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This is the Beginning, When People Will Be Opening their Eyes!
Nothing is quite as funny as the unintended humour of reality. The original position is designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice. In taking up this point of view, we are imagining ourselves in the position of free and equal persons who jointly agree upon and commit themselves to the principles of social and political justice. The main distinguishing feature of the original position is “the veil of ignorance”: to insure impartiality of judgment, the parties are deprived of all knowledge of their personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances. The two principles of justice guarantee the equal basic rights and liberties needed to secure the fundamental interests of free and equal citizens and to pursue a wide range of conceptions of good. The second principle provides fair equality of education and employment opportunities enabling all to fairly compete for powers and positions of office; and it secures for all a guaranteed minimum of the all-purpose means (including income and wealth) that individuals need to pursue their interests and to maintain their self-respect as free and equal persons. Persons in the original position give pride of place to their interest in the equal freedoms. The intuitive idea behind the precedence of liberty is that if the persons in the original position assume that their basic liberties can be effectively exercised, they will not exchange a lesser liberty for an improvement in the economic well-being, at least not once a certain level of wealth has been attained. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
It is only when social conditions do not allow the effective establishment of these rights that one can acknowledge their restriction. Only if it is necessary to enhance the quality of civilization so that in due course the equal freedoms can be enjoyed by all can the denial of equal liberty can be accepted. The lexical ordering of the two principles is the long-run tendency of the general conception of justice consistently pursued under reasonably favourable conditions. Eventually there comes a time in the history of a well-ordered society beyond which the special form of the two principles takes over and holds from then on. What must be shown then is the rationality of this ranking from the standpoint of the parties in the original position. Clearly the conception of goodness as rationality and the principles of moral psychology have a part in answering this question. Now the basis for the priority of liberty is roughly as follows: as the conditions of civilization improve, the marginal significance for our god of further economic and social advantages diminishes relative to their interests of liberty, which become stronger as the conditions for the exercise of the equal freedoms are more fully realized. Beyond some point it becomes and then remains irrational from the standpoint of the original position to acknowledge a lesser liberty for the sake of greater material means and amenities of office. This is so because as the general level of well-being raises (as indicated by the index of primary goods the less favoured can expect) only the less urgent wants remain to be met by further advances, at least insofar as human’s wants are not largely created by institutions and social forms. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
At the same time the obstacles to the exercise of the equal liberties decline and a growing insistence upon the right to pursue our spiritual and cultural interests assert itself. Increasingly it becomes more important to secure the free internal life of the various communities of interests in which persons and groups seek to achieve, in modes of social union consistent with equal liberty, the ends and excellences to which they are drawn. In addition humans come to aspire to some control over the laws and rules that regulate their association, either by directly taking part themselves in its affairs or indirectly through representatives with whom they are affiliated by ties of culture and social situation. To be sure, it is not the case that when the priority of liberty holds, all material wants are satisfied. Rather these desires are not so compelling as to make it rational for the persons in the original position to agree to satisfy them by accepting a less than equal freedom. The account of the good enables the parties to work out a hierarchy among their several interests and to note which kinds of ends should be regulative in their rational plans of life. Until the basic wants of individuals can be fulfilled, the relative urgency of their interest in liberty cannot be firmly decided in advance. It will depend on the claims of the least favoured as seen from the constitutional and legislative stages. However, under favourable circumstances the fundamental interest in determining our plan of life eventually assumes a prior place. One reason for this I have discussed in connection with liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
And a second reason is the central place of the primary good of self-respect and the desire of human beings to express their nature in a free social union with others. Thus the desire for liberty is the chief regulative interest that the parties must suppose they all will have in common in due course. The veil of ignorance forces them to abstract from the particulars of their plans of life, thereby leading to this conclusion. The serial ordering of the two principles then follows. Now it might seem that even though the desire for an absolute increase in economic advantages declines, human’s concern for their relative place in the distribution of wealth will persist. In fact, if we suppose that everyone wishes a greater proportionate share, the result could be a growing desire for material abundance all the same. Since each strives for an end that cannot be collectively attained, society might conceivably become more and more preoccupied with raising productivity and improving economic efficiency. And these objectives might become so dominant as to undermine the precedence of liberty. Some have objected to the tendency to equality on precisely this ground, that it is thought to arouse in individuals an obsession with their relative share of social wealth. However, while it is true that in a well-ordered society there is most likely a trend to greater equality, its members take little interest in their relative position as such. As we have seen, they are not much affected by envy and jealousy, and for the most part they do what seems best to them as judged by their own plan of life without being dismayed by the greater amenities and enjoyments of others. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Thus there are no strong psychological propensities prompting them to curtail their liberty for the sake of greater absolute or relative economic welfare. The desire for a higher relative place in the distribution of material means should be sufficiently weak that the priority of liberty is not affected. Of course, it does not follow that in a just society everyone is unconcerned with matters of status. The account of self-respect as perhaps the main primary good has stressed the great significance of how we think others value us. However, in a well-ordered society the need for status is met by the public recognition of just institutions, together with the full and diverse internal life of the many free communities of interest that equal liberty allows. The basis for self-esteem in a just society is not then one’s income share but the publicly affirmed distribution of fundamental rights and liberties. And this distribution being equal, everyone has a similar and secure status when they meet to conduct the common affairs of the wider society. No one is inclined to look beyond the constitutional affirmation of equality for further political ways of securing one’s status. No one is inclined to look beyond the constitutional affirmation of equality for further political position from a strategic point of view. It would also have the effect of publicly establishing their inferiority as defined by the basic structure of society. This subordinate ranking in the public forum experienced in the attempt to take part in political and economic life, and felt in dealing with those who have a greater liberty, would indeed be humiliating and destructive of self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
And so by acquiescing in a less than equal liberty one might lose on both counts. This is particularly likely to be true as society becomes more just, since equal rights and public attitudes of mutual respect have an essential place in maintaining a political balance and in assuring citizens of their own worth. Thus while the social and economic differences between the various sectors of society, the noncomparing groups as we may think of them, are not likely to generate animosity, the hardships arising from political and civic inequality, and from culture and ethnic discrimination, cannot be easily accepted. When it is the position of equal citizenship that answers to the need for status, the precedence of equal liberties becomes all the more necessary. Having chosen a conception of justice that seeks to eliminate the significance of relative economic and social advantages as supports for human’s self-confidence, it is essential that the priority of liberty be firmly maintained. So for this reason too the parties are led to adopt a serial ordering of the two principles. In a well-ordered society then self-respect is secured by the public affirmation of the status of equal citizenship for all; the distribution of material means is left to take care of itself in accordance with the idea of pure procedural justice. Of course doing this assumes the requisite background institutions which narrow the range of inequalities so that excusable envy does not arise. Now this way of dealing with the problem of status has several noteworthy features which may be brought out as follows. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Suppose to the contrary that how one is valued by others depends upon one’s relative place in the distribution of income and wealth. In this case, having a higher status implies having more material means than a larger fraction of society. Thus not everyone can have the highest status, and to improve one person’s position is to lower that of someone else. Social cooperation to increase the conditions of self-respect is impossible. The means of status, so to speak, are fixed, and each human’s gain is another’s loss. Clearly this situation is a great misfortune. Persons are set at odds with one another in the pursuit of their self-esteem. Given the preeminence of this primary good, the parties in the original position surely do no want to find themselves so opposed. If not impossible, it would tend, for one thing, to make the good of social union difficult to achieve. Moreover, if the means of providing a good are indeed fixed and cannot be enlarged by cooperation, as mentioned in the discussion of envy, then justice seems to require equal shares, ceteris paribus. However, an equal division of all primary gods in irrational in view of the possibility of bettering everyone’s circumstances by accepting certain inequalities. Thus the best solution is to support the primary good of self-respect as far as possible by the assignment of the basic liberties that can indeed be made equal, defining the same status for all. At the same time, distributive justice as frequently understood, justice in the relative shares of material means, is relegated to a subordinate place. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Thus we arrive at another reason for factoring the social order into two parts as indicated by the principles of justice. While these principles permit inequalities in return for contributions that are for the benefit of all, the precedence of liberty entails equality in the social bases of esteem. Now it is quite possible that this idea cannot be carried through completely. To some extent human’s sense of their own worth may hinge upon their institutional position and their income share. If, however, the account of social envy and jealousy is sound, then, with the appropriate background arrangements, these inclinations should not be excessive, at least not when the priority of liberty is effectively upheld. However, if necessary, theoretically we can include self-respect in the primary goods, the index of which defines expectations. Then in applications of the difference principle this index can allows for the effects of excusable envy; the expectations of the less advantaged are lower the more severe these effects. Whether some adjustment for self-respect has to be made is best decided from the standpoint of the legislative stage where the parties have more information about social circumstances and the principle of political determination applies. Admittedly this problem is an unwelcome complication. Since simplicity it itself desirable in a public conception of justice, the conditions that elicit excusable envy should if possible be avoided. Expectations of the less advantaged can be understood so as to include the primary good of self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Now some may want to object to this account of the priority of liberty that societies have other ways of affirming self-respect and of coping with envy and other disruptive inclinations. Thus in a feudal or in a caste system each person is believed to have one’s allotted station in the natural order of things. One’s comparisons are presumably confined to within one’s own estate or caste, these ranks becoming in effect so many noncomparing groups established independently of human control and sanctioned by religion and theology. Humans resign themselves to their position should it ever occur to them to question it; and since all may view themselves as assigned their vocation, everyone is held to be equally fated and equally noble in the eyes of providence. This conception of society solves the problem of social justice by eliminating in thought the circumstances that give rise to it. The basic structure is aid to be already determined, and not something for human beings to affect. On this view, it misconceives human’s place in the World to suppose that the social order should match principles which they would as equals consent to. Now to this idea, parties re to be guided in their choice of a conception of justice by a knowledge of the general facts about society. They take for granted than that institutions are not fixed but change overtime, altered by natural circumstances and the activities and conflicts of social groups. The constraints of nature are recognized, but humans are not powerless to shape their social arrangements. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
