, and hath given unto you that ye might choose life or death. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

“And ye can do good and be restored unto that which is good, or have that which is good restored unto you; or ye can do evil, and have that which is evil restored to you,” reports Helman 14.1-31. Come, Holy God, and please bless this Thanksgiving food that will feed my body, though the actions of which you are daily made manifest in the World. O Lord, open Thou my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. Praised art Thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, mighty, revered and exalted God. Thou bestowest lovingkindness and possessest all things. Mindful of the patriarchs’ love for Thee, Thou wilt in Thy love bring a redeemer to their children’s children for the sake of Thy name. O King, Thou Helper, Redeemer and Shield, by Thou praised, O Lord, Shield of Abraham. Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever. Thou callest the dead to immortal life for Thou art mighty in deliverance. This Thanksgiving dinner is the work of many made palpable. Before eating, it is right to acknowledge their labour. We thank all these people and all their protective spirits. I send my prayers to God. Holy Ones, please accept my invitation. Please be honoured by it, by life’s true sacrifice. The food we eat is a gift from you and how grateful we are to have family and a beautiful home and safe Ultimate Driving Machines and a wonderful education. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

Residence One at Mills Station holds 1,932 square feet of single story living. The open concept design includes three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a two car garage. Each home includes a Home Hub located at the front of the home which can be used as a study, playroom or sitting room.
The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The great room is spacious and full of natural light with a covered patio! The Owner’s suite is nestled in the rear of the home separate from the secondary bedrooms, providing maximum privacy. Enjoy a spa like experience in the Owner’s bathroom with a large walk in shower, dual vanities, and makeup counter.
This home is designed with Universal Design concepts meaning that its well equipped for life’s transitions and aging in place. Learn more about this unique feature by speaking with a sales associate today!

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 Google Mini to help connect everything together! https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/move-in-ready-home-site-77/

Thank you, Holy Ooe: please share my good fortune. I praise you, Holy One: please share my friendship. How wonderful! How marvelous! This home is the gift from the Earth which it grew. #CresleighHomes
We Have No More Right to Consume Happiness without Producing it than to Consume Wealth without Producing it!

The truth is something you stumble into when you think you are going some place else. Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. The basic principle underlying initiation rituals: “if I had to suffer so much pain and humiliation to get into this club, it must be a wonderful organization. To tame the savageness of humans and make gentle the life of this World is a prayer for our country and for our people. To suggest that we say a prayer for our country and our people is to acknowledge error—the fault that lies within Americans and must not be ascribed to alien, un-American influences. Nearly 50 percent of American between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than 33 percent consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.” When they were young People used to know more, not less, about geography because classroom lessons were still fresh in their minds. And 90 percent of students have no idea of the locations of four countries intimately linked to American interest. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
The United States of America’s education system is not preparing young people for an increasingly global future. Cultural literacy is a desirable trait for a candidate in a presidential election. Many youths used to grow up and dream of being president, so that means we need to do a better job of preparing them. To raise questions about an individual’s intellectual qualifications carries more weight than anything else one can say about a person. One crucial qualification to determine if a person is competent is their intellectual ability to distinguish, in times of crises and on the daily basis, between worthwhile and worthless opinions. One of the major concerns about those who have proven themselves competent is the corruption of intellectuals by power than the potential corruption of government policy by intellectuals whom on one had elected. Many Americans rely on television as their only source of information for whatever they know about influences on government policy. At some point a devourer always overreaches oneself, like the witch or gain in folk tales who tries to drink up the sea and bursts, or like the vacuum monster in Yellow Submarine who ultimately devours himself and disappears. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25

As it stands, 66 percent of Americans cannot name three branches of government or come up with the name of a single Supreme Court justice. Americans who get their news primarily from television rather the newspaper know much less about the judicial system than newspaper readers. Furthermore, 66 percent of newspaper readers, but only 40 percent of television news watchers, know hat the primary mission of the Supreme Court is to interpret the United States Constitution. When people are ignorant of the high court’s constitutional mandate, it is much easier to convince them that justices are supposed to reflect public opinion—and that something has gone wrong when a court hands down a decision that contradicts popular wisdom. More than 50 percent of adults do not even know that there are nine Supreme Court justices. About half of adults—but just about 41 percent of teenagers—can name the three branches of government (Legislative, Executive, and Judicial). Only 25 percent of adult—but 20 percent of teenagers—know that there are one hundred U.S. senators. The vast majority of both adults and teens have no idea of when or by whom the Constitution was written (James Madison in 1787). Among teenagers, nearly 98 percent cannot name the Chief Justice of the United States (John G. Roberts). #RandolphHarris 3 of 25

We are still operating under the illusions that all Americans are playing by the same rules. This is our civic present and, if nothing is done to stem the rising tide of ignorance among the young, our even more disturbing civic future is doomed. So long as our society had a common point of moral reference there was a tendency for conflict to be resolved by compromise, and this comprise had a moral as well as practical basis. People no longer learn anything for the mistakes of others, instead they repeat them and expect a good outcome. However, the enemy is too dangerous to give them the benefit of the doubt; their crimes require emergency measures. Change must therefore affect the motivational roots of a society or it is not change at all. When the mind of the country is taught to aim at low objects, it eats upon itself. Despite the steady rise in the formal educational level of the population, so many Americans seems to know less and less. Technology, our servant, has also become our master, as the information highway—potentially the greatest tool for the diffusion of learning ever devised—has, for too many, become a highway to the far-flung regions of junk thought. At times like this, people must be willing to consider ideas, and even makes changes in behaviour, that they generally preferred to avoid. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25

To seize the moment, Americans must recognize that we are living though an overarching crises and knowledge involving everything about the way we learn and think. Such a recognition has to come from ordinary citizens as well as their elected representative, from nonintellectuals and intellectuals alike. The first essential step is negative: we must give up the delusion that technology can supply the fix for a condition that, however much it is abetted by our new machines, is essentially nontechnological. That some children from affluent homes can pass undemanding standardized tests does not mean that they are learning what citizens of a functional democracy need to know. The real problem is that we, as a people, have become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions. Our own ignorance is our worst enemy. However, reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe it can do it again. Americans must consider their behaviour from a different perspective. The job of higher education is not to instruct students in popular culture but to expose them to something better. Genuine intellectuals—we need to hear more, not less, from reality-based intellectual about all of the social problems that have been exacerbated by people ignorance—that is, all social problems. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25

If we persist in our efforts and finally attack the dysfunction of the system at its motivational roots, we may indeed be successful. In any case, there is n such thing as “compromise”: we are either strong enough to lever the train onto a new track or it stays on the old one or it is derailed. Everything rests on the assumption that the World does not contain the wherewithal to satisfy the needs of its human inhabitants. From this it follows that people must compete with one another for these scarce resources—lie, swindle, steal, and kill, if necessary. These basic assumptions create the danger of a “war of all against all.” I do not believe that our society can long continue on its old premises without destroying itself and everything else. Nor do I believe it can contain or rest the gathering forces of change without committing suicide in the process. The nation’s memory and attention span may already have sustained so much damage that they cannot be revived by the best efforts of America’s best mind. Intellectuals must be willing to step up and bring their knowledge, instead of a lust for power, to the public square; for educators devoted to teaching and learning rather than to the latest fads in pop psychology. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25

None of these suggestions address the core problem created by the media—the pacifiers of the mind that permeate our homes, schools, and politics. These is little evidence to indicate that Americans have either the desire or the will to lessen their dependency on the easy satisfaction held out by the video and digital World. The old culture turned the volume down on emotional experience in order to concentrate on its dreams of glory, but the new culture has turned it up again. Too much stimulation makes the carrot hard to see. Good taste is a taste for carrots. Happy babies must learn early that the beautiful things in life are not free. It is unrealistic o expect people simply to turn off their television sets, computers, or smart phones, because infotainment addiction resembles compulsive eating rather than alcoholism or smoking: alcohol and nicotine can be eliminated, but both food and the media supply essential nutrients as well as nonessential junk. If this is truly the new American dream for the upbringing of future generations, it is painful to think about what the cultural landscape will look like a generation from now. If there is not enough resources to go around, then those who have more will use structural inequality to find ways to prolong their advantage, and even legitimate it though various devices. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25

The law itself, although philosophically committed to equality, is fundamentally a social device for maintaining structured systems of inequality (defining as crimes, for example, only those of theft and violence in which lower class persons engage). However, when White collar criminals steal from people, it is glorified and they usually receive less prison time, and people are less likely to kill them in their process of breaking the law because they have more money and are deemed more valuable by society. It is still considered permissible, for example, to kill someone who is stealing your property under certain conditions. This is especially true if that person is without property oneself—a wealthy kleptomaniac (in contrast to a poor looter) would probably be worth a murder trial if killed while stealing. A more trivial example can be found in the handing of noise controls. Police are called to prevent distraction by the joyous noises of laughter and song, but not to stop the harsh and abrasive roar of power saws, leaf blowers operating at illegal hours, air hammers, power mowers, snow blowers, and other baneful machines. However, do not burn your fireplace on a bad air quality day, even if you cannot afford to run the heater and need to use your fireplace, you will be fined. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25

The rich and the poor have always been with us to some degree. However, there is a new culture that has emerged. What is significant about the new culture is that they do not necessarily care about the causes they represent, they do not even care that whatever cause they are taking up is a new trend, they are rejecting the foundation of American culture altogether. They are much given to acing out grandiose fantasies of taking society by storm, through achievement of wealth, power, and fame. Like so many of the more successful nineteenth century utopian communities (Oneida and Amana, for example), the puritans became corrupted by involvement in successful economic enterprise and the communal aspect was eroded away—another example of system being destroyed by what it attempts to ignore. Just as a plane needs to be fixed in space by at least one more pint than the two necessary to a line, so any complementary schism needs an additional referent in order to avert mutual destruction. This has usually been popularly recognized in any situation where civil warfare threatens in either the individual or social dimension. It frequently takes an external enemy to bring the individual together with oneself, to reunite the quarreling family, to being the nation together, to restructure the idea. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25

However, it is not necessary that the “third force” be negative and threatening; a common goal can unite the split group or individual. And in fact that is the essential aspect even under negative pressure. The chaos and lack of discipline is what we are most afraid of confronting and that is what we are most anxious and insecure that we have ourselves created. If society remains in a state of internecine warfare, it will bring either the group or the individual to its own destruction long before its time. In our fear of burning the candle at both ends we burn it in the middle and thus fall apart sooner. One would not have neurosis if the things fought against were not sufficiently nourished by one’s environment to enable in the first place. If we were perfect, if we had the exclusive solution, there would be no anxiety, no doubt, no disease. However, in fact, there has always been something else left to be desires and in an expanding Universe one would have to have colossal conceit, superhuman knowledge and experience, to ever not feel that something remains unexplored in this Universe. Every art, every science, every system has at one time or another found itself unnecessarily limited by its own conceit and has admitted its humility or has perished. This is as much a hard fact of experience as any “hard fact” in any field of endeavour. There is little reason to believe that this state of affairs will ever change. #Randolphharris 10 of 25

For a new culture pattern does not emerge out of nothing—the seed must already be there, like the magic tricks of wizards and witches in folklore, who can make an ocean out of a drop of water, a palace out of a stone, a forest out of a blade of grass, but nothing out of nothing. Our homes are furnished as if we intended to spend the rest of our lives in them, instead of moving every few years. This perhaps represents merely a kind of technological neurosis—a yearning for stability expressed in a technological neurosis—a yearning for stability expressed in a technological failure to adapt. Should Americans ever settle down, however, they will find little to do in the ways of readjusting their household furnishing habits. Much of the new culture is implicitly and explicitly “neotenous” in a cultural sense: behaviour, values, and life-styles formerly seen as appropriate only to childhood are being retained into adulthood as a counterforce to the old culture. When the system as it stands is no longer viable, however, the mechanism must be exposed for the swindle that it is; otherwise the needed radical changes will be rendered ineffectual. They key to the mechanism is the powerful human reluctance to admit that an achieved goal was not worth the unpleasant experience required to achieve it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25

You tell me it is the institution, you had better free your mind instead. However, what is all the freed minds are in jail? I am afraid there are no quick solutions to the problem of the empty self, and we cannot simplify its impact on the Christian mind. The battle here will be won or lost in the area of habits. Admit the problem. First, we must admit that this is a problem and we need to inform others about it. We do ourselves or our God no good if we hide from the fact that the empty self threatens all of us. Any movement that brings about lasting changes begins with conscious raising. Start talking to your Christian friends about the value of the Christian mind. Mention the empty self in your Saturday or Sunday school class, your home Bible study, and so on. Talk to your children about developing their intellectual abilities for the service of Christ and His people. Before a problem can be solved, it must be carefully defined and clearly acknowledged. Choose to be different. Second, at some point we need to make a fundamental decision that we will be different no matter what the cost. We Christians simply must admit that we have allowed our culture to squeeze us into its mold. We must stand against the culture (including inappropriate tendencies in the evangelical subculture), resist the empty self, and eschew the intellectual flabbiness that goes along with it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25

Motivation is key here. I am no expert on motivation, but I do have one piece of advice, derived from several decades of ministry: Expose yourself to ideas with which you disagree and let yourself be motivated to excel intellectually by the exposure. Listen to talk shows, read the editorial page, and walk around a local university and look at bulletin boards or read the student newspaper. Get into discussion with people at work with whom you differ. The point is to spend time around those who do not simply reinforce your own ways of looking at things. There are two advantages to this. For one thing, we can learn from our critics. For another, such exposure can move us to realize just how serious the war of ideas really is and how inadequately prepared we are to engage in that contest. Change your routine. Third, for one week, note two things on a sheet of paper. First, observe your energy rhythms. When is your energy at a low point during that day and when is it vigorous? Second, note what you tend to do when you tend to do when you get home from work or just after you have finished eating dinner. Often, when our energy is low or when we get home from work or finish dinner, we go into a passive mode and turn on the television. If a person learns to limit television watching and spends more time getting physical exercise, I believe that an intellectual life is easier to develop. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25

I do not think I have to defend limiting television watching in this regard, but what about exercise? If you are in good shape, your mind becomes more alert and you have more energy to be proactive. I tell my graduate students that if they want to get the most out of the intellectual opportunities of graduate school, then they must learn to use low-energy times, or moments like after work or diner, as occasions to engage in physical exercise. Try something. After dinner go for a walk instead of turning on the TV. When you get back, sit down for thirty minutes to an hour and read an intellectually challenging book. The important thing here is to get out of passive ruts, especially those passive couch hamburger moments, and replace old habits with the new ones that create energy to read, reflect, and be more proactive. Develop patience and endurance. Fourth, learn how to duffer and develop patient endurance. A life of intellectual cultivation takes effort. And it can be painful. The mind is like a muscle: it needs to be stretched beyond itself. I often read books that are a little over my head so I can develop my intellectual strength. Also, it often takes time to work through an important topic with sufficient care and attention. One needs to take a long-term perspective toward reading and study. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25