This assumption is likewise part of the background of the theory of justice. It follows that certain ways of dealing with envy and other aberrant propensities are closed to a well-ordered society. For example, it cannot keep them in check by promulgating false or unfounded beliefs. For our problem is how society should be arranged if it is to conform to principles that rational persons with true general beliefs would acknowledge in the original position. The publicity condition of requires the parties to assume that as members of society they will also know the general facts. The reasoning leading up to the initial agreement is to be accessible to public understanding. Of course, in working out what the requisite principles are, we must rely upon current knowledge as recognized by common sense and the existing scientific consensus. However, there is no reasonable alternative to doing this. We have to concede that as established beliefs change, it is possible that the principles of justice which it seems rational to choose may likewise change. Thus when the belief in a fixed natural order sanctioning a hierarchical society is abandoned, assuming here that this belief is not true, a tendency is set up that points in the direction of two principles of justice inertial order. The effective protection of the equal liberties becomes increasingly of first importance. When God wants to punish people, he gives the unjust leaders. So the answer is for the people to repent, turn from their ways, be converted, and seek God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Some people only care about power and what they can do with power. May the Lord come down to protect our people. Democracy is not prescribed in the Bible, and Christians can and do live under other political systems. However, Christians can hardly fail to love democracy, because of all systems it best assures human dignity, the essence of our creation in God’s image. If a candidate wins by cheating, he or she can only be forgiven by God if one renounced the office one has obtained by fraud. There will be no divine forgiveness for this act of injustice without a previous decision to repay the damage done. However, apparently God’s forgiveness is unimportant to some ruling. When politicians rig the vote, it means all the passion for democracy and all the prayers of the people are meaningless. A government that assumes or maintains power through fraudulent means has no moral basis. If it does not of itself freely correct the evil it has inflicted on the people, then it is our serious moral obligation as a people to make it do so. Nonetheless, there is enormous sin attached to fratricidal strife. As moral outrage grows, it is important to study the Bible. God has ordained government to preserve order, but even a bad government is better than no government—which results in chaos. Government’s authority comes from God; it is a delegation. Therefore, governments—all governments—whether they acknowledge it or not, rule under God. However, does God give an unrestricted delegation? Certainly not. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
As Jesus Christ made clear with the coin, there are two realms—and Caesar is not to usurp what belongs to God. Any government that violates the law that is higher than its own is exceeding the legitimate authority God has granted. Government must always be respected, otherwise anarchy results; but the nation may attempt to venerate a culture or race. “When the state is made to serve the aspirations of race or nation instead of the cause of justice for all, it becomes a demonic state warranting resistance and rejection by the Christian faith,” reports Donald Bloesch, Crumbling Foundations (Grand Paris, Mich.: Zondervan, 1984), 183. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, “If government persistently and arbitrarily violates its assigned task, then the divine mandate lapses.” In that case the state becomes evil incarnate, as in Nazi Germany. Instead of acting as God’s instrument for preserving life and order, it does the reverse, destroying life and order. Then the church must resist. Though as argued earlier, the church’s primary function is evangelization and ministering to spiritual needs; as the principle visible manifestation of the Kingdom of God, it must be the conscience of society, the instrument of moral accountability. Richard Neuhaus eloquently wrote that “the church can and should subject to moral questioning every political agenda or cause, thus keeping the entirety of human politics under the transcendent judgement of God.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The church’s first duty then would be to publicly expose the state’s immorality. The government should not be involved in corruption, oppression, the deprivation of civil liberties, nor the taking of innocent lives. As a second step the church should refuse to have any part in the state’s immorality. The church must take the next more severe measures of resistance lest its words be rendered hollow. The great evangelist Charles Finney refused communion to slave-holders. Others organized the underground railroad and rescued fugitive slaves from prison. Many ministers broke the law, were arrested, and some imprisoned. However, that state’s evil, even as egregious as slavery, does not give an unrestricted license to disobey any law; only the unjust law can properly be contested. While active resistance may succeed, as it did with slavery and the Civil-Rights Movement, it may not, however, be enough in the face of the raw power modern totalitarian states have achieved. So, when all peaceable means fail, what does the Christian do? Is revolution ever justified? Scottish reformation theologians like John Knox and Samuel Rutherford believed they could be, advocating the right of Christians to rise up against ungodly rulers. Many ministers in the colonies agreed as well; when they preached that the people had the authority to resist the king when the king violated God’s commands, they were setting the stage for the American Revolution. After dumping tea in Boston Harbour the next step of resistance was the musket. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
A Boston preacher said that for a people to “arise unanimously and resist their prince, even to dethrone him, is not criminal but a reasonable way of vindicating their liberties and just rights.” John Adams observed, “The revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people, a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.” Some Christian activists today loosely call for a new American Revolution just as the young radical youth movements did in the sixties. However, history reveals, revolution most often results, after the bodies are buried, in one form of tyranny replacing another. G.K. Chesterton summed it up well: “The real case against revolution is this: That there always seems to be much more to be said against the old regime than in favour of the new regime.” So for the Christian, revolution is never to be lightly regarded. It is the most extreme form of disobedience. It could only be contemplated on the same justification as a just war; that is, that there must be a better alterative as a result of the revolution. Its advantages must outweigh the suffering, and the evil employed in the revolution must prevent a far greater evil than the status quo. This was the reasoning that caused Albert Einstein to abandon his pacifism in the face of a dictator’s rise to power. “To prevent the greater evil, it is necessary that the lesser—the hated military—be accepted for the time being,” Einstein contended. It was this reasoning the caused Bonhoeffer to patriciate in the plot to assassinate this dictator. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
For Christians to justify participation in revolution, therefore, they would have to be convinced that the state had become totally opposed to the purposes of God for the state and there was no other recourse to prevent massive evil. The Exodus from Egypt is often cited as a model for political action by liberation theologians, but they ignore the fact that in the Exodus, God did not overthrow the political system in Egypt. He extracted His own people from that system, taking them to Mount Sinai that they might worship Him. In the light of this, then, what about America? What lessons are to be drawn from it? We must be aware to prevent a regime’s refusal to allow free elections, the suspensions of civil liberties, the massive corruption of the governmental process, the trampling of human rights, and a leader’s own blasphemous, at times messianic pretensions, which give the church a mandate to act. The church should be mobilized to say no to evil. The first stage of an individua approach should be entirely biblical. By preaching repentance and conversion, one can encourage outbreaks of spiritual revival all across America. One should call for people to pray for their country. A courageous cardinal and ordinary citizens can open a crack of light in the dark canopy that envelops so much of planet Earth. Through peaceful actions and resistance to evil, the Kingdom of God will be made visible again. The Late Francis Schaeffer once wrote, “If here is no place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The belief that government is autonomous, the ultimate repository of power, the solution to all of society’s ills, is the greatest imposter of the twenty-first century. Christians and the church have no higher calling than to expose it by every legitimate means. To some people the great trouble about any argument for the Supernatural is simply the fact that argument should be needed at all. If so stupendous a thing exists, ought it not be obvious as the sun in the sky? It is not intolerable, and indeed incredible, that knowledge of the most basic of all Facts should be accessible only by wire-drawn reasonings for which the vast majority of humans have neither leisure nor capacity? I have great sympathy with this point of view. However, we must notice two things. When you are looking at a garden from a room upstairs it is obvious (once you think about it) that you are looking through a window. However, if it is the garden that interests you, you may look at it for a long time without thinking of the window. When you are reading a book, it is obvious (once you attend to it) that you are using your eyes: but unless your eyes begin to hurt you, or the book is a text book on optics, you may read all evening without once thinking of eyes. When we talk we are obviously using langue and grammar: and when we try to talk a foreign language we may be painfully aware of the fact. However, we are talking English, we do not notice it. When you shout from the top of the stirs, “I am in half a moment,” you are usually conscious that you have made the singular am agree with the singular I. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
There is indeed a story told about a Native American who, having learned several other languages, was asked to write a grammar of the language used by his own tribe. He replied, after some thought, that it had no grammar. The grammar he had sued all his life had escaped his notice all his life. He knew it (in once sense) so well that (in another sense) he did not know it existed. All these instances show that the fact, and through which alone you have access to all the other facts, may be precisely the one that is most easily forgotten—forgotten not because it is so remote or abstruse but because it is so near and so obvious. And that is exactly how the Supernatural has been forgotten. The Naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one’s own thinking cannot be merely a natural event, and that therefore something other than Nature exists. The Supernatural is not remote and abstruse: it is a matter f daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing. Denial of it depends on a certain absent-mindedness. However, this absent-mindedness is in on way surprising. You do not need—indeed you do not wish—to be always thinking about windows when you are looking at gardens or always thinking about eyes when you are reading. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
In the same way the proper procedure for all limited and particular inquiries is to ignore the fact of your own thinking, and concentrate on the object. It is only when you stand back from particular inquiries and try to form a complete philosophy that you must take it into account. For a complete philosophy must get in all the facts. In it you turn away from specialized or truncated thought to total thought: and one of the facts total thought must think about is Thinking itself. There is thus a tendency in the study of Nature to make us forget the most obvious first of all. And since the Sixteenth Century, when Science was born, the minds of humans have been increasingly turned outward, to know Nature and to master her. They have been increasingly engaged on those specialized inquiries for which truncated thought is the correct method. It is therefore not in the least astonishing that they should have forgotten the evidence for the Supernatural. The deeply ingrained habit of truncated thought—what we call the “scientific” habit of mind—was indeed certain to lead to Naturalism, unless this tendency were continually corrected from some other source. However, no other source was at hand, for during the same period humans of science were coming to be metaphysically and theologically uneducated. That brings me to the second consideration. The state of affairs in which ordinary people can discover the Supernatural only by abstruse reasoning is recent and, by historical standards, abnormal. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
All over the World, until quite modern times, the direct insight of the mystics and the reasonings of the philosopher percolated to the mass of the people by authority and tradition; they could be received by those who were no great reasoners themselves in the concrete form of myth and ritual and the whole pattern of life. In the conditions produced by a century or so of Naturalism, plain humans are being forced to bear burdens which plain humans were never expected to bear before. We must get the truth for ourselves or go without it. There may be two explanations for this. It might be that humanity, in rebelling against tradition and authority, has made a ghastly mistake; a mistake which will not be less fatal because the corruptions of those in authority rendered it very excusable. On the other hand, it may be that the Power which rules our species is at this moment carrying out a daring experiment. Could it be intended that the whole mass of the people should now move forward and occupy for themselves those heights which were once reserved only for the sages? Is the distinction between wise and simple to disappear because all are now expected to become wise? If so, our present blunderings would be but growing pains. However, let us make no mistake about our necessities. If we are content to go back and become humble plain humans obeying a tradition, well. If we are ready to climb and struggle on till we become sages ourselves, better still. However, the human who will neither obey wisdom in others nor adventure for her oneself is fatal. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live: a society where all were seers could live even more fully. However, a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go; to stay here is death. One other point that may have raised doubt or difficulty is the advanced reasons for believing that a supernatural element in present in every rational human. The presence of human rationality in the World is therefore a Miracle. Human Reason an Morality have been mentioned not as instances of Miracle (at least, not of the kind of Miracle you wanted to hear about) but as prods of the Supernatural: not in order to show that Nature ever is invaded but that there is a possible invader. Whether you choose to call the regular and familiar invasion by human Reason a Miracle or not is largely a matter of words. Its regularity—the fact that it regularly enters by the same door, human pleasures of the flesh—may incline you not to do so. It looks as if it were (so to speak) the very nature of Nature to suffer this invasion. However, then we might later find that it was the very nature of Nature to suffer Miracles in general. Fortunately the course of our argument will allow us to leave this question of terminology on one side. We are going to be concerned with other invasions of Nature—with what everyone would call Miracles. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Our question could, if you liked, be put in the form, “Does Supernature every produce particular results in space and time except through the instrumentality of human brains acting on human nerves and muscles?” I have said “particular results” because, on our view, Nature as a whole is herself one huge result of the Supernatural: God created her. God pierces her wherever there is a human mind. God presumably maintains her in existence. The question is whether He ever does anything else to her. Does God, beside all this, ever introduce into her events of which it would not be true to say, “This is simply the working out of the general character which God gave to Nature as a whole in creating her”? Such events are what are popularly called Miracles: and it will be in this sense only that the word Miracle will be used from now on. Do not stand at my grace and weep, I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a though rays of light that glow. I am the diamond glint on snow. I am the moonlight on the shinning sea. I am the gentle autumn rain. When you wake in the morning hush, I am the swift, uplifting rush or quiet birds in circling flight. I am the soft starlight at night. Do not stand at my grace and weep. I am not there. I do not sleep. Our God and God of our fathers, we thank Thee for Thy Torah, our priceless heritage. May the portion we have ready today inspire us to do Thy will and to seek further knowledge of Thy word. Thus our minds will be enriched and our lives endowed with purpose. May we take to heart Thy laws by which humans truly live. Happy are all who love Thee and delight in Thy commandments. Amen. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
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Wise Humans, Good Humans, Patriotic Humans are to be Found in All Communities!
If Americans could be made to believe that their sufferings were for some remote, high sacrificial end, perhaps it would be possible for them to become reconciled to their plight; but sharing the culture that condemns them, and seeing that lust for trash is what blinds the nation to their claims, is what sets storms rolling in the soul of America. The United State of America is so unique from other nations because it is a nation of laws, not a nation of humans. A nation of laws means that legal decrees, not people rule. Whether it be the most common American members or members of Congress, high-ranking bureaucrats or the president of the United States of America, everyone is governed by the same laws, regardless of their station. All must be held to the just laws of America. America’s founds extolled a nation of laws, for they knew that only a fairly enforced legal system could protect liberty and property against corruption and tyranny. God is in fact the author of liberty and to retain it, the inhabitant of the land must be protected by His might hand. There is no other power that can protect that liberty. In order for us to enjoy this protection of His might, we must accept God as our God and keep His commandments. “Behold, this America is a choice land, and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall be free from bondage, and from captivity, and from all other nations under Heaven, if they will but serve the God of the land, who is Jesus Christ,” reports Ether 2.12. The God of this land is also the King of the land. And this is true. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Manifest Destiny is a phenomenon. Jesus spoke here in America, and He proclaimed, “This lad shall be a land of liberty, and there shall be no kings upon it. For I, the Lord, the king of Heaven, will be their king, and I will be light unto them forever, that hear my words. For it is a choice land, saith God, wherefore I will have all humans that dwell thereon that they shall worship me,” reports 2 Nephi 10.11-19. The alternative to enjoying this liberty and happiness through acceptance of and obedience to Jesus Christ is made clear by Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny is a tangible blessing from God that has created American history. It is a systematic body of concepts and beliefs that powers American life and culture. The right of our manifest destiny to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development and great creation of liberty and federative development of self government entrusted to us is a promise that we shall flourish. “Whoso should possess this land of promise, from that time henceforth and forever, should serve him, the true and only God, or they should be swept off when hey are ripened in iniquity,” reports Ether 2.8-9. It is as a right that we serve God and obey the laws as that of the tree to the space of air and the Earth be suitable for the full expression of its principle and destiny of growth. When people follow the guidance of God of the land, they reach great heights. The Lord in the very beginning revealed to Adam a perfect form of government for the benefit of humans. We believe that governments are instituted of God. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Individual freedom is necessary. No law shall be passed that takes away from a human the right of free choice. Free agency is fundamental as law of human conduct. Humans have a right to obey or disobey that laws as they please, and take the consequences. That government is best which has as its aim the administration of justice, social well-being and the promotion of prosperity among its members. We must recognize that property rights are essential to human liberty. The individual has three great rights, equally sacred from arbitrary interference: the right to one’s life, the right to one’s liberty, and the right to one’s property. The three rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a human one’s life, but to deny one one’s liberty, is to take from one all that makes life worth living. To give one liberty, but take from one the property which is the fruit and badge of one’s liberty, is to still leave one a slave. Laws are enacted for the protection of society, and have no value except when they are administered in righteousness and justice. If dishonest humans occupy administrative offices, laws cannot be so administered in righteousness and justice. The Lord says, “When the wicked rule, the people mourn.” Wise humans, good humans, patriotic humans are to be found in all communities, in all political parties, among all creeds. None but such humans should be chosen. Without beneficent laws, righteously administered, the foundations of civilization crumble, anarchy reigns, decay and dissolution follow. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
We call upon all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout the World to honour the laws of God, and obey and uphold the law of the land; and we appeal to good humans everywhere, regardless of creed, party affiliation, race, culture, or condition to join with us in an effort to put into operation the words of President Lincoln, the great emancipator, that our country may continue to be a light to the World, a loyal, law-abiding, God-fearing nation. We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience; and allow all humans the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may. However, we claim absolutely no right, no prerogative whatever, to interfere with any other people. A good government must secure for every citizen the free exercise of conscience. Matters of belief or religious practice should not be interfered with, unless they oppose laws formulated for the common good. There should be no mingling of religious influence with the civil governments. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honouring, and sustaining the laws. The main psychological root of the liability to envy is a lack of self-confidence in our own worth combined with a sense of impotence. Our way of life is without zest and we feel powerless to alter it or to acquire the means of doing what we still want to do. This creation the notion of resentment. By contrast, someone sure of the worth of one’s plan of life and one’s ability to carry it out is not given to rancor nor is one jealous of one’s good fortune. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