However, such a perspective will require endurance in staying put in a chair, with pen in hand, long enough to read deeply and widely. This requires a spirit of quietness and an absence of distraction. If you are fidgety and have to get up every fifteen minutes, you must get control of yourself. And gaining such control will require self-denial, suffering, and endurance. The intellectual life is both a means to and a result of a life of discipline, self-control, and endurance. The best way to develop these traits is to practice the spiritual disciplines, especially solitude and fasting. Through solitude, I am learning to be quiet, alone, and focused. Through fasting, I am learning to say no to immediate gratification and bodily distraction and control of myself. The spiritual disciplines can facilitate endurance, patience, discipline, and self-control—virtue that constitute the soil in which the cultivation of the Christian mind takes place. Develop a good vocabulary. Fifth, keep a dictionary handy and get in the habit of looking up words that you do not understand. The development of a good vocabulary is an important tool in the cultivation of the Christian mind. The ubiquitous and egregious (look them up!) avoidance of the dictionary today is no help to the person who wishes to love God with one’s mind. Set some intellectual goals. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25

It is important for you to set some study goals on a yearly basis. I suggest you team up with another person in your church who has similar study interest and commit yourselves to mutually accountable reading program, like Reese’s Book Club, for example. For six years now, I have met every Friday morning for breakfast with a study partner. My friend and I read books in philosophy, psychology, contemporary culture, spiritual formation, and so on. We meet to discuss our reading. Also, we subscribe to important Christian periodicals (for example, Christian Today) and regularly browse in secular and Christian bookstores. We come together and share our discoveries each week, and our times together are rich! Find a plan that works for you and just do it! Sometimes one of our friends or loved ones have become a spiritual paralytic. The affliction or trial one has undergone has virtually immobilized the person spiritually. One is unable to help oneself. Not only that, but the spiritual “mat” one is lying on—that is, faith in God and trust in His promises—is no more than the equivalent of a thin, straw-filled mattress. If you try to encourage one through Scripture, one will look at you blankly and tell you Scripture just does not mean anything to one anymore. One has tried to claim God’s promises, but nothing “works.” God just is not there. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25

This person has become an awkward, heavy spiritual burden. You cannot pray with one, you can only pray for one. However, just as the paralytic’s friends persisted until they brought him to Jesus, so we too must persist in bringing this person to the throne of grace until God heals one spiritually. Of course, the spiritual paralytic is an extreme case. More often than not, the person to whom we are called to be a minister of grace can still go to the throne of grace oneself. However, we are still called to really around that person in prayer. God can, and often does, answer our individual prayers, but the general tenor of Scripture is that God desires we support each other in prayer. Beyond prayer, we must in some way receive permission to be a minister of grace to the person in need. One of the best ways we can do this is to demonstrate that we care. The first thing the person requiring grace needs from you is the assurance and demonstration that you care. We want to help that person come to the place where one can cast that hurt on God, truly believing God does care. So often, though, our perception of other people’s care. If we see care demonstrated in our friends, it is easier for us to believe God cares. If should not be this way; we should not gauge the care of God by the care of fallible, sinful human beings. However, we do. And often, God wants us to be the tangible evidence of His care. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25

How can we demonstrate that we care? Obviously the first thing we must do is to make contact. If you live in the same city, invite the person to lunch or coffee, or in some way establish personal contact. Based on my own experience after the death of my first wife, and confirmed by several friends who have lost loved ones, this is where we so often fail each other. Apparently because we feel awkward and do not know what to say, we do not say anything. In fact, we may even avoid the hurting person. One friend, whose wife died some months after mine, said to me, “William, where are my friends?” Another told me of someone, who was one of his best friends, avoiding him after the death of a child. If you have failed to make contact back you did not know what to day, allow me to offer a suggestion. Just tell the person, “I know you must be hurting badly, and I do not know what to say, but I just want you to know I care.” Then, if appropriate you could add, “If it would help, I would like to have lunch [or whatever] with you, and just listen to you. I would like to know how you are really doing.” Above all, do not ask the person merely in passing at church or somewhere else “How are you doing?” Though you may not intend this, it communicates to the hurting person that you are expecting the typical cultural response, “Oh, just fine!” Speaking as one who has “been there,” this is taken as more of an indication that you do not care than that you do. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25

When you have demonstrated to the other person that you do care—be sensitive to determine when the other person believes this—you can begin to ask gently probing questions, such as, “How are you and God getting alone during this time?” “Are you able to get any comfort from the Scriptures, or are they just dead to you right now?” Ask questions in a way that communicates you will not be shocked by negative answers. “And now it came to pass in the forty and third year of the reign of the judges, there was no contention among the people of Nephi save it were a little pride which was in the church, which did cause some little dissensions among the people, which affairs were settled in the ending of the forty and third year. And there was no contention among the people in the forty and fourth year; neither was there much contention in the forty and fifth year. And it came to pass in the forty and sixth, yea, there was much contention and many dissensions; in the which there were an exceedingly great many who departed out of the land of Zarahemla, and went forth unto the land northward to inherit the land. And they did travel to an exceedingly great distance, insomuch that they came to large bodies of water and many rivers. Yea, and even they did spread forth into all parts of the land, into whatever parts it had not been rendered desolate and without timber, because of the many inhabitants who had before inherited the land. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25

“And they did travel to an exceedingly great distance, insomuch that they came to large bodies of water and many rivers. Yea, and even the did spread forth int all parts of the land, into whatever parts it had not been rendered desolate and without timber, because of the many inhabitants who had before inherited the land. And now no part of the land wad desolate, save it were for timbers; but because of the greatness of the destruction of the people who had before inhabited the land it was called desolate. And there being but little timber upon the face of the land, nevertheless the people who went forth became exceedingly expert in the working of cement; therefore they did build houses of cement, in the which they did dwell. And it came to pass that they did multiply and spread, and did go forth from the land southward to the land northward, and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face of the whole Earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea west to the sea east. And the people who were in the land northward did dwell in tents, and in houses of cement, and they did suffer whatsoever tree should spring up upon the face of the land that it should grow up, that in time they might have timber to build their houses, their cities, and their temples, and their synagogues, and their sanctuaries, and all manner of their buildings. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25

“And it came to pass as timber was exceedingly scarce in the land northward, they did send forth much by the way of shipping. And thus they did enable the people in the land northward that they might build many cities, both of wood and of cement. And it came to pass that there were many of the people of Ammon, who were Lamanites by birth, did also go forth into this land. And now there are many records kept of the proceedings of this people, by many of this people, which are particular and very large, concerning them. However, behold, a hundredth part of the proceedings of this people, yea, the account of the Lamanites and of the Nephites, and their wars, and contentions, and dissensions, and their preaching, and their prophecies, and their shipping and their building of temples, and of synagogues and their sanctuaries, and their righteousness, and their wickedness, and their murders, and their robbings, and their plundering, and all manner of abominations and whoredoms, cannot be contained in this work. However, behold, there are many books and many records of every kind, and they have kept chiefly by the Nephites. And they have been handed down from one generation to another by the Nephites, even until they have fallen into transgression and have been murdered, plundered, and hunted, and driven forth, and slain, and scattered upon the face of the Earth, and mixed with the Lamanites until they are no more called the Nephites, becoming wicked, and wild, and ferocious, yea, even becoming Lamanites. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25

“And now I return again to mine account; therefore, what I have spoken had passed after there had been great contentions, and disturbances, and wars, and dissensions, among the people of Nephi. The forty and sixth year of the reign of the judges ended; and it came to pass that there was still great contention in the land, yea, even in the forty and seventh year, and also in the forty and eighth year. Nevertheless Helaman did fill the judgment-seat with justice and equity; yea, he did observe to keep the statues, and the judgments, and the commandments of God; and he did do that which was right in the sight of God continually; and he did walk after the ways of his father, insomuch that he did prosper in the land. And it came to pass that he had two sons. He gave unto the eldest the name of Nephi, and unto the youngest, the name of Lehi. And they began to grow up unto the Lord. And it came to pass that the wars and contentions began to cease, in small degree, among the people of the Nephites, in latter end of the forty and eighth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi. And it came to pass in the forty and ninth year of the reign of the judges, there was continual peace established in the land, all save it were the secret combinations which Gadianton the robber had established in the more settled parts of the land, which at the time were not known unto those who were at the head of government; therefore they were not destroyed out of the land. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25

“And it came to pass that in this same yea there was exceedingly great prosperity in the church, insomuch that there were thousands who did join themselves unto the church and were baptized unto repentance. And so great was the prosperity of the church, and so many the blessings which were poured out upon the people, that even the high priests and the teachers were themselves astonished beyond measure. And it came to pass that the work of the Lord did prosper unto the baptizing and uniting to the church of God, any souls, yea, even tends of thousands. Thus we may see that the Lord is merciful unto all who will, in the sincerity of their hearts, call upon his hoy name. Yea, this we see that the gate of Heaven is open unto all, even to those who will believe on the name of Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God. Yea, we see that whosoever will may lay hold upon the word of God, which is quick and powerful, which is quick and powerful, which shall divide asunder all the cunning and the snares and the wiles of the devil, and lead the humans of Christ in a strait and narrow course across that everlasting gulf of misery which is prepared to engulf the wicked—and land their souls, yea, their immortal souls, at the right hand of God in the kingdom of Heaven, to sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and with Jacob, and with all our holy fathers, to go no more out. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25

“And in this year there was continual rejoicing in the and of Zarahemla, and in all the regions round about, even in the land which was possessed by the Nephites. And it came to pass that there was peace and exceedingly great joy in the remainder of the forty and ninth year; yea, and also there was continual peace and great joy in the fiftieth year of the reign of the judges. And in the fifty and first year of the reign of the judges there was peace also, save it were the pride which began t enter into the church—not into the church of God, but into the hearts of the people who professed to belong to the church of God—and they were lifted up in pride, even to the persecution of many of their brethren. Now his was a great evil, which did cause the more humble part of the people to suffer great persecutions, and to wade through much affliction. Nevertheless they did fast and pray oft, and did wax stronger and stronger in their humility, and firmer and firmer in the faith of Christ, unto the filling their souls with joy and consolation, yea, even to the purifying and the sanctification of their hearts, which sanctification of their hearts unto God. And it came to pass that the fifty and second year ended in peace also, save it were the exceedingly great pride which had gotten into the hearts of the people; and it was because of their prosperity in the land; and it did grow upon them from day to day. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25

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Had a Fairy Come and Offered to Fulfill My Desires, I Should Not Have Known what to Ask!

Did you hear about the fellow who blamed arithmetic for his divorce? His wife put two and two together. In spite of various pronouncements concerning the “death of God,” there was never any likelihood that religion would wither away in American life. Both suburbanization and higher education were secularizing forces, in that they brought together people of different faiths and ethnic backgrounds on the same turf in a manner that could not help but erode certain traditional loyalties. Still many Americans choose from a cafeteria-style theological menu because they have been exposed to other religions or need to find a way to justify their actions. For example, 66 percent of Americans believe in Heaven, while less than 50 percent believe in hell. In the same sort of inconsistency, some sins that people know are wrong are acceptable, while others are not. None of us are perfect Christians, but many do try and repent from their sins. Many enslaved people in America used to look to the Bible, especially the story of Exodus, as divine source of hope for liberation for slavery. The Bible is still were most Americans turn today for hope of salvation. Some 75 percent of American believe in God. In fact, more than 60 percent who were surveyed said the Bible, not the will of the people should shape US Law. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24

Most of these people also believe that liberal secularists have gone too far in trying to remove religion from public life. God and science have been proven methods for prolonging Earthly life. There is a deep desire for spiritual moorings—a hunger for God. People miss prayer in schools and pledging allegiance to the flag. It is believed that these two activities kept Americans in line and loyal to their country. The humbling of ourselves under God’s mighty hand always leads to exaltation. Sometimes this may consist in the removal of whatever affliction God has brought into our lives and the restoration of peaceful circumstances, perhaps even more prosperous circumstances than before. This happened in the case of Job: “The LORD blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the first,” reports Job 42.12. At other times, though the circumstances are not changed, as in the case of the death of a loved one, the heaviness and painful grief or agony are removed. This happened in the case of Paul’s thorn. He was given grace to accept his thorn. When it often seems to us God has forgotten us, how are we to obtain such faith? The answer lies in 1 Peter 5.7: “Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you.” God cares for you. Even though He is disciplining you, He cares for you. As we have already seen, discipline is an indication of God’s care. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24

However, God’s care goes beyond necessary discipline. Even as He disciplines you, He shares in your pain. Isaiah described God’s attitude toward Israel, “In all their distress He too was distressed,” report Isaiah 63.9. The same can be said of God’s attitude toward you. In all your distress He too is distressed. Because God cares for you, you can cast your anxiety on Him. Do not get these thoughts reversed. The text does not say, “If you cast your anxieties on Him, He will care for you.” His care is not conditioned on our faith and our ability to cast our anxiety on Him; rather, it is because He does care for us that we can cast our anxiety on Him. Even at this point, we need the help of the Holy Spirit to do this. Even with all the assurance this whole passage provides us, its truth sometimes fails to reach our hearts. Sometimes we have to pray for the grace to humble ourselves under His mighty hand and the grace to believe that He does in fact care for us. Sometimes we must pray as did the father who came to Jesus asking Him to heal his son. When Jesus said to him, “Everything is possible for one who believes,” the father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief,” reports Mark 9.32-24. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24

In Modern American culture, what psychologist call the empty self has emerged in epidemic proportion. The empty self is constituted by a set of values, motives, and habits of thought, feeling, and behaviour that perverts and eliminates the life of the mind and makes maturation in the way of Christ extremely difficult. There are several traits of the empty self that undermine intellectual growth and spiritual development. The empty self is inordinately individualistic. A few years ago, I was sitting in an elementary school gym with other parents at a DARE graduation (a public-school program designed to help children say no to drugs) for my daughter’s sixth-grade class. Five sixth graders were about to read brief papers expressing their reasons for saying no to drugs. I leaned over to the coupe sitting next to me and made a prediction: each paper, I said, would be a variation of the same reason for refusing to take drugs: self-interest. Sure enough, student after student said he or she would refuse drugs because of a desire to stay healthy, become a doctor or athlete, or do well in school. Conspicuous by its absence was one single reference to virtue or duty to community. Not one student anathematized drug use because of the shame it would bring to family, community, or God. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24

Individualist reasons were the only ones given for abstaining from drug use, a fact to be expected in a generation whose moral education is exhausted by values clarification. By contrast, when a Japanese ice skater fell during an Olympic performance a few years ago, her main concern was not the endorsement opportunities she had lost. She feared that shame had been brought onto her family and people. Community loomed large in the way she understood her own sense of self. A healthy form of individualism is a good thing. Sadly, we have all known people who fail to draw appropriate boundaries and do not separate and individuate from others in a healthy way. Such people do not think or feel for themselves, they are easy to manipulate, and their well-being is far too dependent on what others think of them. A person with a healthy individualism learns to avoid these problems in order to mutually to depend upon and relate to members of the body of Christ. This sort of individualism produces strong selves who have the power to practice self-denial to enrich the broader groups (for example, family, church) of which they are part of. However, the empty self-populating American culture is a self-contained individual who defines one’s own goals, values, and interests as though one were a human atom, isolated from other with little need or responsibility to live for the concerns of the broader community. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24

Self-contained individuals do their own thing and seek to create meaning by looking within their own selves. However, as psychologist Martin Seligman, “the self is a very poor site for finding meaning.” The empty self is infantile. It is widely recognized that adolescent personality traits are staying with people longer today than in earlier generations, sometimes manifesting themselves into the early thirties. Created by a culture filled with pop psychology, schools and media that usurp parental authority, and television ads that seem to treat every like a teenager, the infantile part of the empty self needs instant gratification, comfort, and soothing. The infantile person is controlled by infantile cravings and constantly seeks to be filled up with and made whole by food, entertainment, and consumer goods. Such a person is preoccupied with pleasures of the flesh, physical appearance, and body image and tends to live by feelings and experiences. For the infantile personality type, pain, endurance, hard work, and delay gratification are anathema. Pleasure is all that matters, and it had better be immediate. Boredom is the greatest evil, amusement the greatest good. The empty self is narcissistic. Narcissism is an inordinate and exclusive sense of self-infatuation in which the individual is preoccupied with one’s own self-interest and personal fulfillment. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24

Narcissists manipulate relationships with others, including God, to validate their own self-esteem and cannot sustain deep attachments or make personal commitments to something larger than their own ego. Narcissists are superficial and aloof and prefer to “play it cool” and “keep their options open.” Self-denial is out of the question. The Christian narcissist brings a Copernican revolution to the Christian faith. Historically, the Copernican revolution dethroned the Earth from the center of the Universe and put the Sun in its place. Spiritually, the narcissist dethrones God and His purposes in history from the center of the religious life and replaces them with one’s own personal fulfillment. The narcissist evaluates the local church, the right books to read, and the other religious practices worthy of one’s time on the basis of how they will further one’s own agenda. God becomes another tool in a narcistic bag of tricks, along with the car, workouts at the fitness center, and so on—things that exist as mere instruments to facilitate a life defined largely independent of biblical Worldview. Narcissists see education solely as a means to enhance their own careers. The humanities and general education that historically were part of a university curriculum to help develop people with the intellectual and moral virtues necessary for life directed at he common good, just do not fit into the narcissist’s plans. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24

Narcissistic students object to the introduction of requirements in general education because the work demands too much of them and seldom leads to lucrative employment. The empty self is passive. The couch cheese burger is the role model for the empty self, and without question, modern Americans are becoming increasingly passive in their approach to life. We let other people do our living and thinking for us: the pastor studies the Bible for us, the news media does our political thinking for us, and we let our favourite sports team exercise, struggle, and win for us. From watching television to listening to sermons, our primary agenda is to be amused and entertained. Holidays have become vacations. Historically, a “holiday” was a “holy day,” an intrinsically valuable, special, active change of pace in which, through proactive play and recreation, you refresh your soul. A “vacation” is a “vacating”—even the language is passive—in order to let someone else amuse you. The passive individual is a self in search of pleasure and consumer goods provided by others. Such an individual increasingly becomes a shriveled self with less and less ability to be proactive and take control of life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24

Many factors have contributed to the emergence of passivity as an aspect of the empty self. However, in my view, television is the chief culprit, and its impact begins early life. Elementary school children watch an average of twenty-five hours of television per week, and high schoolers spend six times as many hours watching television as they invest doing homework. Studies indicate that such widespread television viewing induces mental passivity, inhibits motivation and the ability to stick to something, negatively affects reading skills (especially those needed for higher-level mental comprehension), weakens the ability to listen and stay focused, and encourages an overall passive withdrawal from life. The widespread passivity of the empty self explains the proliferation of magazines like People, of television shows like Entertainment Tonight, and of an overidentification with sports teams and figures. Passive people do not have lives of their own, so they must live vicariously through the lives of others, and celebrities become the codependent enablers of a passive lifestyle. They very idea of a Christian celebrity may be considered an oxymoron. However, for the passive, empty self, it is a spiritual life-support system. The empty self is sensate. Modern life is thoroughly mediated by electronic images. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24

Today, we may decisions and even judge what is and is not real on the basis of electronic images. If it is on TV, it is real. Advertisements sell us thing based on images, not on thoughtful content about a product. On television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to day that television gives us a conversation in images, not words. The emergence of the sensate self has produced two disastrous results. For one thing, people no longer base their decisions on a careful use of abstract reasoning in assessing the pertinent issues, nor are they as capable of doing so compared to earlier generations when thought was communicated by writing and abstract ideas, not by images. For another thing, people are coming to believe more and more that the sense-perceptible World is all there is. Cultures come in two major types: sensate and ideational. In a sensate culture people believe only in the reality of the physical Universe capable of being experienced with the five sense. A sensate culture is secular, this-Worldly, and empirical. By contrast, an ideational culture embraces the sensory World but also accept the notion that an extra-empirical, immaterial reality can be known as well—a reality consisting in God, the soul, immaterial beings, values, purposes, and various abstract objects like numbers and propositions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24

A senate culture will eventually disintegrate because it lacks the intellectual resources necessary to sustain public and private life conducive of corporate and individual human flourishing. And this is precisely what we see happening to modern American culture. The widespread emergence of the sensate self has caused us to be shallow, small-souled people. The empty self has lost the art of developing an interior life. In the medieval times, the self used to be defined in terms of internal traits of virtue and morality, and the successful person, the person of honour and reputation, was the person of deep character. In such a view, the cultivation of an interior life through intellectual reflection and spiritual formation was of critical importance. In the last few decades, however, the self has come to be defined in terms of external factors—the ability to project a pleasurable, powerful personality and the possession of consumer goods—and the quest for celebrity status, image, pleasure, ad power has become the preoccupation of a self so defined. A careful development of an inner life is simply irrelevant in such a view of the good life. The empty self is hurried and busy. The empty self is a hurried, busy self gorged with activities and noise. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24

The empty self is consumed with consumer goods, calories, experiences, politicians, romantic partners, and empathetic therapists. The empty self experiences a significant absence of community, tradition, and shared meaning, a lack of personal conviction and worth, and it embodies the absences as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger. Because the empty self has a deep emotional emptiness and hunger, and because it has devised inadequate strategies to fill that emptiness, a frenzied pace of life emerges to keep the pain and emptiness suppressed. One must jump from one activity to another and not be exposed to quiet for very long or the emptiness will become apparent. Such a lifestyle created a deep sense of fatigue in which passivity takes over. And fatigued people wither do not have the energy to read or, when they do, choose undemanding material. Shortly after noting that our capacity to think is on the decrease today, it is obvious that the modern individual is too rushed and distracted to look for something to improve one’s mind, demand an effort for oneself, or give rise to reflection, awareness, or sustained thought. Distraction and noise are enemies of an intellectual and spiritual life; focus and quiet are its friends. Americans are raging against the consequences of their own inclinations in these modern times, something was wrong with society and people’s actions to cause these outbursts. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24

The old American tradition that every individual is somehow unique is something we epitomize. And the notion that education having individual potential can be more powerful than sliver and gold. A cultivated mind will not only come up with legal ways to make money, but will also find ways to retain wealth. The concept of this potential does not all fall on the parents, but because this potential is seen as innate, partially hidden, gradually unfolding, fluid, and malleable it does help to have encouragement and guidance to access these talents. However, the parent cannot simply coerce the child into a set uniform pattern of behaviour, because it is important, given our achievement ethic, that a child realize one’s maximum potential, and this means taking into account present, anticipated, or fantasied characteristics of one’s own. This potential is thus rooted in individualism and achievement ideology. It also serves, however, as a kind of compromise between biological and environmental determinism. The parent is given not clay but some more differentiated substance with which to mold an adult. We have a need to instill a social consciousness, which is why so many people want to bring up their families in the Church. Yet, keep in mind, even the deliberate push in a given direction will not always produce the expected outcome. Still, it is better to try. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24

Actually a good part of the difficulty starts in the confusion relating to the nature and scope of one’s own experience and particularly as it is extended to the interpretations of one’s relation to others. When one is in an authoritative relation to another as expert, leader, or parent, this is especially obvious. True, good and evil exists for us in our pain and misery, joy and exaltation. Yet the thing-in-itself is not good or bad but only in its relationship. Any one thing is sometimes good and sometimes evil and only the extremely misexperienced can ultimately fail to see this. Very recently some things like love were good, others like pleasure of the flesh were bad. Yet, if one is of the other, how can this be? We admired the highly motivated but despised the over emotional yet the intense disregard of emotion is nothing but the negative aspect of high motivation. To do any one thing intensively is far that time to neglect and obviate all other values. Too often we developed pairs of names to designate the good and bad aspects of a thing separately, yet failed to realize we were but naming the same thing twice instead of the different relationships which were the actual basis of the differentiations. The epiphanous experience in and of itself is always ambivalent. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24

Only the context of the experience enables the discrimination of its relative values. The psychoanalyst has long been aware of this ambivalence and of course it has been long recognized as the “golden mean,” “tao,” or “way.” From birth, and possibly from even before, such choices are apparent and are usually mishandled by those in the dominant political (power) relationship to the developing individual. For the authority in attempting to choose for someone else sets up rules or lists by which to ease this take for oneself. No longer can one permit others the exercise of taste for obviously one’s tastes are one’s own and not the others’. An authority then, if one is to control the actions of others, must resort to standards and external sanctions. Only in this way can one maintain one’s special privilege. And yet if dynamic experience or taste is the basis of choice how mad one must be to think one can in any way choose for another. Because of one’s often superhuman sense of power and its complement of obligation one feels it is one’s responsibility, which, of course it would be if one were omniscient. Yet does not the parent think one knows better in relation to the child, the child to the dog, the teacher to the student, the lawyer to one’s client, the doctor to one’s patient, the governor to one’s people, the priest to one’s parish? #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
The superior, the expert, because it is what one knows is one’s own absolute experience is mislead to believe it is all that is to be known and so offers a rule, a list of sanctions and values. And because the recipient is likely to be unaware of such origins in the absolutes and relationships in the experience of the authority, one can only apply the rules to the thing and so probably is doubly mistaken and confused. The last statement is somewhat misleading for the submitter does not experience the list or rule of things entirely without relationships. In fact, the matter is far worse than one might suspect. The additional trouble lies in that there is always and very definitely a relationship but it is to the authority and not to the situation that the relationships is established. The concept of the “evil eye,” the authority by trying to establish an experience of relationships to some situation succeeds only in establishing it to oneself. However, when asked for what one has done this one will usually deny that was one’s intent and answer instead that one was trying for the development of independent and responsible experience in the existence of others. As such, all authority is truly made. At best the expert, the individual, who, because of more experience has some advantage, can only lead by example and guidance and not by command and instruction if both of these dilemmas are to circumvented. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24

Specific examples of this type of difficulty are extremely easy to find for they are most of our life. The mother who is anxious for the welfare of her newly born child prevents it from putting strange objects in its mouth for fear of contaminative results to the infant. She has established that habit when the time for weaning arrives and she must now cope with a child which rejects what is for it, the “bad” strange objects, its new solid food. Simultaneously this rejection of what was learned to be avoided incurs the loss of one’s mother’s affection for which the avoidance relationship has been established in the first place. One soon ceases to trust the evidence of one’s senses and in one’s turn seeks signs of eternal truth instead of reliable knowledge. Again strictures regarding pleasures of the flesh, especially for females, cause them to abhor the act for the first third of their existence but then they discover after receiving the ring that it takes the next third of existence to overcome this former set of values to what formerly was bad is now good. No wonder that so may reach the menopause thoroughly confused. The student in submitting to “basic disciplines” soon abandons thinking about the subject matter of the discipline and instead thinks primarily of how to please one’s superior, the teacher. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
And since one’s own original work is likely to be highly unbasic or individual and not in strict conformity with the “basic discipline” one to ceases to trust in one’s own experience and seeks sanctions in a white coat, collar, or particular skin colour. Yet when out of school one discovers the one must learn to choose for oneself. We can only pray one has not learned the original less too well. Of course one could continue to develop food aversions, frigidity, or slavish professionalism instead of fighting though the limitations. Such individuals are frequently comfortable in their selves even though to others they are dull and a threat to the freedom of everyone. It is possible to let the ambivalent remain bad always or good always. One can place the blame or praise elsewhere and so not have to choose now one way now another according to the relative circumstances. I just suggest that since choice is possible, and if we wish to have a democratic society with a self-choosing and responsible people, we can do much to make such choose probable. We do not have to give in to totalitarian measures. All of this has special relevance to our contemporary life and to spiritual formation under modern conditions. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24

We now live within the life form called “modernity,” where revered ritual and personal relations do not smoothly govern life, because human solidarity (in family, neighbourhood, school, workplace, church) has been pulverized. There are few things of equal significance to this fact for serious Christians to understand today. In the “modern” condition, feeling will come to exercise almost total mastery over the individual. This is because people in that condition will have to constantly decide what they want to do, and feeling will be all they have to go on. Here lies the secret to understanding contemporary Western life and its peculiar proneness to gross immoralities and addictions. People are overwhelmed with decisions and can only make those decision on the basis of feelings. More than a century ago, Leo Tolstoy experiences the effects of “modernity” in the circle of wealth, upper-class Russians who made up his World. In that World, he relates, “My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires, I should not have known what to ask.” This is exactly the World of pointless activity portrayed in such staples of the contemporary American consciousness as television shows The Good Place, The Ranch, Superstore, and New Girl. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24