Even if one could, one has no desire to level down the advantages of others at some expense to oneself. This hypothesis implies that the least favoured tend to be more envious of the better situation of the more favoured the less secure their self-respect and the greater their feeling that they cannot improve their prospects. Similarly the particular envy aroused by competition and rivalry is like to be stronger the worse one’s defeat, for the blow to one’s self-confidence is more severe and the loss may seem irretrievable. It is general envy, however, that mainly concerns us here. There are three conditions that encourage hostile outbreaks of envy. The first of these is the psychological condition we have just noted: persons lack a sure confidence in their own value and in their ability to do anything worthwhile. Second (and one of two social conditions), many occasions arise when this psychological condition is experienced as painful and humiliating. The discrepancy between oneself and others is made visible by the social structure and style of one’s society. The less fortunate are therefore often forcibly reminded of their situation, sometimes leading them to an even lower estimation of themselves and their mode of living. And third, they see their social position as allowing no constructive alternative to opposing the favoured circumstances of the more advantaged. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
To alleviate their feelings of anguish and inferiority, they have no choice but to impose a loss on those better placed even at some cost to themselves, unless of course they are to relapse into resignation and apathy. Now, if not to present these conditions, many aspects of a well-ordered society of to mitigate. It is clear that, although it is a psychological state, social institutions are a basic instigating cause. However, the contract conception of justice supports the self-esteem of the citizens generally more firmly than other political principles. In the public forum each person is treated with the respect due to a sovereign equal; and everyone has the same basic rights that would be acknowledged in an initial situation regarded as fair. The members of the community have a common sense of justice and they are bound by ties of civic friendship. Obedience implies a higher attitude than mere submission, for obedience has its root in good intent; submission may spring from selfishness or meanness of spirit. Though obedience and submission both imply restraint on one’s own will, we are obedient only from a sense of right; submissive from a sense of necessity. Honour expressed an act or attitude of an inferior towards a superior. When applied to things it is taken in the sense of holding honour. Thus, in honouring the law, we look upon it as something which is above selfish desires or indulgences. To sustain signifies to hold up; to keep from falling. To sustain the law, therefore, is to refrain from saying or doing anything which will weaken it or make it ineffective. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
We obey the law from a sense of right. We honour the law because of its necessity and strength to society. We sustain law by keeping it in good repute. This is in our connection with stability. The greater advantages of some are in return for compensating benefits for the less favoured; and no one supposes that those who have a larger share are ore deserving from a moral point of view. Happiness according to virtue is rejected as a principle of perfection: regardless of the excellences that persons or associations display, their claims to social resources are always adjudicated by principles of mutual justice. For all these reasons the less fortune have no cause to consider themselves inferior and the public principles generally accepted underwrite their self-assurance. The disparities between themselves and others, whether absolute or relative, should be easier for them to accept than in other forms of polity. Turning to the second condition, both the absolute and the relative differences allowed in a well-ordered society are probably less than those that have often prevailed. Although in theory the difference principle permits indefinitely large inequalities in return for small gains to the less favoured, the spread of income and wealth should not be excessive in practice, given the requisite background institutions. Moreover the plurality of associations in a well-ordered society, each with its secure internal life, tends to reduce the visibility, or at least the painful visibility, of variations in human’s purposes. For we tend to compare our circumstances with others in the same or in a similar group as ourselves, or in positions that we regard as relevant to our aspirations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
The various associations in society tend to divide it into so many noncomparing groups, the discrepancies between these divisions not attracting the kind of attention which unsettles the lives of those less well placed. And this ignoring of differences in wealth and circumstances is made easier by the fact that when citizens do meet one another, as they must in public affairs at least, the principles of equal justice are acknowledged. Moreover in everyday life the natural duties are honoured so that the more advantaged do not make an ostentatious display of their higher estate calculated to demean the condition of those who have less. After all, if the disposing conditions for envy are removed, so probably are those for jealousy, grudgingness, and spite, the converses of envy. When the less fortunate segments of society lack the one the more fortunate will lack the other. Taken together these features of a well-ordered regime diminish the number of occasions when the less favoured are likely to experience their situation as impoverished and humiliating. Even if they have some liability to envy, it may never be strongly envoked. Finally, considering the last condition, it would seem that a well-ordered society as much as any other offers constructive alternatives to hostile outbreaks of envy. The problem of general envy anyway does not force us to reconsider the choice of the principles of justice. As for particular envy, to a certain extent it is endemic to human life; being associated with rivalry, it may exist in any society. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
The more specific problem for political justice is how pervasive are the rancor and jealousy aroused by the quest for office and position, and whether it is likely to distort the justice of institutions. It is difficult to settle this latter in the absence of the more detailed knowledge of social forms available at the legislative stage. However, there sees to be no reason why the hazards of particular envy should be worse in a society regulated by justice as fairness than by any other conception. The principles of justice again seems relatively stable. A question has been asked man times. In the case of a conflict between requirements made by the law revealed by the word of God, and those imposed by the secular law, which of these authorities would members of the Church be bound to obey? The word of God is to come first. So essentially, God should be in and influence the government because the number one rule of God is to be honest and if one cannot honestly enforce the law, they have no right in government. In all civilized nations the people are accorded the right to pray, and this right is assured by what maybe properly called a common law of humankind. No earnest soul is cut off from communion with one’s God; and with such an open channel of communication, relief from burdensome laws and redress from grievances may be sought from the power that holds control of nations. “Bad laws, if they exist, should be repleaded as soon as possible; still, while they continue in force, they should be religiously observed,” reports President Abraham Lincoln. This is the view of the Church. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
While there are many forms of equality, and egalitarianism admits of degrees, there are conceptions of justice that are recognizably equalitarian, even though certain significant disparities are permitted. The two principles of justice fall under this heading. The different conception of equality which they define is acknowledged on the supposition that envy does not exist. For behold, you should not fear humans more than God, you should be faithful and God will extend His arm, and He will be with you in every time of trouble. Children of God are chosen to do the work of the Lord. Repent of that which thou hast done, and thou art still chosen, and art again called to the world. Except thou doest this, thou shalt become as other humans, and have no more gift. When thou delivers up that which God has given thee sight and power to translate thou delivers up that which is sacred into the hands of a wicked human who depends upon one’s own judgment, and boasts in one’s own wisdom; and this is the reason that thou will lose thy privileges for a season. Nevertheless, God’s work shall go forth, for, inasmuch as the knowledge of the Saviour has come unto the World, through the testimony of the Jewish people, even so shall the knowledge of a Saviour come unto our people, and to the Americans through the testimony of their fathers. And this testimony shall come to the knowledge of all. For this very purpose are these plates preserved that the promises of the Lord might be fulfilled, which He made to His people. And the Americans might come to the knowledge of their fathers, and they might know the promise of the Lord. And they may believe the gospel and rely upon the merits of Jesus Christ, and be glorified through faith in his name and through their repentance they might be saved. I cancel every demonic assignment against you and your purpose. The plans of the enemy will not prevail. In Jesus’ name, Amen. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Joseph Smith was very sorry he had been unfaithful, and he humbled himself before God, determining to try harder to keep all of the Lord’s commandments. Later, within a month, the gift and the plates were returned to Joseph, but he was not allowed to translate the same record again. By revelation Joseph was told that wicked people had the lost manuscript. The Lord, Jesus Christ said; Behold, Satan, has put it into their hearts to alter the words, because they have altered the words, they read contrary from that which you translated and caused to be written. On this wise the Devil has sought to lay a cunning plan, the he may destroy this work. Verily I say unto you, that I will not suffer that Satan shall accomplish his evil design in this thing. Behold, they say and think in their hearts, We will see if God has given him power to translate, if so, he will also give him power again; and if he bringeth forth the same words, behold, we have the same with us, and we have altered them. Therefore, they will not agree, and we will say that he has lied in his words, and that he has no gift, and that he has no power; therefore, we will destroy him, and also the work. Behold, I say unto you, that you shall not translate again those words which have gone forth out of your hands. For, behold, if you should bring forth the same words, they will say that you have contradicted yourself. And, behold, they will publish his, and Satan will harden the hearts of the people to stir them up to anger against you, that they will not believe my words. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The Lord told Joseph that the part of the record he had translated which had been lost (about one hundred and sixteen pages) was a shorted story of the Nephite record; and that the golden plates also contained the complete story. Joseph was told he should translate the full record rather than the shortened one he had previously translated: the Lord said: I will not suffer that they shall destroy my work; yea, I will show unto them that y wisdom is greater than the cunning of the Devil. Behold, I am Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I came unto my own, and my own received me not. I am He who said, Other sheep have I which are not of this fold, unto my disciples, and many there were that understood me not. And I will show unto this people, that I had other sheep, and I will also bring to light my gospel, which was ministered unto them. And this I do, that I may establish my gospel, that there may not be so much contention. Yea, Satan doth stir up the hearts of the people to contention, concerning the points of my doctrine; and in these things they do err, for they do wrest the Scriptures, and do not understand them. Therefore, I will unfold unto them this great mystery; for behold, I will gather them as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, if they will not harden their hearts. Behold, this is my doctrine: Whosoever repenteth and cometh unto me, the same is my church Whosoever is of my church, and endureth of my church to the end, one will I establish upon my Rock. And now, remember the words of your Redeemer, your Lord, and your God. Amen. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