In the course of events, however, Tolstoy became involved in the life of the less affluent Russians. “I saw that the whole life of these people was passed in heavy labour, and that they were content with life. And they all—endlessly different in their manners, minds, education, and position, as they were—all alike, in complete contrast to my ignorance, knew the meaning of life and death, laboured quietly, endured deprivations and sufferings, and lived and died seeing therein not vanity but good.” The less affluent whom Tolstoy admired so much were not yet swallowed up in modernity. They had solid traditions of faith and community that provided a ritual form of life—and of death. The result was that they knew what was good to do without regard to their feelings. Good was not determined for them by how they “felt” or by what they thought was “the best deal.” The same was true for the “homemaker” and the “wage-earner” of our recent past. Not to say that all was well with them or with Tolstoy’s less affluent. However, individuals in their roles knew without thinking about it what to do with their minutes, hours, and days, and only rarely were faced with having to do what they “felt like doing.” The overall order in which they lived usually gave them great strength and inner freedom derived from their sense of place and direction, even in the midst of substantial suffering and frustration. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24

In a situation such as today, by contrast, where people constantly have—only think they have—to decide what to do, they will almost invariably be governed by feelings. Often they cannot distinguish between their feelings and their will, and in their confusion they also quite commonly take feelings to be reasons. And they will in general lack any significant degree of self-control. This sill turn their life into a mere drift through the days and years, which addictive behaviour promises to allow them to endure. Self-control is the steady capacity to direct yourself to accomplish what you have chosen or decided to d and be, even though you “do not feel like it.” Self-control means that you, with steady hand, do what you do not wan to do (or what you want not to) when that is needed and do not do what you want to do (what you “feel like” doing) when that is needed. In people without rock-solid character, feeling is a deadly enemy of self-control and will always subvert it. The mongoose of a disciplined will under God and good is the only match for the cobra of feeling. “And it came to pass in the commencement of the thirty and sixth years of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi, that Shiblon took possession of those sacred thing which had been delivered unto Helaman by Alma. And he was a just man, and he did walk uprightly before God; and he did observe to do good continually, to keep the commandments of the Lord his God; and also did his brother. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
“And it came to pass that Moroni died also. And thus ended the thirty and sixth year of the reign of the judges. And it came to pass that in the thirty and seventh year of the reign of the judges, there was a large company of men, even to the amount of five thousand and four hundred men, with their wives and their children, departed out of the land of Zarahemla into the land which was northward. And it came to pass that Hagoth, he being an exceedingly curious man, therefore he went forth and built him an exceedingly large ship, on the borders of the land Bountiful, by the land Desolation, and by the narrow neck which led into the land northward. And behold, there were many of the Nephites who did enter therein and did sail forth with much provisions, and also many women and children; and they took their course northward. And thus ended the thirty and seventh year. And in the thirty and eighth year, this man built other ships. And the first ship did also return, and many more people did enter into it; and they also took much provisions, and set out again to the land northward. And it came to pass that they were never heard of more. And we suppose that they were drowned in the depth of the sea. And it came to pass that one other ship also did sail forth; and whither she did go we know not. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24

“And it came to pass that in this year there were many people who went forth into the land northward. And thus ended the thirty and eight years. And it came to pass in the thirty and ninth year of the reign of the judges, Shiblon died also, and Corianton had gone forth to the land northward in a ship, to carry forth provisions unto the people who had gone forth into that land. Therefore it became expedient for Shiblon to confer those sacred things, before his death, upon the son of Helaman, who was called Helaman, being called after the name of his father. Now behold, all those engravings which were in the possession of Helaman were written and sent forth among the children of humans throughout all the land, save it were those parts which had been commanded by Alma should not go forth. Nevertheless, these things were made to be kept sacred, and handed down from one generation to another; therefore, in this year, they had been conferred upon Helaman, before the death of Shiblon. And it came to pass also in this year there were some dissenters who had gone forth unto the Lamanites; and they were stirred up again to anger against the Nephites. And also in this same year they came down with a numerous army to war against the people of Moronihah, or against the army of Moronihah, in which theu were beaten and driven back again t their own lands, suffering great loss. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24

“And thus ended the thirty and ninth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi. And thus ended the account of Alma, and Helaman his son, and also Shiblon, who was his son,” reports Alma 63.1-17. Ruling the storm, He comes in the night, losing his axe again and again. The Bull of Storms comes bellowing, scattering seed over the Earth. A strong king He is, spreading fire and water as He rampages. In His wake he will leave fertile ground. Grant that we lie down in peace, secure in Thy protecting love, and shelter us beneath Thy wings to keep us safe throughout the night. On the morrow raise us up in perfect peace to life, O God, to face each task with faith in Thee, our zeal renewed and strength restored. Please save us for Thine own name’s sake, and guard us from all lurking foes. Remove all sorrow, hatred, strife, and turn Thy children’s hearts to Thee. Spread Thy tent of peace, O Lord, above Earth, we pray, and shield Thy people Israel, dispersed aboard in every land. Praised be Thou, our Lord and King, Whose sheltering love spreads over us, enfolding all who seek Thy peace, who find their hope and strength in Thee. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the Word which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of Earth, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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You Always Hold Your Loved One in Your Heart, but You Must Let Go of Your Grief!

We have probed the Earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried things in it….That does not fit my definition of a good tenant. If we were here on a month-to-moth bases, we would have been evicted long ago, and perhaps that is what is going on with COVID-19. Perhaps the Earth is tired of being abused. After 96 percent of wildfires are caused by humans. Reentering America, one is struck first of all by the grim monotony of American facial expressions—hard, surly, and bitter—and by the aura of deprivation that informs them. One goes abroad forewarned against exploitation by grasping foreigners, but nothing is done to prepare the returning traveler for the fanatical acquisitiveness of one’s compatriots. It is difficult to become reaccustomed to seeing people already weighted down with possession acting as if every object they did not own were bread withheld from a hungry mouth. These perceptions are heightened by the contrast between the sullen faces of real people and the vision of happiness television offers: men and women ecstatically engaged in stereotyped symbols of fun—running through fields, strolling on beaches, dancing and singing. Smiling faces with chronically open mouths express their gratification with the manifold bounties offered by the culture. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24

One begins to feel there is a sever gap between the fantasies Americans life by and the realities they live in. Americans know from an early age how they are supposed to look when happy and what they are supposed to do or buy to be happy. However, for some reason their fantasies are unrealizable and leave them disappointed and embittered. The traveler’s antennae disappear after a time. These impressions fade, and reentry process is gradually effected. American once again seem familiar, comfortable, ordinary. Yet some uneasiness lingers on, for the society seems troubled and self-preoccupied—as if suddenly large numbers of America were scrutinizing their own society with the doubtful eyes of a traveler. One of the functions of a society is to make its inhabitants feel safe, and American devote more of their collective resources to security than to any other need. They build McMansions in gated communities, have cameras inside and outside the home, every member of the family has a mobile phone and every kind of insure you can dream of. Some people even go as far as buying armored (bullet proof) Ultimate Driving Machines. Yet American still think they need more safety because of shotguns in the close, nuclear bombers patrolling overhead, and the fiction the passes as news. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24

With each decade we seem to accumulate more fears, and most of these fears seem to be about each other. In the fifties we were afraid of native Communists, and although we now feel sheepish about that moment of panic, today we express the same kind of fears about the mainstream media and the political party; and in our reactions to all of these fears we have created some very real dangers. Our intense fears make many people believe their race, way of life, religion, wealth, family, home and country are in danger of total extinction. During this COVID-19 crisis, many people have seriously become fearful of a World War III. Given this lack of concern for an overwhelming threat, how can we account for the exaggerated fear of climate change? From Dr. Freud we learned long ago to suspect, when a fear seems out of proportion, that is has been bloated by a wish; and this seems particularly likely when the danger is defined as a psychological one—an evil influence. The truth about climate change is if we want to save the World, we need to stop destroying forests and rain forests. We fear storms and wild beasts, but we do not censor them. If we must guard ourselves against evil influences we there by admit to their seductive appeal. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24

Thus the McCarthy era reached its peak after the discovery that a few Americans has responded to “brainwashing” efforts, and the fear of conversion to Communism was quite explicit in public statements and popular surveys. One survey respondent, for example, made the revealing statement that “so many people in America are eager like those soldiers of ours in Korea to fall into the traps set by Communist propaganda.” The anticommunism of that period and its institutional residues have served as a kind of political fig leaf. The same emphasis surrounds of fears of radicalism today. The political party, peace demonstrations, militance, dens, and student protests are disturbing not only because they provide a serious physical danger (say the equivalent of walking through a street gang wearing the wrong colour), but also because we fear having our secret doubts about the viability of our social system voiced aloud. It is not what happens abroad that generates hysteria, but rather what appears to be happening within ourselves. This is why force must be used against the expression of certain ideas—if the ideas pluck a responsive chord counterarguments are difficult to remember, and one must fall back on clubs and tear gas. However, what is the nature of the attraction exerted by radical ideas on unwilling conservatives? #RandolphHarris 4 of 24

We know something about the hopes that tige the old maid’s search for a ravisher under her bed, but we need to understand better the seductive impact that informs our enraged fascination with the revolutionary currents of American society. Since the very form of this question rests on certain assumptions about culture and personality, however, let me first makes these explicit. The emotional repertory of human beings is limited and standard. When caressed, we are built to feel warm, happy, and content, when frustrated feel angry, when attacked feel frightened, when insulted feel offended, when excluded jealous, and so on. However, every culture holds some of these human reactions to be unacceptable and attempts to warp its participants int some peculiar specialization. Since human beings are malleable within limits, the warping is for the most part successfully achieved, so that some learn not to laugh, some not to cry, some not to love, and some not to hate in situations in which these reactions might appropriately be expressed. This cultural warping of human emotionality is eased by compartmentalization: there are special times and places and situations where the disparaged responses are permitted, or classes of people who can provide vicarious satisfaction through conspicuous performance of some kind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24

Yet there are always a few of these responses with which every society and every individual has trouble. They must be shouted down continually, although they are usually visible to the outsider. Thus although the Germans, for example, have always placed great stress on order, precision, and obedience to authority, they periodically explode into revolutionary chaos and are driven by romantic Gotterdammerung fantasies. In the same way there is a cooperative underside to competitive America, a rich spoofing tradition in ceremonious England, an elaborate pornography in all prudish societies, and so on. Rather than saying Germans are obedient or Anglo-Saxon societies stuffy or puritanical, it is more correct to day that Germans are preoccupied with issues of authority, Anglo-Saxons with the control of emotional and pleasures of the flesh expression, and so forth. Those issues about which members of a given society seem to feel strongly all reveal a conflict one side of which is strongly emphasized, the other side as strongly (but not quite successfully) suppressed. These opposing forces are much more equally balanced than the society’s participants like to recognize—were this not true there would be no need for suppression. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24

Life would indeed be much less frantic if we were all able to recognize the diversity of responses and feelings within ourselves, and could abandon our somewhat futile efforts to present a monolithic self-portrait to the World. Probably some exaggeration of uniformity is necessary, however, in order for us to act at all, or at least with enough consistency to permit smooth social functioning. On the individual level the delicate balance reveals itself though conversion. An individual who “converts” from one orientation to its exact opposite appears to oneself and others to have made a gross change, but actually it involves only a very small shift in the balance of a focal and persistent conflict. Just as only one percent of the voting population is needed to reserves the results of an American election, so only one percent of an individual’s internal “constituencies” need shift in order to transform one from voluptuary to ascetic, from police officer to criminal, from Communist to anticommunist, or whatever. The opposite sides are as evenly matched before, and the apparent change merely represents the desperate efforts made by the internal “majority” to consolidate its shaky position of dominance. The individual must expend just as much energy shouting down the new “minority” as one did the old; some of the most dedicated witch hunters of the 1950’s, for example, were ex-Communist. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24

So the reason there is so much division in America right now is because the majority is now becoming the minority, as the demographics change. On the society levels there are more outlets from the expression of “minority” themes and sentiments, and reversals of emphasis involve more overlap between the opposing trends. The United States of America, for example, traditionally one of the most prudish societies in the World, has long displayed, in a somewhat warped and mechanical way, the greatest profusion of stimuli involving pleasures of the flesh. These considerations suggest that the fear of radical movements in America derives much of its intensity from the attraction that such movements have for their opponents—an attraction that must be stifled. However, what is it? What is so severely lacking in our society that the assertion of an alternative life style throws so many Americans into panic and rage? I would like to suggest three human desires that are deeply and uniquely frustrated by American culture: The desire for community—the wish to live in trust and fraternal cooperation with one’s fellows in a total and visible collective eternity. The desire for engagement—the wish to come directly to grips with social and interpersonal problems and to confront on equal terms an environment which is not composed of ego extensions is another human desire that is deeply and uniquely frustrated by American culture. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24

The third is the desire for dependence—the wish to share responsibility for the control of one’s impulses and the direction of one’s life. When I say that these three desires are frustrated by American culture, this need not conjure up romantic images of individual struggling against society. In every case it is fair to say that we participate eagerly in producing the frustration we endure—it is not something merely done t us. For these desires are in each case subordinate to their opposites in that vague entity called the American Character. Americans have voluntarily created and voluntarily maintained a society which increasingly frustrates and aggravate these secondary yearnings, to the point where they threaten to become primary. Groups that in any way personify this threat are therefore feared in an exaggerated way, and will be until Americans as a group are able to recognize and accept those needs within themselves. “Thus says the Lord Who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters. Remember not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing, even now it is springing to light. Do you not perceive it? A way will I make in the wilderness and rivers in the desert!” (Isaiah 43.16, 18-19.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 24

Most of the conditions we commonly speak of as feelings are really not feelings at all; but the feeling tones or sensations that accompany those conditions are so powerful that the conditions themselves become identified with the associated sensations. This is true love and hatred or contempt, for example, but also with hurry and peace and with self-esteem and discouragement. Now, there are some extremely serious dangers here. When we confuse the condition with the accompanying feeling—peace, for example, with the feeling of peacefulness—we very likely will try to manage the feelings and disregard or deny the reality of the conditions. That way lie such things as “falling in love with love” and most of all the well-known addictions. The person who primarily wants the feeling of being loved or being “in love” will be incapable of sustaining loving relationships, whether with God or with other humans. And the person who wants the feeling of peacefulness will be unable to do the things that make for peace—especially, doing what is right and confronting evil. So, as far as our planning for spiritual formation is concerned, we must choose and act with regard to the condition, good or bad, and allow the feelings to take care of themselves, as they certainly will. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24

In particular, we must never directly cherish, protect, or manipulate feelings, whether in ourselves or others. When negative feelings have themselves become so overwhelming that they threaten to take over our lives, this is the only exception to this rule. Then we must take steps to remove the negative feeling (grief or pain, for example). Prayer or even medication for such feelings is then wise. However, even so, the focus on the feeling must not be allowed to prevent our dealing, when and as we can, with the conditions from which that feelings arises. A well-known minister, after his wife passed away, said he had learned that there is a difference between turning loose your loved one and turning loose your grief. You always hold your loved one in your heart, but you must let go of your grief. So far as possible, we must always away from painful and destructive feelings. Simply that. Walk away. “Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers. On the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, so that I had to reject them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24

However, this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them and write it in their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be my people for I will forgive their guilt and I will remember their sins no more,” reports Jeremiah 31.31-34. Charles Darwin. Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) has offered a model of emotion for various other theorists and researchers. Darwin focuses on emotive expressions—that is, on visible gestures—and not on the subjective meanings associated with them. These gestures, he posits, were acquired during a prehistoric period and have survived as “serviceable associated habits.” Originally linked to actions these emotive gestures become actions manque. The emotion of love, for example, is the vestige of what was once a direct act of copulation. The baring of teeth in rage is a vestige of the once immediate act of biting. The expression of disgust is the vestige of what was once the immediate act of regurgitating a noxious thing. For Darwin, there is no emotion without gesture although there may be gesture without action. (The says the Lord God: ) “I will give them a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within them. I will remove their heart of stone and will give them a heart of flesh,” reports Ezekiel 11.19. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24

Darwin’s theory of emotion, then, is a theory of gesture. The question for later students thus became: are emotive gestures universal or are they culturally specific? Darwin’s own general conclusion was that they were universal. Darwin distinguished between facial expressions of emotion that are innate and universal and facial gestures (not necessarily of emotion) that are learned and thus culturally variable. He devised a sixteen-item questionnaire and sent it to thirty-six missionaries and others who had lived in non-Western societies. One question was: “Can a dogged or obstinate expression be recognized, which is chiefly shown by the mouth being firmly closed, a lowering brow, and a slight frown?” Based on his returned questionnaires, Darwin concluded that “the chief expressive actions” of human beings were innate and therefore universal. Despite his generally universalist interpretations, however, Darwin concluded that some nonverbal behaviours (such as weeping, kissing, nodding, and shaking the head in affirmation and negation) were not universal but culture-specific and “learned like the words of a language.” However, the debate has been carried forward by those who argue that emotional expressions are probably innate, and those who argue that they are modeled on language and therefore culturally variable. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24

What is missing from both sides of this debate is what was missing in Darwin’s theory from the beginning: a conception of emotion as subjective experience and a more subtle and complex notion of how social factor impinge. Humans compete with each other for control of the ritual apparatus, which is a powerful tool for commanding people by controlling their emotions. The ego is a mediator between the id (drive) and conscious expression. Affects are seen as signals of impending danger (from inside or outside) and as an impetus to action. The ego is assigned the capacity to postpone id drives, to neutralize or bind them. One emotion—anxiety—is the model for all others because it is more important due to the unpleasantness of anxiety which leads to the development of various ego defenses against unpleasantness. As analysts we recognize that anxiety occupies a special position in mental life. It is the motive for defense. Defenses serve the purpose of minimizing, or, if possible, preventing the development of anxiety. Anxiety was initially defined in a way that bypasses the ego: anxiety is the reaction to an influx of stimuli which is too great for the mental apparatus to master or discharge. (Thus says the Lord God: ) “I ignore the troubles of the past. I shut mine eyes to them. For, behold, I create new Heavens and a new Earth. The past shall be forgotten and never come to mind. Humans shall rejoice forever in what I now create,” reports Isaiah 65.16, 17. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24

So we see that God is a worker and that humans, created in God’s image, is a worker and that work is good. However, then come the Fall and the Curse. “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return,” Genesis 3.17-19. The Curse made nature uncooperative, so that work became painful toil and humans had to sweat for a living. Today our working conditions vary. Some sweat more than others. We may be in a better position than some. However, the norm for the World is “painful toil.” Even more, the normal experience of humankind is one’s labour is a malaise of futility. The writer of Ecclesiastes gave this universal expression as he bemoaned his plight from the perspective of one who leaves God out of his life. In 2.4-10 he describes his professional success in acquiring vineyards and gardens and parks and enslaved humans and flocks and treasures. He was greater than all his contemporaries. He was denied nothing his eyes desired. However, he concluded in verse 11, “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing gained under the Sun.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 24

And he reiterates in verse 17, “So I hated life, because the work that is done under the Sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the win.” Humans and others, this is as far as work will take you apart from God. You will engaged in it because, though fallen, you are in the image of God and because work is part of the natural order, and it will produce its benefits and satisfactions—but it will also be toil, and its joys will be ephemeral. Studs Terkel has revealed what has always been true under the Sun when God is left out. “And now it came to pass that Moroni did not stop making preparations for war, or to defend his people against the Lamanites; for he caused that his armies should commence in the commencement of the twentieth year of the reign of the judges, that they should commence in digging up heaps of Earth round about all the cities, throughout all the land which was possessed by the Nephites. And upon the top of these ridges of Earth he caused that there should be timers, yea, works of timbers built up to the height of a human, round about the cities. And he caused that upon those works of timbers there should be a frame of pickets built upon the timbers round about; and they were strong and high. And he caused towers to be erected that overlooked those works of pickets, and he caused places of security to be built upon those towers, that the stones and the arrows of the Lamanites could not hurt them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24

“And they were prepared that they could cast stones from the top thereof, according to their pleasure and their strength, and slay one who should attempt to approach near he walls of the city. Thus Moroni did prepare strongholds against the coming of their enemies, round about every city in all the land. And it came to pass that Moroni caused that his armies should go forth into the east wilderness; yea, and they went forth and drove all he Lamanites who were in the east wilderness into their own lands, which were south of the land of Zarahemla. And the land of Nephi did run in a straight course from the east sea to the west. And it came to pass that when Moroni had driven all the Lamanites out of the east wilderness which was north of the lands of their own possessions, he caused that the inhabitants who were in the land of Zarahemla and in the land round about should go forth into the east wilderness, even to the borders by the seashore, and possess the land. And he also placed armies on the south, in the borders of their possessions, and caused them to erect fortifications that they might secure their armies and their people from the hands of their enemies. And thus he cut off all the strongholds of the Lamanites in the East wilderness, yea, and also on the west, fortifying the line between the land of Zarahemla and the land of Nephi, from the west sea, running by the head of the river of Sidon—the Nephites possessing all the land northward, yea, even all the land which was northward of the land Bountiful according to their pleasure. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24

“Thus Moroni, with his armies, which did increase daily because of the assurance of protection which his works did bring forth unto them, did seek to cut off the strength and the power of the Lamanites from off the lands of their possession, that they should have no power upon the lands of their possession. And it came to pass that the Nephites began the foundation of a city, and they called the nae of the city Moroni; and it was by the east sea; and it was on the south by the line of the possessions of the Lamanites. And they also began a foundation for a city between the city of Moroni and the city of Aaron, joining he borders of Aaron and Moroni; and they called the name of the city, or the land, Nephihah. And they also began in that same year to build many cities on the north, one in a particular manner which they called Lehi, which was in the north by the borders of the seashore. And thus ended the twentieth year. And in these prosperous circumstances were the people of Nephi in the commencement of the twenty and first year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi. And they did prosper exceedingly, and they became exceedingly rich; yea, and they did multiply and wax strong in the land. And thus we see how merciful and jus are all the dealings of the Lord, to the fulfilling of all his words unto the children of humans; yea, we can behold that his words are verified, even at this time, which he spake unto Lehi, saying: #RandolphHarris 18 of 24

“Blessed art thou and thy children; and they shall be blessed, inasmuch as they shall keep my commandments they shall prosper in the land. However, remember, inasmuch as they will not keep my commandments they shall prosper in the land. However, remember, inasmuch as they will not keep my commandments they shall be cut off from the presence of the Lord. And we see that these promises have been verified to the people of Nephi; for it has been their quarrelings and their contentions, yea, their murderings, and their plunderings, their idolatry, their whoredoms, and their abominations, which were among themselves, which brought them their wars and their destructions. And those who were faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord were delivered at all times, whilst thousands of their wicked brethren have been consigned to bondage, or to perish by the sword, or to dwindle in unbelief, and mingle with the Lamanites. However, behold, there was never a happier time among the people of Nephi, since the days of Nephi, than in the days of Moroni, yea, even at this time, in the twenty and first year of the reign of the judges. And it came to pass that the twenty and second year of the reign of the judges also ended in peace; yea, and also the twenty and third year. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24

“And it came to pass that in the commencement of the twenty and fourth year of the reign of the judges, there would also have been peace among the people of Nephi had it not been for a contention which took place among them concerning the land of Lehi, and the land of Morianton, which joined upon the borders of Lehi; both of which were on the borders by the seashore. For behold, the people who possessed the land of Morianton did claim a part of the land of Lehi; therefore there began to be a warm contention between them, insomuch that the people of Morianton took up arms against their brethren, and they were determined by the sword to slay them. However, behold, the people who possessed the land of Lehi fled to the camp of Moroni, and appealed unto him for assistance; for behold they were not in the wrong. And it came to pass that when the people of Morianton, who were led by a man whose name was Morianton, found that the people of Lehi had fled to the camp of Moroni they were exceedingly fearful lest the army of Moroni should come upon them and destroy them. Therefore, Morianton put it into their hearts that they should flee to the land which was northward, which was covered with large bodies of water, and take possession of the land which was northward. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24

“And behold, they would have carried this plan into effect, (which would have been a cause to have been lamented) but behold, Morianton being a man of much passion, therefore he was angry with one of his maid servants, and he fell upon her and beat her much. And it came to pass that she fled, and came over to the camp of Moroni, and told Moroni all things concerning the matter, and also concerning their intentions to flee into the land northward. Now behold, the people who were in the land Bountiful, or rather Moroni, feared that they would hearken to the words of Morianton and unite with his people, and thus he would obtain possession of those parts of the land, which would lay a foundation for serious consequences among the people of Nephi, yea, which consequences would lead to the overthrow of their liberty. Therefore Moroni sent an army, with their camp, to head the people of Morianton, to stop their flight into the land northward. And it came to pass that they did not head them until they had come to the borders of the land Desolation; and there they did head them, by the narrow pass which led by the sea into the land northward, yea, by the sea, on the west and on the east. And it came to pass that the army which was sent by Moroni, which was led by a man whose name was Teancum did meet the people of Morianton. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24

And when Teancu met the people of Morianton, so stubborn were the people of Morianton, (being inspired by wickedness and his flattering words) that a battle commenced between them, in which Teancum did slay Morianton and defeat his army, and took them prisoners, and returned to the camp of Moroni. And thus ended the twenty and fourth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi. And thus were the people of Morianton brought back. And upon their covenanting to keep the peace they were restored to the land of Morianton, and a union took place between them and the people of Lehi; and they were also restored to their lands. And it came to pass that in the same year that the people of Nephi had peace restored unto them, that Nephihah, the second chief judge, died, having filled the judgment seat with perfect uprightness before God. Nevertheless, he had refused Alma to take possession of those records and those things which were esteemed by Alma and his fathers to be most sacred; therefore Alma had conferred them upon his son, Helaman. Behold, it came to pass that the son of Nephihah, Pahoran, was appointed to fill the judgment-seat, in the stead of his father; yea, he was appointed chief judge and governor over the people, with an oath and sacred ordinance to judge righteously, and to keep the peace and the freedom of the people. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24

Pahoran also had the power to grant unto them their sacred privileges to worship the Lord their God, yea, to support and maintain the cause of God all his days, and to bring the wicked to justice according to their crime. And Pahoran did fill the seat of his father, and did commence his reign in the end of the twenty and fourth year, over the people of Nephi,” Alma 50.1-40. Wonder and awe, as I sit in your presence, you who sit in the gateway, in this World and in the other, mediating the power that shines through, letting pass what I need, and what I can use, holding back in mercy what I cannot. Seen against the brightness, your dark silhouette is still and sharp and clear. Sitting fiercely, with perfect intent, pure in your purpose, source of terror and comfort. A roaring fire, you sit in my heart’s center. A rampaging bull, you tear through my soul. A searing bolt, you cut through my life. A skirring arrow, you slice me in two. A standing stone, you are my anchor. The Lord reigneth while the people stand in awe; He is enthroned upon His judgment seat, while the Earth trembles. The Lord is mighty in Zion; He is exalted over all peoples. They praise His name: “God is great and revered, is holy.” Mighty King who loveth justice, Thou hast established equity; Justice and righteousness hast Thou wrought in Jacob. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24

A tall-standing cypress tree is our God, supporting the Worlds on his limbs, each World ordered according to the spreading of His branches. Into each World, His twigs extend, bearing the leaves and birds that are our lives. From what source is the tree nourished? Where do its roots extend? Deep within the void they reach and are fed there from the substance of the Goddess. He makes known her will, giving it form, from which we might know it and live according to its pattern. Shaper and essence, open my eyes, open my ears, open my heart, that I might perceive the sacred pattern and conform my life to it. The goddess is the one who is Lady of all, and she is the one of whom I would speak, the one who gives birth and the one who brings death, beginning and end of the course of our lives. God is the Lord Almighty. Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at His footstool, declaring: “Holy is He!” Moses and Aaron were among His priests; Samuel was among those that called upon His name, calling upon the Lord and being answered. He would speak unto them out of a pillar of cloud; they kept His testimonies and the laws He gave them. Thou, O Lord, didst answer them; Thou wast a forgiving God unto them, through punishing them for their evil. Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at His holy mountain; for the Lord our God is holy. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24