The important of separating envy from the moral feelings can be seen from several examples. Suppose first that envy is held to be pervasive in poor less affluent societies. The reason for this, it may be suggested, is the general belief that the aggregate of social wealth is more or less fixed, so that one person’s gain is another’s loss. The social system is interpreted, it might be said, as a naturally established and unchangeable zero-sum game. Now actually, if this belief were widespread and the stock of goods were generally thought to be given, then a strict opposition of interests would be assumed to obtain. In this case, it would be correct to think that justice requires equal shares. Social wealthy is not viewed as the outcome of mutually advantageous cooperation and so there is no fair basis for an unequal division of advantages. What is said to be envy may in fact be resentment which might or might not prove to be justified. Dr. Freud’s speculations about the origin of the sense of justice suffer from the same defect. He remarks that this sentiment is the outgrowth of envy and jealousy. As some members of the social group jealously strive to protect their advantages, the less favoured are moved by envy to take them away Eventually everyone recognizes that they cannot maintain their hostile attitudes toward one another without injury to themselves. Thus as a compromise they settle upon the demand of equal treatment. The sense of justice is a reaction-formation: what was originally jealousy and envy is transformed into a social feeling, the same sense of justice that insists upon equality for all. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
Dr. Freud believes that this process is exemplified in the nursey and in many other social circumstances. Yet the plausibility of one’s account assumes that the initial attitudes are correctly described. With a few changes, the underlying features of the example he depicts correspond to those of the original position. That persons have opposing interests and seek to advance their own conception of the god is not at all the same thing as their being moved by envy and jealousy. As we have seen, this sort of opposition gives rise to the circumstances of justice. Thus if children compete for the attention and affection of their parents, to which one might say they justly have an equal claim, one cannot assert that their sense of justice springs form jealousy and envy. Certainly children are often envious and jealous; and no doubt their moral notions are so primitive that the necessary distinctions are not grasped by them. However, waiving these difficulties, we could equally well say that their social feelings arise from resentment, from a sense that they are unfairly treated. And similarly one could say to conservative writers that it is mere grudgingness when those better circumstances reject the claims of the less advantaged to greater equality. However, this contention also calls for careful argument. None of these charges and countercharges can be given credence without first examining the conceptions of justice sincerely held by individuals and their understanding of the social situation in order to see how far these claims are indeed founded on these motives. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
None of these remarks is intended to deny that the appeal to justice is often a mask for envy. What is said to be resentment may really be rancor. However, rationalizations of this sort present a further problem. In addition to showing that a person’s conception of justice is not itself founded on envy, we must determine whether the principles of justice cited in one’s explanation are sincerely held as this is shown in their being applied by one to other cases in which one is not involved, or even better, in which one would suffer a loss from their being followed. Dr. Freud means to asset more than the truism that envy and jealousy, and that without this energy, there would be no (or much less) desire to give justice. Conceptions of justice have few attractions for us other than those deriving from these and similar feelings. It is claim that is supported by erroneously conflating envy and resentment. Unhappily the problem of the other special psychologies must go untouched. They should in any case be treated in much the same way as envy. One tries to assess the configuration of attitudes toward risk and uncertainty, domination and submission, and the like, that just institutions are likely to generate, and then to estimate whether they are likely to render theses institutions unworkable or ineffective. We also need to ask whether, from the point of view of the persons in the original position, the conception chosen is acceptable or at least tolerable whatever our special proclivities may turn out to be. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
The most favourable alternative is that which allows a place for all these different tendencies insofar as they are likely to be encouraged by a just basic structure. There is a division of labour so to speak between persons with contrary inclinations. Of course some of these attitudes may earn a premium in the way that certain trained abilities do, as for example the willingness to be adventuresome and to take unusual risks. However, if so, the problem is o all fours with the return to natural assets and it is covered by the discussion of distributive shares. What a social system must not do clearly is to encourage propensities and aspirations that it is bound to repress and disappoint. So long as the pattern of special psychologies elicited by society either supports its arrangements or can be reasonably accommodated by them, there is no need to reconsider the choice of a conception of justice. I believe, though I have not shown, that the principles of justice as fairness pass this test. When people can measure the extent of their freedom in two or three paces, and realize for the first time in their lives they have nothing else to do, but sit on a bunk, as they say passes into night and they continue to sit there because they are in prison—that is when it dawns on them how important freedom is. Even the children of a wealthy family, children of charismatic, gregarious politicians may suddenly find themselves stripped of everything that has propped up their egos. All their plans, friends, their busy work schedule, all their carefully cultivated followers will be gone, and replaced by the sheer loneliness and boredom of the prison cell and the venomous hostility of their guards. And they will keep waiting for justice, for a deal. Surely the United States Constitution could not simply leave them to rot in prison! #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Imagine half a year going by before you are confronted with any charges. Then a fraudulently concocted murder case is brought, and a rigged military court condemns you to death. This is a bad dream, for the real reason for your imprisonment is the President is a communist and has lust for money and greed for power. Then imagine within his or her two-term limit as president due to expire in a few short weeks, the president declares martial law, granting him or herself almost unlimited powers. Then he or she can have you and other political opponents thrown into prison. The president may never intend to leave office—and may be determined never to let a popular rival out to silence him or her. Prison has the bewildering effect on many, which causes them to lose all sense of direction and perspective. One may become better not only at the president, but at the World, even at God. Injustice causes some to hate everyone and their prison guard may goad on an individual. Imagine if sometimes they put your dinner plate on the ground and let a mongrel dog wolf part of it down; then, kicking the dog aside, they give you what and left, and if you do not eat it, you get placed on suicide watch. In a matter of weeks, this could cause an individual to lose forty pounds, suffer two heart attacks. And when you are not longing for revenge, you want to die. However, much like Joseph Smith, if you keep your faith in God, He will show you that such losses are not in vain as you find your true life in Christ. What is this suffering is what draws you closer to the Lord and saves you from a life of eternal flames in the pits of hell? Therefore, continue to search for meaning in life. Find great inspiration in the Holy Bible to motivate your life and struggle for your country. Then, even if your prison is physical, or only in your mind, kneel in your jail cell and give your life to Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Even if you are overcome with grief for your anger towards God, please beg for forgiveness. There is a close connection between frequent and solid spiritual experiences between us and the development of faith in the elaborate and creative purposes of God. This is derived from the close connection between Father and child because we are here with God now, needing Him and He says, “I am thinking of you,” and even though we may not be able to see God, we are having Him as part of our current experience, even when we are unaware. The fortune individual will have had many times when one was with God but not are of Him except for the security of knowing that He was there when needed. We are fortune because our environment is fulfilling one of the essentials needed if one is to have highly developed creativity. Because we have somehow had God there when He was not an obvious part of our experience, one can discover the Lord after we think He is absent (from experience) for a while. The individual will have had the experience of tolerating God’s absence without having to feel the terror that He might be lost forever. As we build our faith our experience will flicker between “God here when He is not here,” and “God not here when He is here.” One has thereby discovered that one can hold on to a concept—the symbol—which stands for the available God—has become pleasantly and interestingly established. We can play peekaboo with it. We can make the symbol happen while waiting for God to come along. The symbol can fill the interval of waiting, a small space of time. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
The symbol stands for God—it stands for “You who normally come soon after I realize that I need You. Something arouses in my mind, an anticipation, a phantasy of something good. Then there is a small gap an absence, an interval of time. Then You came.” All one’s viewpoints, one’s life, most of all one’s bitterness—all will change. One will have a sense that life has suddenly moved into a different channel with another purpose. It is for our doubting hearts to believe that spiritual power—which is peaceful, prayerful, humane, forgiving, willing to suffering on the side of the poor and oppressed—can change society. We know that the gospel affects the lives of individuals, but can it make an impact on institutions and governments, where the heartless realities of power pierce like a knife? It is hard to fathom this. Nevertheless, it can happen. It does happen. One can never quite calculate how one conversation in a mental or physical prison cell may set in motion a train of events to shake a nation. Many people in prisons want to die. However, when they find Christ, they acquire a new maturity, and, though one may also retain their natural ebullience, a relative serenity that have never had before manifests. Some people will sense an individual has undergone something like a religious conversion as a result of years of injustice inflicted in a cell or in their own community. And indeed they have, but it will take away none of their heartfelt concern for their nation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
In countries that suffer from communism, the president uses martial law as a cover while they rape the country. Leaders and their business cronies have been known to bleed nations dry, making huge profits through monopoly powers and putting the money into New York real estate and Swiss banks. Meanwhile, half the working population cannot find jobs. The ugly scabs of the slums, many without running water or flushing toilets, spread across Sacramento and other cities. Marxist guerrillas are quickly gaining around, and the some in positions of authority, riven by corruption, seem unable to stop them. They may find it easier to savage poor peasants than to fight the Communists. Things may even reach a pint where anyone who helps the poor will be under suspicion. Army units have arrested, killed, and tortured even Catholic priests and nuns who have chosen to work with the desperately poor in other countries. While in America, some people, even the rich and famous, are given bonuses and jobs to help extort those suffering injustices. A few Catholics have, it is true, take the side of the Marxists, but the vast majority simply minister in the name of Jesus to those in need. Between the Marxist insurgency and a president who becomes a dictator, there is little room in the middle. Some people, even many in America, have seen the ruthless side of communism—after all they suffer and lose their lives just because of who they are. It is true, one can fight hatred with a greater hatred, but it is more effective to fight hatred with greater Christian love. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
Do much soul searching and pursue your freedom struggle through the path of nonviolence, fully cognizant that this ay be the longer and more arduous road. And you may suffer solitary confinement once again, and possibly death. However, by taking the road of revolution, how many lives, other then one’s, will have to be sacrificed? Humans are ordained to eternal life through the providence of God, it likewise is part of that providence to permit some to fall away from that end; this is called reprobation. Thus, as predestination is a part of providence, in regard to those ordained to eternal salvation, so reprobation is a part of providence in regard to those who turn aside from that end. Hence reprobation includes the will to permit a person to fall into sin, and to impose the punishment of damnation on account of that sin. Symbols can stand for what will come. However, equally, they can stand for what may come, what may not come, or what will not come again. All kinds of conceptual processes can fill the interval between the moment when we have phantasy of something and the moment of finding something. Transitional objects and other symbols appear where there had been either nothing, or an experience of something not there. God loves all humans and all creatures, inasmuch as He wishes them all some good; but He does not wish every good to them all. So far, therefore, as He does not wish this particular good—namely, eternal life—He is said to hate or reprobate them. Reprobation different in its causality from predestination. This atter is the cause of what is expected in the future life by predestined—namely, glory—and of what is received in this life—namely grace. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Reprobation, however, is not the cause of what is in the present, namely sin; but it is the cause of abandonment by God. It is the cause, however, of what is assigned in the future—namely, eternal punishment. However, guilt proceeds from the free-will of the person who is reprobated and deserted by grace. In this way, the word of the prophet is true—namely, “Destruction is thy own, O Israel.” Reprobation by God does not take away from the power of the person reprobated. Hence, when it is said that the reprobated cannot obtain grace, this must not be understood as implying absolute impossibility: butt only conditional impossibility: as was said above does not do away with the liberty of choice. Whence, although anyone reprobated by God cannot acquire grace, nevertheless, that one falls into this or that particular sin comes from the use of one’s free will. Hence is rightly imputed to one as guilt. It is as if it were illuminated through a succession of continuously changing filters. You discover that the first phase of your involvement was no more than a prelude or an overture before the curtain vanished. You come to see that sin began by enticing you with an illusion—the illusion of a light-filled hedonistic joy, evil disguised by sun-drenched window—and to accept that what you are in fact confronted with is nothing more or less than the successive layers of the thinnest of honey-comb marks laid down gently in whispers of lies upon the canvas surface. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
However, when the curtain has risen and the any the painting of lies continues to such your eyes into itself, it will engulf your soul with its entertainment. The uniform skin of God’s grace evaporates in part because in tenuous existence came about only through the adhering to God’s commandments and your organization of forms of faith, which was a shimmering ray of love inviting the Holy Ghost in your temple. However, as this shimmer disintegrates, it gives way to billowing and boundless hazes of black smoke, to seemingly limitless vistas of your soul space. It is the duty of citizens of any country to remember that they have individua responsibilities, and that they must operate within the law of the country in which they have chosen to live. No member of the Church can be accepted as in good standing whose way of life is one of rebellion against the established order of decency and obedience to law. We cannot be in rebellion against the law and be in harmony with the Lord, for He has commanded us to “be subject to the powers that be, until He reigns whose right it is to reign,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.22. And one of these days He is going to come. The exception to this principle would be when the Lord directs His people through His prophets to take an opposing stand to government. Otherwise they recognize the established authority of government. Remember that the Lord holds all of us responsible for our conduct here. He held our father Adam responsible for his conduct, but no more than He does us, in proportion to the station we hold. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
The kings of the Earth will have to give an account to God, for their conduct in a kingly capacity. Kings are heads of nations, governors are heads of provinces; so are fathers or husbands governors of their own houses, and should act accordingly. Because some regard the theory and practice of one’s subject from the inside, they mystic can discuss it with a correctness and authority which most critics do not possess because they are outside it. They are largely in the dark about it—one is actually in the light. Those who has never felt it in themselves nor seen in demonstrated in others cannot understand the blessedness of such a state. Because they are unready for it, they cannot endure such an experience. The peace it imparts is too impersonal and would suffocate them. The detachment which it creates makes the Worldly life seem less important and is too frightening. The recognition that this experience does happen is increasingly rapidly in Western counties but in the East, it has never been doubted. The criticism that mystical experience is subjective and illusory is being dropped, as it ought to be Those who have never experienced this state yet venture to criticize it as illusory are dealing with mere words, not facts. If the ordinary human seldom gets these subtler experiences it is because one’s nature is too coarse, one’s mind too physically based, one’s focus too personal to permit one to receive them. Deep within one’s own heart, hidden within one’s own consciousness, every person carries all the evidence for the truth of these teachings that one is ever likely to need. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
That arrogance which denies Heaven to the unorthodox does not trouble the mystic. One finds Heaven here in this life, now before the transition of death. At such times, unexpected and unsought though they are, one feels the nearness of God, the love of God, the reality of God. Whoever ventures to call them delusions s oneself deluded. Those who are dead are never gone: they are there in the shimmering light. The dead are not under the Earth: they are there in the blue sky, they are in the clouds that drift above, they are in the rain that falls, they are in the sun that shines, they are in the moon the beams, they are in the trees that provide shade, they are in the crowd, the dead are not dead. Those who are dead are never gone, they are in your heart, they are in the eyes of an innocent child, they are in the flames in your fireplace. They are in the forest, they are in the house, they are not dead. When the Ark rested, Moses said: Mayest Thou, O Lord, dwell among the myriads of the families of America. Arise, O Lord, unto Thy sanctuary, Thou, and the Ark of Thy strength. Let Thy priest be clothed with salvation; and Thy faithful ones exult. For the sake of David, Thy servant, reject not Thine anointed. I have given your good teaching; forsake not My Torah. It is a Tree of Life to them that hold fast to it, and everyone who upholds it is happy. Its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace. Turn us unto Thee, O Lord, and we shall return; renew our days as of Heaven. This nation and all nations, together with president, queens, kings, emperors, judges, and all humans, righteous and wicked, have go to go into the spirit World and stand before the bar of God. They have got to give an account of the deeds done in the body. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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Even the Truth Can Spread and Not Only the Popular Lie!
It is easy enough to praise humans for the courage of their convictions. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the bravery of this confusion. The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any. We all learn by experience but some of us have to go to summer school. The malignant forms of aggression—sadism and necrophilia—are not innate; hence, they can be substantially reduced when the socioeconomic conditions are replaced by conditions that are favourable to the full development of human’s genuine needs and capacities: to the development of human self-activity and human’s genuine need and capacities: to the development of human self-activity and human’s creative power as its own end. Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple human self-activity and all factors that make humans into a psychic cripple turn one also into a sadist or a destroyer. Humans, have in our day become a source of suspicion and distrust of all against all. Credulity is one our worst enemies, but that is the makeshift the neurotic always resorts to in order to quell the doubter in one’s own heart or to conjure one out of existence. The result is that modern humans know oneself only in so far as one can become conscious of oneself—a capacity largely dependent on environment conditions, knowledge and control of which necessitated of suggested certain modifications of one’s original instinctive tendencies. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Their consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the World around one, and it is to the latter’s peculiarities that one must adapt one’s psychic and technical resources. This task is so exacting, and its fulfilment so profitable, that one forgets oneself in the process, losing sight of one’s instinctual nature and putting one’s own conception of oneself in place of one’s real being. In this way one slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual World where the products of one’s conscious activity progressively take the place of reality. The Communist revolution has debased humans far lower than collective psychology has done, because it robs one of one’s freedom not only in the social but in the moral and spiritual sphere. Aside from the political difficulties, this entailed a great psychological disadvantage for the West that had already made itself unpleasantly felt in the days of German Nazism: we can now point a finger at the shadow. Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. If one truly responds to humans and their future, id est, concernedly and “responsibly,” one can respond only by faith or by despair. Rational faith as well as rational despair are based on the most thorough, critical knowledge of all the factors that are relevant for the survival of humans. The basis of rational faith in humans is the presence of a real possibility for one’s salvation; the basis for rational despair would be the knowledge that no such possibility can be seen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Most people are quite ready to denounce faith in human’s improvement as unrealistic; but they do not recognize that despair is often just as unrealistic. It is easy to say: “Humans have always been killer.” However, the statement nevertheless is not correct, for it neglects to take into account the intricacies of history of destructiveness. It is equally easy to say, “The desire to exploit others is just human nature”; but again, the statement neglects (or distorts) the facts. In brief, that statement, “Human nature is evil,” is not a bit more realistic than the statement, “Human nature is good.” However, the first statement is much easier to make; anyone who wants to prove human’s evilness finds followers most readily, for one offers everybody an alibi for one’s own sins—and seemingly risks nothing. Yet the spreading of irrational despair is in itself destructive, as all untruth is; it discourages and confuses. Preaching irrational faith or announcing false Messiahs is hardly destructive—it seduces and then paralyzes. The attitude of the majority is neither that of faith nor that of despair, but, unfortunately, that of complete indifference to the future of humans. With those who are not entirely indifferent, the attitude is that of “optimism” or of “pessimism.” They are accustomed to identifying human achievement with technical achievement, human freedom with freedom from direct coercion and the consumer’s freedom to choose between many allegedly different commodities. The dignity, cooperativeness, kindness of the primitive do not impress them; technical achievement, wealth, toughness do. Centuries of rule over technically backward people of different colour have left their stamp on the optimists’ minds. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