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Waiting for the Angel to Stir the Water, I Realized I am Almost a God the Creator—The World I See is My World!
The faces of the past are like leaves that settle to the ground, they may the Earth rich and thick, so that new fruit will come forth every Summer. Radio and television have contributed greatly to the demise of the art of conversation. Scientist have attempted to pin down the difference between the effects of radio and television and have not as yet been able to turn up any solid results. It seems to me that neither radio nor television is an agent of dialogue. They work indirectly. In both of them there is someone on the giving end and someone on the receiving end. There can be no contradictions, no back talk. When the radio or TV is turned on, conversation stops. Radio and TV can create the impression of conversation, but they cannot really make it come about. That, I think, is a privilege reserved for living human beings. The crucial issue is whether radio and television invite us, stimulate us, challenge us to converse or whether they are inimical to the conditions that make conversation possible. However, in that regard radio seems less harmful to me than television. Television encourages passivity, a comfortable consumer mentality, more than any other medium. It is the most successful means we have ever developed to help us “pass time.” However, real conversation demands time. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
If we pass our time and kill our time, conversation cannot flourish. Radio, if I am seeing things rig, does not exert so strong an attraction. It promotes and demands more alertness, more imagination. It could be, if it wanted to be, an inexhaustible source of material for conversation. It cannot offer conversation itself, but it can offer the stuff of conversation. It can point us toward other, more basic and direct means of communication, calling our attention, say, to the uniqueness and delight of face-to-face conversation. In many cases, when people turn on the radio, they are still free. However, when an individual turns on the TV and there is a program that interests them, they become addicted to them and do not want to move from in front of the screen. With the assistance of radio technology, one can listen to a conversation somewhat in the same way that they listen to someone else speaking on the telephone, and to be honest, it can be much better than the gibberish and chatter coming out of most people’s mouths because there is a topic that is meant to keep people interested. What we hear on the radio is not, of course, as personal as a telephone conversation, but we take both the telephone and radio in stride. We are not fascinated by them, and so I can truly say that we are free either to listen to the radio or not listen to it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
My reaction to television is quite different. With television I lose a bit of my freedom. The minute the set is turned on and I see the picture on it, I experience what I would hesitate to call a compulsion but what is certainly a strong impulse or inclination to watch, even if I know intellectually that the program is utter drivel. I do not means to say that everything on television is drivel, some of it is very fascinating and highlights lifestyles we may be interested in, or inform of about myths we what to know about, some people even use television shows like a book club and discuss them so they forego sin by gossiping about real life people. People feel drawn to watch TV because it transports them to other realities they want to explore. Television holds a fascination far greater than that of radio. It exerts a kind of psychological spell that cannot be explained in terms of the content of any particular program. I have often asked myself what this fascination is, and I think it is rooted in some very profound level of our nature: By merely pressing a button, we can summon another World into our living rooms. That appeals to profound magical instincts. With television I become a kind of god. I can get rid of the reality I actually live with, and in its place I can create a new reality that appears when I press the button. #RandolpHarris 3 of 23
I am almost God the Creator. The World I see is my World. That reminds me of a story that not only illustrates this point vividly but also has the advantage of being true. A father and his six-year-old son were riding in the family car on a rainy, stormy day. They had a flat tire and had to stop to change it. Given the weather, that was a thoroughly unpleasant task, and the boy said to his father, “Daddy, can we not change to a different channel?” that is the way the child saw the World. If this one does not suit me, I will switch to another one. My wife recently read a novel by a Polish author and then told me a story, which I found utterly intriguing. The novel tells about the son of a very wealthy and eccentric man. The body grows up in his parental house but in total isolation. All he has available to him is a television set. He leaves it on all day, and he thinks that what he sees on it is reality (acute television intoxication). The young man never says a word, cannot say a word, because he knows nothing. All he can do is watch, because for him the World is nothing but a television show. However, precisely because he says nothing and because he eventually winds up in the house of one of the most powerful men in America, people think he must be terribly important. Pretty soon everyone knows his name, and in the end he is nominated for president because he never says anything and has not any opinions at all. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
This story illustrates just what I have been talking about. Reality and what we see in television have become one, and I think that this experience of being able to press a button and makes another World become a reality is—as you have said—a profound, atavistic experience and one that we find incredibly seductive. That is why television has no need, as it were, to offer anything “good.” Its appeal lies in the very nature of the medium. People are drawn to it the way they are to shooting star or to any other exciting spectacle—where they can remain spectators and are in no way prepared to take any action themselves. The flip side of this illusion of power (that can be had by pressing a button) is, then, total passivity. With radio, the possibility still remains that listening can be a kind of response, a predisposition to activity that should not be confused with merely waiting for enlightenment. Television has brought about drastic changes in our listening habits. Now that television has gotten people of the habit of attending to anything fully and closely, we can no longer assume that we have our listeners’ attention. Television has reduced radio to a more modest role. Indeed, radio hardly qualifies as a mass medium any more—a situation for which we should perhaps be grateful. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Should not radio therefore be defining new tasks for itself that will take into account these differences we have been discussing here? I know that South German Radio has offered an extensive series of programs covering subjects ordinarily treated in university courses. The language has been somewhat simpler perhaps, but that is all to the good. (If instructors used simpler language to convey more content, it would be an improvement in our university courses.) This, it seems to me, is an admirable task for radio and one in which it can fill a significant educational role. It is remarkable with how little concentration people think, live, and work these days. Work is so fragmented and shattered that concentration is usually only mechanical and partial. We rarely encounter that full concentration that involves the whole person. A worker on an assembly line who has to tighten the same screw over and over again needs a certain kind of concentration is usually only mechanical and partial. We rarely encounter that full concentration that involves the whole person. A worker on an assembly line who has to tighten the same screw over and over again needs a certain kind of concentration to keep up one’s pace, but this type of concentration is capable of listening without one’s thoughts wandering off; one will not try to do five things at once because one cannot find any one thing that really satisfies one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
And, of course, without concentration we cannot accomplish anything. Everything we do without concentration will have little value. If concentration is lacking, our activities will not provide us or anyone else with satisfaction. That holds true for all of us, not just for great artist or scientist. I now turn to the notion of reflective equilibrium. The need for this idea arises as follows. According to the provisional aim of mortal philosophy, one might says that justice as fairness is the hypothesis that the principles which would be chosen in the original position are identical with those that match our considered judgments and so these principles describe our sense of justice. However, this interpretation is clearly oversimplified. In describing our sense of justice an allowance must be made for the likelihood that considered judgments are no doubt subject to certain irregularities and distortions despite the fact that they are rendered under favourable circumstances. When a person is presented with an intuitively appealing account of one’s sense of justice (one, say, which embodies various reasonable and natural presumptions), one may well revise one’s judgments to conform to its principles even though the theory does not fit one’s existing judgments exactly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
One is especially likely to do this if one can find an explanation for the deviations which undermines one’s confidence in one’s original judgments and if the conception presented yields a judgment which one finds one can now accept. From the standpoint of moral philosophy, the best account of a person’s sense of justice is not the one which fits one’s judgments prior to one’s examining any conception of justice, but rather the one which matches one’s judgments in reflective equilibrium. As we have seen, this state is one reached after a person has weighed various proposed conceptions and one has either revised one’s judgments to accord with one of them or held fast to one’s initial convictions (and the corresponding conception). The notion of reflective equilibrium introduces some complications that call for comment. For one thing, it is a notion characteristic of the study of principles which govern actions shaped by self-examination. Moral philosophy is Socratic: we may wan to change our present considered judgments once their regulative principles are brought to light. And we may want to do this even though these principles are a perfect fit. A knowledge of these principles may suggest further reflections that lead us to revise our judgments. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
This feature is not peculiar though to moral philosophy, or to the study of other philosophical principles such as those of induction and scientific method. For example, while we may not expect a substantial revision of our sense of correct grammar in view of a linguistic theory the principles of which seem especially natural to us, such as change is not inconceivable, and no doubt our sense of grammaticalness may be affected to some degree anyway by this knowledge. However, these is a contrast, say, with physics. To take an extreme case, if we have an accurate account of motions of the Heavenly bodies that we do not find appealing, we cannot alter these motions to conform to a more attractive theory. It is simply good fortune that the principles of celestial mechanics have their intellectual beauty. There are, however, several interpretations of reflective equilibrium. For the nation varies depending upon whether one is to be presented with only those descriptions which more or less match one’s existing judgments except for minor discrepancies, or whether one is to be presented with all possible descriptions to which one might plausibly conform one’s judgements together with all relevant philosophical arguments for them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
In the first case we would be describing a person’s sense of justice more or less as it is although allowing for the smoothing out of certain irregularities; in the second case a person’s sense of justice may or may not undergo a radical shift. Clearly it is the second kind of reflective equilibrium that one is concerned with in moral philosophy. To be sure, it is doubtful where one can ever reach this state. For even if the idea of all possible descriptions and of all philosophically relevant arguments is well-defined (which is a questionable one), we cannot examine each of them. The most we can do is to study the conceptions of justice known to us through the tradition of moral philosophy and any further ones that occur to us, and then to consider these. This is pretty much what I shall do, since in presenting justice as fairness I shall compare its principles and arguments with a few other familiar views. In light of these remarks, justice as fairness can be understood as saying that the two principles previously mentioned would be chosen in the original position in preference to other traditional conceptions of justice, for example, those of utility and perfection; and that these principles give a better match with our considered judgments on reflection than these recognized alternatives. Thus justice as fairness moves us closer to the philosophical ideal; it does not, of course, achieve it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
This explanation of reflective equilibrium suggests straightway a number of further questions. For example, does a reflective equilibrium (in the sense of the philosophical ideal) exist? If s, is it unique? Even if it is unique, can it be reached? Perhaps the judgments from which we begin, or the course of reflection itself (or both), affect the resting point, if any, that we eventually achieve. It would be useless, however, to speculate about these matters here. They are far beyond our reach. I shall not even ask whether the principles that characterize one person’s considered judgments are the same as those that characterize another’s. I shall take for granted that these principles are either approximately the same for persons whose judgments are in reflective equilibrium, or if not, that their judgments divide along a few lines represented by the family of traditional doctrines that I shall discuss. (Indeed, one person may find oneself torn between opposing conceptions at the same time.) If human’s conceptions of justice finally turn out to differ, the ways in which they do is a matter of first importance. Of course we cannot know how these conceptions vary, or even whether they do, until we have a better account of their structure. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
And this we now lack, even in the case of one human, or homogeneous group of humans. Here too there is likely to be a similarity with linguistics: if we can describe one person’s sense of grammar we shall surely know many things about the general structure of language. Similarly, if we should be able to characterize one (educated) person’s sense of justice, we would have a good beginning toward a theory of justice. We may suppose that everyone has in oneself the whole form of a moral conception. So for the purposes of this essay, the views of the reader and the author are the only ones that count. The opinions of others are useful only to clear our own heads. I wish to stress that a theory of justice is precisely that, namely, theory. It is a theory of the moral sentiments (to recall an eighteenth-century title) setting out the principles governing our moral powers, or, more specifically, our sense of justice. These is a definite if limited class of facts against which conjectured principles can be checked, namely, our considered judgments in reflective equilibrium. A theory of justice is subject to the same rules of method as other theories. Definitions and analyses of meaning do not have a special place: definition is but one device used in setting up the general structure of theory. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Once the whole framework is worked out, definitions have no distinct status and stand or fall with the theory itself. In any case, it is obviously impossible to develop a substantive theory of justice founded solely on truths of logic and definition. The analysis of moral concepts and the a priori, however traditionally understood, is too slender a basis. Moral philosophy must be free to use contingent assumptions and general facts as it pleases. There is no other way to give an account of our considered judgments in reflective equilibrium. This is the conception of the subject adopted by most classical British writers through Sidgwick. I see no reason to depart from it. I believe that his view goes back in its essentials to Aristotle’s procedure in the Nicomachean Ethics. And Sidgwick thought of the history of moral philosophy as a series of attempts to state in full breadth and clearness those primary intuitions of Reason, by the scientific application of which the common moral thought of humankind may be at once systematized and corrected. He takes for granted that philosophical reflection will lead to revisions in our considered judgments, and although there are elements of epistemological intuitionism in his doctrine, these are not given much weight when unsupported by systematic considerations. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Moreover, if we can find an accurate account of our moral conceptions, then questions of meaning and justification may prove much easier to answer. Indeed some of them may no longer be real questions at all. Note, for example, the extraordinary deepening of our understanding of the meaning and justification of statements in logical and mathematics made possible by developments since Frege and Cantor. A knowledge of the fundamental structures of logic ad set theory and their relation to mathematics has transformed the philosophy of these subjects in a way that conceptual analysis and linguistic investigations never could. One has only to observe the effect of the division of theories into those which are decidable and complete, undecidable yet complete, and neither complete no decidable. The problem of meaning and truth in logic and mathematics is profoundly altered by the discovery of logical systems illustrating these concepts. Once the substantive content of moral conceptions is better understood, a similar transformation may occur. It is possible that convincing answers to questions of the meaning of justification or moral judgments can be found in no other way. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
I wish, then, to stress the central place of the study of out substantive moral conceptions. However, the corollary to recognizing their complexity is accepting the fact that our present theories are primitive and have great defect. We need to be tolerant of simplifications if they reveal and approximate the general outlines of our judgments. Objections by way of counterexamples are to be made with care, since these may tell us only what we know already, namely that our theory is wrong somewhere. The important thing is to find out how often and how far it is wrong. All theories are presumably mistaken in places. The real question at any given time is which of the views already proposed is the best approximation overall. To ascertain this some grasp of the structure of rival theories is surely necessary. It is for this reason that I have tried to classify and to discuss conceptions of justice by reference to their basic intuitive ideas, since these disclose the main difference between them. In presenting justice as fairness I shall contrast it with utilitarianism. I do this for various reasons, partly as an expository device, partly because the several variants of the utilitarian view have long dominated our philosophical tradition and continue to do so. And this dominance has been maintained despite the persistent misgivings that utilitarianism so easily arouses. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
The explanation for this peculiar state of affairs lies, I believe, in the fact that no constructive alternative theory has been advanced which has the comparable virtues of clarity and system and which at the same time allays these doubts. Intuitionism is not constructive, perfectionism is unacceptable. My conjecture is that the contract doctrine properly worked out can fill this gap. I think justice as fairness an endeavor in this direction. Of course the contract theory as I shall present it is subject to the strictures that we have just noted. It is no exception to the primitiveness that marks existing moral theories. It is disheartening, for example, how little can now be said about priority rules; and while a lexical ordering may serve fairly well for some important cases, I assume that it will not be completely satisfactory. Nevertheless, we are free to use simplifying devices, and this I have often done. We should view a theory of justice as a guiding framework designed to focus our moral sensibilities and to put before our intuitive capacities more limited and manageable questions for judgment. The principles of justice identify certain considerations as morally relevant and the priority rules indicate the appropriate precedence when these conflict, while the conception of the original position defines the underlying idea which is to inform our deliberations. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
If the scheme as a whole seems on reflection to clarify and to order our thoughts, and if it tends t reduce disagreements and to bring divergent convictions more in line, then it has done all that one may reasonably ask. Understood as parts of a framework that does indeed seem to help, the numerous simplifications may be regarded as provisionally justified. However, achieving this new vision of oneself—of who one would be—must not be presumed to be a mere snap of the fingers. It will require genuine openness to radical change in oneself, careful and creative instruction, and abundant supplies of divine grace. For most people all of this only comes to them after they reach the lowest level of their lives or the worst point of a decline, and discover the total hopelessness of being who they are. Most people cannot envision who they would be without the fears, angers, lusts, power ploys, and woundedness with which they have lived so long. They identify with their habit-worn feelings. When Jesus said to the man by the pool of Bethesda, waiting for the angel to stir the waters, “Wilt thou be made whole?” he was not just passing the time of day (John 5.6). #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
We are not told how old he was, but this man had been in his impotent condition for thirty-eight years! If made whole, he would have to deal with a career change of immense proportions. To all his relatives and acquaintances he would no longer be “the one whom we take to the pool every day to wait for the angel.” He would now be…What? Who? How would he identify himself? How would be now relate to others and they to him? He might even have to get a job. Doing what? However, really, this man’s problems was nothing compared to an individual undergoing the transformation of his feelings (emotions, sensations, desires) from those he learned in the home, school, and playground as he grew up to those that characterize the inner beings of Jesus Christ. He is not no to be one who will spend hours watching TV, listening to the radio, fantasizing sensual indulgence or revenge, or who will try to dominate or injure others in attitude, word, or deed. He will no repay evil for evil—push for push, blow for blow, taunt for taunt, hatred for hatred, contempt for contempt. He will not be always on the hunt to satisfy his lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life (1 John 2.16). #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
No wonder he has no real ideal who he will be; and he must content himself with the mere identity: “apprentice of Jesus.” That is the starting point from which his new identity will emerge, and it is in fact powerful enough to bear the load. “Behold, now it came to pass that the people of Nephi were exceedingly rejoiced, because the Lord had again delivered them out of the hands of their enemies; therefore they gave thanks unto the Lord their God; yea, and they did fast much and pray much, and they did worship God; yea, and they did fast much and pray much, and they did worship God with exceedingly great joy. And it came to pass in the nineteenth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi, that Alma came unto his son Helaman and said unto him: Believest thou the words which I spake unto thee concerning those records which have been kept? And Helaman said unto him: Yea, I believe. And Alma said again: Believest thou in Jesus Christ, who shall come? And he said: Yea, I believe all the words which thou has spoken. And Alma said unto him again: Will ye keep my commandments? And he said: Yea, I will keep thy commandments with all my heart. Then Alma said unto him: Blessed art thou; and the Lord shall prosper thee in this land. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
“However, behold, I have somewhat to prophesy unto thee; but what I prophesy unto thee ye shall not make known; yea, what I prophesy unto thee shall not be made known, even until the prophecy is fulfilled; therefore write the words which I shall say. And these are the words: Behold, I perceive that this very people, the Nephites, according to the spirit of revelation which is in me four hundred years from the time that Jesus Christ shall manifest himself unto them, shall dwindle in unbelief. Yea, and then shall they see wars and pestilences, yea, famines and bloodshed, even until the people of Nephi shall become extinct—yea, and this because they shall dwindle in unbelief and fall into the works of darkness, and lasciviousness, and all manner of iniquities; yea, I say unto you, that because they shall sin against so great light and knowledge, yea, I say unto you, that from that day, even the fourth generation shall not pass away before this great iniquity shall come. And when that great day cometh, behold, the time very soon cometh that those who are now, or the seed of those who are no numbered among the people of Nephi, shall no more be numbered among the people of Nephi. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
“However, whosoever remaineth, and is not destroyed in that great and dreadful say, shall be numbered among the Lamanites, and shall become like unto them, all, save it be a few who shall be called the disciples of the Lord; and them shall the Lamanites pursue even until they shall become extinct. And now, because of iniquity, this prophecy shall be fulfilled. And now it came to pass that after Alma had said these things to Helaman, he blessed him, and also his other sons; and he also blessed the Earth for the righteous sake. And he said: Thus saith the Lord God—Cursed shall be the land, yea, this land, unto every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, unto destruction, which do wickedly, when they are fully ripe; and as I have said so shall it be; for this is the cursing and the blessing of God upon the land, for the Lord cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance. And now, when Alma has said these words he blessed the church, yea, all those who should stand fast in the faith from that time henceforth. And when Alma had done this he departed out of the land of Zarahemla, as if to go into the land of Melek. And it came to pass that he was never heard of more; as to his death or burial we know not of. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
“Behold, this we know, that he was a righteous man; and the saying when abroad in the church that he was taken up by the Spirit, or buried by the hand of the Lord, even as Moses. However, behold, the scripture saith the Lord took Moses unto himself; and we suppose that he has also received Alma in the spirit, unto himself; therefore, for this cause we know nothing concerning his death and burial. And now it came to pass in the commencement of the nineteenth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi, that Helaman went forth among the people to declare the word unto them. For behold, because of their wars with the Lamanites and the many little dissensions and disturbances which had been among the people, it became expedient that the word of God should be declared among them, yea, and that a regulation should be made throughout the church. Therefore, Helaman and his brethren went forth to establish the church again in all the land, yea, in every city throughout all the land which was possessed by the people of Nephi. And it came to pass that they did appoint priests and teachers throughout all the land, over all the churches. And now it came to pass that after Helaman and his brethren had appointed priests and teachers over the churches that there arose a dissension among them, and they would not give heed to the words of Helaman and his brethren. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
“However, they grew proud, being lifted up in their hearts, because of their exceedingly great riches; therefore they grew rich in their own eyes, and would not give heed to their words, to walk uprightly before God,” reports Alma 45.1-24. Most High, from all directions about me, the spirits are praying. The spirits of east and south are praying. The spirits of west and north are praying. The spirits below and above are praying. The spirits are praying with me. We all together are praying to you, Ancient one. Please open Heaven’s door. Looking out at my yard, I see a leaf falling from a tree, and I raise a prayer of awe for God who caused such a marvel to me. This is a sign of the necessity of Grace, the Fatherly tenderness of God, the might of the all-prevailing Name; which are never weak, never diluted, never drawling, never ill-arranged, never provocation to listlessness; which exhibit an exquisite skill of antithesis and a rhythmical harmony which he ear is loth to lose. With a marvellous flexibility, my Lord, thank you for accepting all of your children with all of the different conditions of the human spirit. This is an example of a rich variety of construction, subject to a general law of threefold division. We give glory to God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Pills are the Cure All—If there is Nothing We can Swallow, then there is No Help!
Had I gone the way of the World and not gotten to know God or accepted Him as a part of my life, I think that I would have been a very belligerent individual, full of hate and bitterness. I reject the idea that pleasures of the flesh are the mainspring of all human behaviour. Humans are supposed to instead focus on God, salvation, and interpersonal relationships; what goes on among people, how they influence each other and react to each other, on the makeup of the field that is created when human beings live together. Interestingly enough, psychoanalysts have concentrated their attention on schizophrenia, which they do not basically regard as an illness in the usual sense of the word. They see it instead as the result of personal experience, of interpersonal relationships that have had clearly drastic consequences but essentially add up to no more than another psychological problem like any other psychological problem. The relationship of schizophrenia as an individual illness to the social situation has its roots not only in the family but also within the society. The claim that analysis has no healing effects whatsoever is, in my opinion, untenable. It is not substantiated by my own forty years of experience as an analyst or by the experience of many of my colleagues. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
We should also keep in mind here that in many cases analysts are not as competent as they should be (no profession is immune to that) and that the selection of patients is often not fortunate. Attempts are often made to analyze patient for whom the method is not suitable. The truth is that analysis has cured many people of their symptoms, and it has helped many others achieve clarity about themselves for the first time, has helped them be more honest with themselves, to be somewhat freer, to live closer to reality. That is in itself an extremely worthwhile achievement and one that is often grossly undervalued. There are, of course, certain trends of the times that partially account for the turn against analysis. Many people believe that medicine is the only thing that is of real help. If there is nothing we can swallow, then there is no help. Pills are the cure all. Another prevailing view is that we ought to be able to cure everything overnight. Many people are unwilling to come terms with the fact that life is not simple, requires rational thought, and worst of all they do not deal with their own resistance. Misguided individuals “feel” everything should be made simple; everything should be made easy. That is the trend of the times. People “feel” we should be able just to swallow everything as easily as we can a pill. And if learning something requires effort, then it is not worth learning. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
There is a story that can illustrate what I mean here. A young and goes to an elegant new community called Cresleigh Ranch, tours and studies the model homes for a long time, and says to the sales representative, “I am sorry, but you do not have anything I like.” Then he gets up and leaves. Two weeks later he comes back, the sales representative asks—very politely, because this is a high-class community and an architectural marvel—why he could not find anything he liked last time. The young man replies, “Oh, I could have found something all right, but my analyst told me I should practice being assertive.” With that method we can learn to be more sure of ourselves, can learn how to appear more confident, how to lose our fear of sale associates, and so on. However, what we do not learn is why we are so insecure. We remain ignorant of the fact—and here we touch on the theme of transference again—that we tend to regard everyone else as an authority, as a father figure. Even if the method does yield some quick results in the housing development and we feel a little more self-confident, we still have not gotten to the root causes of our insecurity at all, and behind our new façade we remain the same insecure people we always were. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Indeed, our situation is even worse than it was, for we are no longer aware that we are insecure. And why are we insecure? Not because we are afraid of authority but because we are not fully developed human beings, because we lack the strength of our convictions, because we have remained small children who hope others will help us, because we have not grown up, because we are full of self-doubt, and so on. The methods of behaviouristic therapy cannot help in cases like that. All they do is sweep the dirt under the rug—ignore, deny or conceal from themselves and public view or knowledge something that is embarrassing, unappealing, or damaging to one’s reputation. For example, the senator has been accused of trying to sweep his former drug use under the rug. You need to stop sweeping your problems under the rug. However, not all criticism of psychoanalysis is unjustified. I would like to mention a few objections to it that I consider quite sound. Psychoanalysis can often degenerate into mere chatter. Dr. Freud’s idea of free association is in part responsible for this. In encouraging the patient to say anything that occurred to one, Dr. Freud assumed that the patient would say those things that came from one’s depths, things that were genuine and of real importance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
However, in many analyses patients simply babble away and run down their husbands for the hundredth time or complain about everything their awful parents did to them. Nothing comes of that. They go over the same ground again and again. However—someone is listening. The patient feels tat the fact of someone listening helps somehow had that one’s situation will eventually improve. However, tat kind of talk along never changed anyone or anything. It is not what Dr. Freud had in mind. His method involved discovery and struggle against resistance. Dr. Freud never assumed that we could achieve anything, much less solve difficult psychic problems, without expending effort. Without effort we cannot attain any of our goals in life, no matter what the advertisements may claim to the contrary. Anyone who fears effort, anyone who backs off from frustration and possibly even pain will never get anywhere, especially not in analysis. Analysis is hard work, and analysts who gloss that over harm their own cause. Another failing in many analyses is emphasizing intellectualization over emotion. The patient theorizes endlessly about the significance of the time his grandmother hit him for saying he was too full for a slice of her old fashioned, gooey, buttery, supremely sweet chess pie or some other incident. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
And if one has an especially strong academic streak, one may develop highly complicated theories; one may construct theory upon theory; but one will feel nothing. One does not feel one’s inability to love, one’s isolation from others. One’s resistance makes all that inaccessible to one. And so analysis may fall in step with the times in giving precedence to cerebral humans, the purely rational human being. We expect intelligence to take care of everything; emotion is only useless ballast that we ignore as much as possible. And finally I would like to say that there are too many people who think they have to run to a psychoanalyst the minute they encounter the least little difficulty in their lives. They do not even try to cope with their problems themselves. Only if they find that their own best effort has still left them unable to understand and improve their situations themselves, then people should go to a psychoanalyst. Analysis remains the best therapy for a number of disorders having to do with excessive preoccupation with self or, in other words, with narcissism, which in turn results in an inability to relate to others. No other method is as effective and fruitful for treating flight into illusion, stalled psychic growth, symptoms like compulsive washing, and any number of other symptoms of an obsessive or compulsive nature. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Psychoanalysis also serves another function that is at least as important as its curative one. It can assist in promoting psychic growth and self-realization. I am sorry to say that only a small minority seem to be interested in psychic growth these days. Most people have an entirely different goal, which is to own more and consume more. When they reach twenty, they assume that their growth is complete, and from then on they direct all their energies to making the best possible use of this completed machine. As they see it, if they were to change it would work to their disadvantage; for if a person changes then one no longer fits the pattern that one and others expect one to fit. If one changes, how can one know whether one will still hold the same opinions ten years from now that one holds now? And how would a change like that affect one’s ability to get ahead? Most people do not want to grow and change, do not want to realize themselves. They want to hang onto the options they have, exploit them, “capitalize” on them. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule. There are counter-movements, particularly in the United States of America. Even if we own and enjoy all manner of things, we can still be unhappy, life can still be meaningless, we can remain depressed and anxious, and many people have come to realize that. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
The trouble with our age is all signpost and no destination. “What meaning can life have,” we ask ourselves, “if our only purpose in it is to buy a somewhat more expensive car the next time around?” People have seen how their parents or grandparents sacrificed their entire lives to the acquisition of the things they thought they wanted. With varying degree of clarity, this minority has rediscovered a piece of ancient wisdom: Humans do not live by bread alone; possessions and power do not guarantee happiness but tend instead to create anxiety and tension. These people want to pursue a different goal. They want to be more rather than have more. They want to be more rational, to rid themselves of illusions, and to change social conditions that can be maintained only with the assistances of illusion. That longing often takes rather Old World forms, such Eastern Religion, for yoga, for Zen Buddhism, and so on. However, many enthusiasts who approach them tend to be naïve. They are taken in by the advertising fakirs who pass themselves off as holy people and by all manner of groups that claim they know how to cultivate human sensitivity. Here, I feel, psychoanalysis has an important mission. It can help us understand ourselves, perceive our own reality, free ourselves from illusion, understand ourselves, too, from the grip of anxiety and green. It can make us capable of perceiving the World differently. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Once we can forget the self as the prime focus of our interest and once we experience ourselves as acting, feeling, nonalienated human beings, then the World becomes the prime focus of our interest, our concern, our creative energies. We can practice those attitudes. And psychoanalysis can help us in this practice, because it is a method that helps us experience ourselves as we really are, helps us experience who we are, where we stand, where we are going. It is therefore advisable to work with a psychoanalyst who understand those connections and does not think the purpose of analysis is to help people adjust ad conform. However, that kind of analysis should not go on too long; overly extensive analysis often creates dependencies. Once a patient has learned enough to make use of the tools oneself, one should begin analyzing oneself. And that is a lifelong task that we carry on until the day we die. We can best practice self-analysis the first thing each morning, combining it with the kind of breathing and concentration exercises used in Buddhist meditation. The important thing is to step back from the bustle of life, to come to ourselves, to stop reacting constantly to stimuli, to make ourselves “empty” so that we can become active within ourselves. Anyone who attempts this will, I think, experience a deepening of one’s capacity to feel; one will experience “healing,” a recovery of health, not in the medical sense but in a profound, human sense. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
However, this process requires patience, and patience is certainly not a commodity we have in great abundance. To any and all who want to make the attempt, though, I wish the best of luck. In ordinary life, a course of action is ordered by authority, and unless it outrages us, we tend to obey the order, follow the rule. Although people may mutter, it appears that, in general, everyone accepts the regulation. All the complex reactions are hidden. However, in a workshop community, where persons feel a sense of their own worth and a freedom to express themselves, the complexities become evident. Sometimes life can be cumbersome, complicated, irritating, frustrating and arriving at a decision may be difficult. After all, does the wish of everyone have to be considered. And the silent answer of the group is that, yes every person is worthy, every person’s views and feelings have a right to be considered. When one observes this process at work, its awesome nature becomes increasingly apparent. The desires of every participant are taken into account, so that no one feels left out. Slowly, beautifully painstakingly, a decision is crafted to take care of each person. A solution is reached by a process that considers each individual’s contribution—respecting it, weighing it, and incorporating it into the final plan. The sagacity of the group is extraordinary. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
The process seems slow, and participants complain about “the time we are wasting.” However, the larger wisdom of the group recognizes the value of the process, since it is continually knitting together a community in which every soft voice, every subtle feeling has its respected place. Another important characteristic of the community-forming process, as I have observed it, is its transcendence, or spirituality. These are words that, in earlier years, I would never have used. However, the overarching wisdom of the group, the presence of an almost telepathic communication, the sense of the existence of “something greater,” seems to all for such terms. As in other instances, a participant expressed, eloquently, these thoughts. She writes, some time after the completion of a workshop: “I found it to be a profound spiritual experience. I felt that oneness of spirit in the community. We breathed together, felt together, even spoke for one another. I felt the power of the “life force” that infuses each of us—whatever that is. I felt its presence without the usual barricades of “me-ness” or “you-ness”—it was like a meditative experience when I feel myself as a center of consciousness, very much a part of the broader, universal consciousness. And yet with that extraordinary sense of oneness, the separateness of each person present has never been more clearly preserved. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
When a person is drowning, it may be better for one to try to swim than to thrash around waiting for divine intervention. The vocabulary to describe motivations must be hierarchical, especially since metamotivations (growth-motivations) must be characterized differently from basic needs (deficiency-needs). This difference between intrinsic values and our attitudes toward these values also generates a hierarchical vocabulary for motives (using this word most generally and inclusively). In another place I have called attention to the levels of gratification, pleasures, or happiness corresponding to the hierarchy of needs to metaneeds. In addition to this, we must keep in mind that the concept of “gratification” itself is transcended at the level of metamotives or growth-motives, where satisfaction can be endless. So also for the concept of happiness which can also be altogether transcended at the highest levels. It may then easily become a kind of cosmic sadness or soberness or non-emotional contemplation. At the lowest basic need levels we can certainly talk of being driven and of desperately craving, striving, or needing, when, exempli gratia, cut off from oxygen or experiencing great pain. As we go on up the hierarchy of basic needs, words like desiring, wishing, or preferring, choosing, wanting become more appropriate. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
However, at the highest levels, id est, of metamotivation, all these words become subjectively inadequate, and such words as yearning for, devoted to, aspiring to, loving, adorning, admiring, worshipping, being drawn to or fascinated by, describe the metamotivated feelings more accurately. The B-values call to behavioural expression or “celebration” as well as inducing subjective states. Celebration is an act of expressing respect or reverence for that which one needs or honours. Its essence is to call attention to the sublime or solemn aspects of living. To celebrate is to share in a greater joy, to participate in an eternal drama. It is well to notice that the highest values are not only receptively enjoyed and contemplated, but that they often also lead to expressive and behavioral responses, which of course would be easier to investigate than subjective states. God’s grace is sufficient for our weakness. Christ’s worth does cover our unworthiness, and the Holy Spirit does make us effective in spite of our inadequacy. This is the glorious paradox of living by grace. When we discover we are weak in ourselves, we find we are strong in Christ. When we regard ourselves as less than the least of all God’s people, we are given some immense privilege of serving in the Kingdom. When we almost despair over our inadequacy, we find the Holy Spirit giving us unusual ability. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
We shake our heads in amazement and say with Isaiah, “Lord, all that we have accomplished you have done for us,” reports Isaiah 26.12. The contrast between human weakness and divine power is vividly illustrated in Isaiah 41.14-15. This particular passage is set in the context of a lengthy message of encouragement to the downtrodden nation of Israel. Verses 14-15 read: “Do not be afraid, O worm Jacob, O little Israel, for I myself will help you,” declares the LORD, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel. “See, I will make you into a threshing sledge, new and sharp, with many teeth. You will thresh the mountains and crush them, and reduce the hills to chaff.” God addresses the nation as “O worm Jacob, O little Israel.” The designation worm is not used by God in a disparaging sense, but rather calls attention to the weakness and helplessness of the nation, as does the term “O little Israel.” The metaphor of a worm is well chosen to express their weakness, because few things are more helpless and exposed to being trodden under foot than a worm. However, the humbling designation as a worm and as little serves only to magnify the greatness of the encouragement of God gives the nation: “Do not be afraid,” “I myself will help you,” and “I will make you into a threshing sledge, new and sharp, with many teeth.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The promise of the overall passage is that Israel, weak and down trodden though she may be, will in due time prevail over her enemies because the Lord Himself will help her. He will not only help her, He will make Israel herself into a threshing sledge that devours her enemies. The ancient threshing machine was a sledge of thick planks armed with iron or sharpened stones as teeth to thresh the grain. God promises that, just as the threshing sledge breaks up the heads of grain, so “worm” Jacob will devour her enemies. The imagery of the passage is a study in contrast between the weakness of Israel and the mighty acts she will perform with God’s help. The image presented [of the threshing sledge] is the strange but strong one of a down-trodden worm reducing hills to powder, the essential idea being that of a weak and helpless object overcoming the most disproportionate obstacles, by strength derived from another. That is a picture of God at work: a weak and helpless object overcoming disproportionate obstacles by strength derived from another. God makes us weak, or rather He allows us to become painfully conscious of our weakness, in order to make us strong with His strength. Some years ago when God opened up for me a wider Bible teaching and writing ministry, I felt drawn to Isaiah 41.14-15. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Even though the promise was given to the nation of Israel, I sensed God was allowing me to make a personal application, that He would indeed make me into a threshing sledge, a harvesting instrument in His hand. However, I also sense that God required, as a condition of the promise, that I accept the description of “worm Jacob, little Israel,” not in a denigrating sense, but as a realization of my own personal weakness and helplessness. I go back to that condition and promise almost every time I teach the word of God or sit down to write. I do not do this in the sense of rubbing a good luck charm, but rather to acknowledge my own inability to accomplish anything for God and to lay hold of His promise to give me the power to minister for Him. God seems to keep saying to me, “As long as you are willing to acknowledge you are weak and helpless as a worm, I will make you strong and powerful like a threshing sledge, with new, sharp teeth.” The gracious paradox of divine strength working through human weakness as taught in Scripture has been recognized through the centuries by the great teachers of the church. The respected Puritan theologian John Owen, for example said, “Yet the duties God requires of us are not in proportion to the strength we possess in ourselves. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
“Rather, the duties are proportional to the resources available to us in Christ. We do not have the ability in ourselves to accomplish the least of God’s tasks. This is the law of grace. When we recognize it is impossible for us to perform a duty in our own strength, we will discover the secret of its accomplishment. However, alas, this is a secret we often fail to discover.” In the earlier stages of their relation, the disciple needs to attach oneself more and more closely to the Master. One is still learning what the quest is, still weak-willed, uncertain, and undeveloped. However, in the later stages one should release one’s hold on the master, discipline one’s feelings, and let go of what has become so dear to one. For now one should increasingly depend on making for oneself the direct contact with one’s higher Self. One should constantly look forward to the time when one will be independent enough to steer one’s own course. It is not meant that one should be left with nothing but one’s ignorance and weakness to guide one, nor that one should face all one’s perplexities by oneself, but that one should face many or most of them as one can and that one should carry to the teacher many occasionally intervene to help on one’s own initiative but only if and when one deems it desirable and necessary to do so. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
In this way the object will be fulfilled of leading the disciple to increasingly correct thinking and more careful behaviour. It is naturally strongly repugnant to a developed mind to allow another to have such great power over one’s own, whereas it is strongly attractive to an undeveloped one. Dear Lord in Heaven, may our prayers be the road on which You come from your celestial home. May our words be food for your shining Ultimate Driving Machine as it carries You to us. Please enter this space, guided by what we speak: Please come to those who are faithful to You, please come to those who do not neglect their duties to you, please come to those who are not stingy with offerings. God please come to us. “Now my son, here is somewhat more I would say unto thee; for I perceive that thy mind is worried concerning the resurrection of the dead. Behold, I say unto you, that there is no resurrection—or, I would say, in other words, that this mortal does not put on immortality, this corruption does not put on incorruption—until after the coming of Christ. Behold, he bringeth to pass the resurrection of the dead. However, behold, my son, the resurrection is not yet. Now, I unfold unto you a mystery; nevertheless, there are many mysteries which are kept, that no one knoweth them save God himself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
“However, I show unto you one thing which I have inquired diligently of God that I might know—that is concerning the resurrection. Behold, there is a time appointed that all shall come forth from the dead. Now when this time cometh no one knows; but God knoweth the time which is appointed. Now, whether there shall be one time, or a second time, or a third time, that humans shall come forth from the dead, it mattereth not; for God knoweth all these things; and it sufficeth me to know that this is the case—that there is a time appointed that all shall rise from the dead. Now there must needs be a space betwixt the time of death and the time of the resurrection. And now I would inquire what becometh of the souls of humans from this time of death to the time appointed for the resurrection? Now whether there is more than one time appointed for human to rise it mattereth not; for all do not die at once, and this mattereth not; all is as one day with God, and time only is measures unto humans. Therefore, there is a time appointed unto humans that they shall rise from the dead; and there is a space between the time death and the resurrection. And now, concerning this space of time, what becometh of the souls of humans is the thing which I have inquired diligently of the Lord to know; and this is the thing of which I do know. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
“And when the time cometh when all shall rise, then shall they know what God knoweth all the times which are appointed unto humans. Now, concerning the state of the soul between death and the resurrection—Behold, it has been made known unto me by an angel, that the spirits of all humans, as soon as they are departed from this mortal boy, yea, the spirits of all humans, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life. And then shall it come to pass, that the spirits of those who are righteous are received into a state of happiness, which is called paradise, a state of rest, a state of peace, where they shall rest from all their redoubles and from all care, and sorrow. And then shall it come to pass, that the spirits of the wicked, yes, who are evil—for behold, they have no part nor portion of the Spirit of the Lord; for behold, they chose evil works rather than good; therefore the spirit of the devil did enter into them, and take possession of their house—and these shall be cast out into outer darkness; there shall be weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth, and this because of their own iniquity, being led captive by the will of the devil. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
“Now this is the state of the souls of the wicked, yea, in darkness, and a state of awful, fearful looking for the fiery indignation of the wrath of God upon them; thus they remain in this state, as well as the righteous in paradise, until the time of their resurrection. Now, there are some that have understood that this state of happiness and this state of misery of the soul, before the resurrection, was a first resurrection. Yes, I admit it may be termed a resurrection, the raising of the spirit or the soul and their consignation to happiness or misery, according to the words which have been spoken. And behold, again it hath been spoken, that there is a first resurrection, a resurrection of all those who have been, or who are, or who shall be, down to the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Now, we do not suppose that this first resurrection of the souls and their consignation to happiness or misery. Ye cannot suppose that this is what it meaneth. Behold, I say unto you, Nay; but it meaneth the reuniting of the soul with the body, of those from the days of Adam down to the resurrection of Christ. Now, whether the souls and the bodies of those whom has been spoken shall all be reunited at once, the wicked as well as the righteous, I do not say; let it suffice, that I say that they all come forth; or in order words, their resurrection cometh to pass before the resurrection of those who die after the resurrection of Christ. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
“Now, my son, I do not say that their resurrection cometh at the resurrection of Christ; but behold, I give it as my opinion, that the souls and the bodies are reunited, of the righteous, at the resurrection of Christ, and his ascension into Heaven. However, whether it be at his resurrection or after, I do not say; but this much I say, that there is a space between death and the resurrection of the body, and a state of the soul in happiness or in misery until the time which is appointed of God that the dead shall come forth, and be reunited, both soul and body, and be brought to stand before God, and be judged according to their works. Yea, this bringeth about the restoration of those things of which has been spoken by the mouths of the prophets. The soul shall be restored to the body, and the body to the soul; yea, and every limb and joint shall be restored to its body; yea, even a hair of the head shall not be lost; but all things shall be restored to their proper and perfect frame. And now, my son, this is the restoration of which has been spoken by the mouths of the prophets—and the shall the righteous shine forth in the kingdom of God. However, behold, an awful death cometh upon the wicked; for they die as to things pertaining to things of righteousness; for they are unclean, and no unclean thing can inherit the kingdom of God. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
“However, they are cast out, and consigned to partake of the fruits of their labours or their works, which have been evil; and they drink the dregs of a bitter cup,” reports Alma 40.1-26. Egyptian monks proposed to themselves—namely, to preserve that vigilant and fortified attention of mind, which in prayer is very necessary, from being wasted or dulled through continuance, if their prayers were few or long; for which purpose both to solicit God more earnestly or frequent address, and to avoid temptations of Satan drawing them into lassitude and weariness—they resolved that their prayers should be many and brief, like darts cast forth with energy. I stand here on the summit of your high mountain, and think of you. Surrounded by the sky, lifted up into the sky itself, the awesome clarity of your focused vision comes closer to me and I am more aware, myself, of your law’s urgings. Dear Lord in Heaven, Lord of all that is right, of all that is just, of all that should be; God and king of the World, of all who live and all that is, God, please advise me; please make the right path open beneath my feet, please make my eyesight clear, that I may always see as far as I do from the top of this mountain of yours. Your outstretched enfolding arms offer cattle, pour out rich milk, that we might, like children, grow in prosperity. Leading cows you come to your worshippers, who, pouring golden butter, come to you. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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