How could a “savage” be human and equal, not to speak of superior, to the humans who can fly to the moon—or by pushing a button, destroy millions of living beings? The optimists live well enough, at least for the moment, and they can afford to be “optimists.” Or at least that is what they think because they are so alienated that even the threat to the future of their grandchildren does not genuinely affect them. The “pessimists” are really not very different from the optimists. They live just as comfortably and are just as little engaged. The fate of humanity is as little their concern as it is the optimists’. They do not feel despair; if they did, they would not, and could not, live as contentedly as they do. And while their pessimism functions largely to protect the pessimists from any inner demand to do something, by projecting the idea that nothing can be done, the optimists defend themselves against the same inner demand by persuading themselves that everything is moving in the right direction anyway, so nothing needs to be done. To have faith means to dare, to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the limits of the realistically possible; it is the paradoxical hope to expect the Messiah every day, yet not to lose heart when He has not come at the appointed hour. This hope is not passive and it is not patient; on the contrary, it is impatient and active, looking for every possibility of action within the realm of real possibilities. Least of all is it passive as far as the growth and the liberation of one’s own person are concerned. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
There are several limitations to personal development determined by the social structure. However, those alleged radicals who counsel that no personal change is possible or even desirable within present-day society use their revolutionary ideology as an excuse for their personal resistance to inner change. The situation of humankind today is too serious to permit us to listen to the demagogues—least of all demagogues who are attacked to destruction—or even to the leaders who use only their brains and whose hearts have hardened. Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality humans are endowed with—the love of life. Hate, as a relation to objects is older than love. It derives from the narcissistic ego’s primordial repudiation of the external World. It really seems as though it is necessary for us to destroy some other thing or person in order not to destroy ourselves, in order to guard against the impulsions to self-destruction. A sad disclosure indeed for the moralist! Humans are looked upon as an isolated system, driven by two impulses: one to survive (ego instinct) and one to have pleasure by overcoming the tensions that in turn were chemically produced within the body and localized in the “erogenous zones.” However, there is no need for psychoanalysis to be ashamed to speak of love, for religion itself said: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” This, however, is more easily said than done. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Emotional bonds are means of identification. Whatever leads humans to share important interests produces this community of feeling, these identifications. And the structure of human societies is to a large extent based on them. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” It is known throughout the World and is undoubtedly older than Christianity, which puts it forward as its proudest claim. Yet it is certainly not very old; even in historical times it was still strand to humankind. Let us adopt a naïve attitude towards it, as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment. Why should we do it? What good will it do us? However, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection It imposes duties on me for whose fulfillment I must be ready to make sacrifices. If I love someone, one must deserve it in some way. (I leave out of account the use one may be to me in important ways that I an love myself in one; and one deserves it if one is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in one. Again, I have to love one if one is my friend’s son, since the pain my friend would feel if any harm came to one would be my pain too—I should have to share it. However, if one is a stranger to me and if one cannot attract me by any worth of one’s own or any significance that one may already have acquired for my emotional life, it would be for hard for me to love one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them. However, I am to love one (with this universal love) merely because one, too, is an inhabitant of this Earth, like an insect, and Earth-worm or a grass-snake, then I fear that only a small modicum of my love will fall to one’s share—not by any possibility as much as, by the judgment of my reason, I am entitled to retain for myself. The contradiction between death instinct and Eros (fundamental and creative love) confronts humans with a real and truly trading alternative. A real alternative because one can decide to attack and wage war, to be aggressive, and to express one’s hostility because one prefers to do this rather than to be sick. That this alternative is a tragic one hardly needs to be proven. And now we are struck by the significance of the possibility that the aggressiveness may not be able to find satisfaction in the external World because it comes up against real obstacles. If this happens, it will perhaps retreat and increase the amount of self-destructiveness holding sway in the interior. Holding back aggressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness. However, science and learning to control the environment and making is more palatable for habitation and cultivation of agriculture, along with religion and psychology is good for humans. Humans are freed from the tragic choice between destroying either others or oneself, because the energy of destructive instinct is used for the control over nature. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
However, we must ask, can this really be so? Can it be true that destructiveness becomes transformed into constructiveness? What can “control over nature” mean? Taming and breeding animals, gathering and cultivating plants, weaving cloth, building huts, manufacturing pottery, and many more activities including the construction of machines, railroads, airplanes, and skyscrapers. All these acts of constructing, building, unifying, synthesizing, and, indeed, if one wanted to attribute them to one of the two basic instincts, they might be considered as being motivated by Eros rather than by the death instinct. With the possible exception of the killing animals for their consumption and killing humans in war, both of which could be considered as rooted in destructiveness, control, and mastery over nature is not destructive but constructive. The death instinct turns into the destructive instinct when, with the help of special organs, it is directed outwards, on to objects. However, civilization leads to the holding back of aggressiveness and results in physical illness, and this is why so many people go to church, are in therapy, and on psychotropic drugs. Many human beings want to deal with their aggression in health ways and have a peaceful, well-behaved community. The forlorn state of consciousness in our World is due primarily to loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past aeon. The more power humans have over nature, the more one’s knowledge and skill went to one’s head, and the deeper became one’s contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for all irrational data—including the objective psyche, which is everything that consciousness in not. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The Church recommends, in order to maintain society, that we develop more faith. Faith is a gift of grace and depends on human’s good will and pleasure. The seat of one’s faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual’s faith into immediate relation with God. Here each of us must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd? To this question there is an optimistic answer only when the individual is willing to fulfil the demands of rigorous self-examination and self-knowledge. If one does this, one will not only discover some important truths about oneself but will also have gained a psychological advantage: one will have succeeded in deeming oneself worthy of serious attention and sympathetic interests. One will have set one’s hand, as it were, to a declaration of one’s own dignity and taken the first step towards the foundations of one’s consciousness—that is, towards the unconscious, the only available source of religious experiences. This is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in His place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience may be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. When it comes to answering the crucial question that hangs over our time like a threat, the religious person enjoys a great advantage. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The religious person has a clear idea of the way one’s subjective existence is grounded in one’s relation to “God.” God is an anthropomorphic idea whose dynamism and symbolism are filtered through the medium of the unconscious psyche. Anyone who wants to can at least draw near to the source of such experiences, no matter whether one believes in God or not. Exotic races have ceased to be peepshows in ethnological museums. They have become our neighbours, and what was yesterday the private concern of the ethnologist is today a political, social, and psychological problem. We may hope for humans of understanding and humans of good will, and must therefore not grow weary of reiterating those thoughts and insights which are needed. Even the truth can spread and not only the popular lie. Only a fool can permanently disregard the conditions of one’s own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making one an instrument of evil. Harmless and naivete are as little helpful as it would be for a cholera patient and those in one’s vicinity to remain unconscious of the contagiousness of the disease. One the contrary, they lead to the projection of the unrecognized evil in the “other.” This strengthens the opponent’s position in the most effective way, because the projection carries the fear which we involuntarily and secretly feel for our own evil over to the other side and considerably increases the formidableness of one’s threat. What is even worse, our lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil. Here, of course, we come up against ne of the main prejudices of the Christian tradition, and one that is a great stumbling block to our policies. We should, so we are told eschew evil and, if possible, neither touch for mention it. For evil is also the thing of ill omen, that which is tabooed and feared. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
This apotropaic attitude toward evil, and the apparent circumventing of it, flatter the primitive tendency in us to shut our eyes to evil and drive it over some frontier or other, like the Old Testament scapegoat, which was supposed to carry the evil into the wilderness. However, if one can no longer avoid the realization that evil, without human’s ever having chosen it, is lodged in human nature itself, then it bestrides the psychological stage as the equal and opposite partner of good. This realization leas straight to a psychological dualism, already unconsciously prefigured in the political World schism and in the even more unconscious dissociation in modern humans. The dualism does not come from this realization; rather, we are in a split condition to begin with it. It would be an insufferable thought that we had to take personal responsibility for so much guiltiness. We therefore prefer to localize the evil in individual criminals or groups of criminals, while washing our hands in innocence and ignoring the general proclivity to evil. This sanctimoniousness cannot be kept up in the long run, because the evil, as experience shows, lies in humans—unless, in accordance with the Christian view, one is willing to postulate a metaphysical principle of evil. The great advantage of this view is that it exonerates human’s conscience of too heavy a responsibility and foists it off on the devil, in correct psychological appreciation of the fact that humans are much more the victims of their psychic constitution than its inventor. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Considering that the evil of our day puts everything that has ever agonized humankind in the deepest shade, one must ask oneself how it is that, for all our progress in the administration of justice, in medicine and in technology, for all our concern with life and health, monstrous engines of destruction have been invented which could easily exterminate the human race. No one will maintain that the atomic physicists are a pack of criminals because it is to their efforts that we owe that peculiar flower of human ingenuity, the hydrogen bomb. The vast amount of intellectual work that went into the development of nuclear physics was put forth by humans who dedicated themselves to their task with the greatest exertion and self-sacrifice, and whose moral achievement could therefore just as easily have earned them the merit of inventing something useful and beneficial to humanity. However, even though the first step along the road to a momentous invention may be the outcome of a conscious decision, here, as everywhere, the spontaneous idea—the hunch or intuition—plays an important part. In other words, the unconscious collaborates too and often makes decisive contributions. So it is not the conscious effort alone that is responsible for the result; somewhere or other the unconscious, with its barely discernible goals and intentions, has its finger in the pie. If it puts a weapon in your hand, it is aiming at some kind of violence. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Knowledge of the truth is the foremost goal of science, and if in pursuit of the longing for light we stumble upon an immense danger, then one has the impression more of fatality than of premeditation. It is not that present-day humans are capable of greater evil than the humans of antiquity or the primitive. One merely has incomparably more effective means with which to realize one’s propensity to evil. As one’s consciousness has broadened and differentiated, so one’s moral nature has lagged behind. That is the great problem before us today. Reason alone no loner suffices. If only because of their dangerousness, in theory, in lies within the power of reason to desist from experiments of such hellish scope as nuclear fission. However, fear of evil which one does not see in one’s own bosom but always in somebody else’s checks reason every time although everyone knows that the use of this weapon means the certain end of our present human World. The fear of universal destruction may spare us the worst, yet the possibility of it will nevertheless hang over us like a dark cloud so long as no bridge is found across the World-side psychic and political split—a bridge as certain as the existence of the hydrogen bomb. It is in the nature of political bodies always to see evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything one does not know and does not want to know about oneself by foisting it off on somebody else. The perfect have no needs of others, but weakness has, for it seeks support and does not confront its partner with anything that might force one into an inferior position and even humiliate one. When high idealism plays too prominent a role, this humiliation may happen only too easily. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Whenever unjust is uncertain and police spying an terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator State, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units. To counter this danger, the free society needs a bond of an affective nature, a principle of a kind like caritas, the Christian love of your neighbour. However, it is just this love for one’s fellow humans that suffers most of all from the lack of understanding wrought by projection It would therefore by very much in the interest of the free society to give some thought to the question of human relationship from the psychological point of view, for in this resides its real cohesion and consequently its strength. Where love stop, power begins, and violence, and terror. What our age thinks as the “shadow” and inferior part of the psyche contains more than something merely negative. The very fact that through self-knowledge, that is, by exploring our own souls, we come upon the instincts and their World of imagery should throw some light on the powers slumbering in the psyche, of which we are seldom aware so long as all goes well. We are living in what the Greeks called the right moment for a metamorphosis of the gods, of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious within us who is changing. If humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science, coming generations will have to take to account of this momentous transformation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
As at the beginning of the Christian era, so again today we are faced with the problem of general moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical, and social progress. So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern humans. Are they capable of resisting the temptation to use their powers of the purpose of staging a World conflagration? Are humans conscious of the path they are treading, and what the conclusions are that must be drawn from the present World situation and their own psychic situation? Do they know that they are on the point of losing the life-preserving myth of the inner human which Christianity has treasured up for one? Does one realize what lies in store should this catastrophe ever befall one? Is one even capable of realizing that this would in fact be a catastrophe? And finally, does the individual know that one is the makeweight that tips the scales? Happiness and contentment, equability of mind and meaning—fulness of life—these can be experienced only by the individual and not by a State, which, on the one hand, is nothing but a convention agreed to by independent individuals and, on the other, continually threatens to paralyse and suppress the individual. The psychiatrist is one of those who know most about the conditions of the soul’s welfare, upon which so infinitely much depends in the social sum. The social and political circumstances of the time are certainly of considerable significance, but their importance for the weal or woe of the individual has been boundlessly overestimated in so far as they are taken for the sole deciding fact. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
In this respect all our social goals commit the error of overlooking the psychology of the person for whim they are intended and—very often—of promoting only one’s illusions. I hope, therefore that a psychiatrist, who in the course of a long life has devoted oneself to the causes and consequences of psychic disorders, may be permitted to express one’s opinion, in all the modesty enjoined upon one as an individua, about the questions raised by the World situation today. I am neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in love with high ideals, but am merely concerned with the fate of the individual human being—that infinitesimal unit on whom a World depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message aright, even God seeks His goal. Testimony to the existence and reality of the glimpse will be found in the literatures of all peoples through all times. It is not a newly manufactured idea, nor a newly manufactured fancy. A human who denies it is foolish so to limit one’s own possibilities, but one may learn better with time. These glimpses cannot rightly be dismissed by the scientist as merely self-suggested or wholly hallucinatory. Nor can they properly be regarded by the metaphysician as valueless for truth. As human beings we live by experience, and they are personal experiences which help to confirm the truth of the impersonal bases underneath them and which encourage us to continue on the same path. The Overself is a living reality. If the quest were merely an intellectual conception or an emotional fancy, nobody would waste one’s years, one’s endeavours, and one’s energies it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
The Overself is not only a necessary conception of logical thought. It is also a beautiful fact of persona experience. There are three signs, among others, of the Soul’s presence in a Soul-denying generation. They are: moral conscience, artistic imagination, and metaphysical speculation. Criticism which knows only sensuous and intellectual experience can be litter valid here if, indeed, it is not entirely irrelevant. When a human confuses the nature of the mind with its own thoughts, when one is unable properly to analyse consciousness and memory, when one has never practised introspection and meditation successfully, one can know nothing of the soul and may well be sceptical of its existence. That the Overself is not the product of an inflated imagination but has a real existence, is a truth which any human who has the required patience and submits to the indispensable training may verify oneself. It is not a dim abstraction but a real presence. Not a vauge theory but a vital fact. To the human of insight there is something strange, ironic, and yet pathetic in the spectable of those who turn the consciousness and the understanding derived from the Overself against the acknowledgement of Its existence. If one can shed the mummy wrappings of acquired notions, complacent bigotries, and superstitious customs, and look at a problem with fresh eyes, one is more likely to succeed in one’s quest for truth. If one can re-examine the whole meaning of it as though it were a newly discovered problems, one is more likely to move towards it correct solution. If one will refuse to be intimidated by dietary precedent, and begin to rethink the whole matter of eating’s why and wherefore, one will reach astonishing results. For much nonsense about diet has come down to us by ignorant tradition and unthinking inheritance. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
As one draws closer to the soul of things, one comes more into harmony with Nature. And if one is true to one’s instincts, one will eat one’s food more and more as Nature herself produces it. Inferior and even harmful foods have been eaten for so long that most people have become addicted to them and, through habitual use, come to like them. It is true that several of these food have been part of a civilized diet for generations, but the duration of an error does not make it less an error, and does not justify its continuance. It is a fact worthy speculating upon that many groups of early Christians were mystical and had a special diet. Had they not been ousted by the Emperor Constantine—whose imperialistic political purpose they did not serve—from the official Christianity which he (and not Jesus) established, we might today have seen half the Christian World holding a faith in mystical beliefs and eating special diets. The France of Louis XII saw some remnants of those early sects, such as the Albigenses, Montanists, and Camisards—and no less than one third of total population of the country—living on special diets. Luigi Cornaro lived to a hundred in Italy on a strictly limited daily quantity of food. Dr. Josiah Oldfield was nearing his hundred year when I last visited England and attributed the fact to avoiding eating too much, which he termed “the great evil.” He is also an enthusiastic advocate of special diets. In the moment when you feel that actual contact with the One Infinite Life-Power has been made, draw it into the body and let it permeate every part, every organ, and every atom. It will tend to dissolve sickness and drive out disease. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Healing powers are like prayers, they can cross oceans and traverse continents as readily and as speedily as can radio waves or thought. Telepathy is a fact and the basis of this operation. The ministrations of absent healing are most successful when the individual is passive and receptive to them. Hence the work of its power is most effective when the sufferer is sleeping or relaxing. I am the family of the Universe, and with all of us together I do not fear being alone; I can reach out and touch a rock or a hand or dip my feet in water Always there is some body close by, and when I speak I am answered by a plane’s roar or the bird’s whistling or the voice of others in conversation far apart from me When I lie down to sleep, I am in the company of the dark and the starts. Breathe to me, sheep in the meadow. Sun and moon, my father and my fathers brother, shine your light on me. My sister, Earth, hold me up to be blessed. Sun and moon, I smile at you both and spread my arms in affection and lay myself down at full length of the Earth to know I love it too and am never to be separated from it In no way shall death part us. Life up your heads, O ye gates, yea, lift them up, ye everlasting doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is the King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Life up your hears, O ye gates, yes, lift the up, ye everlasting doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who then is the King of glory? The Lord of hosts; He is the King of glory. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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They Shared the Feelings and Belief of the Best Hearts and Wisest Heads of the Seventeenth Century!
As far as aggression is biologically given in human genes, it is not spontaneous, but a defense against threats to human vital interests, that of one’s growth and one’s species’ survival. This defensive aggression was relatively small under certain primitive conditions—when no human was much of a threat to another human. Humans have gone through an extraordinary development since then. It is legitimate to imagine that humans will complete the full circle and construct a society in which no one is threatened: not the child by the parent; not the parent by the superior; no social class by another; no nation by a superpower. To achieve this aim is tremendously difficult for economic, political, cultural, and psychological reasons—and the added difficulty that the nations of the World worship idols—and different idols—and thus do not understand each other, even though they understand each other’s languages. To ignore these difficulties is folly; but if the political and psychological roadblocks are removed, the empirical study of all data shows that a real possibility exists to build such a World in the foreseeable future. The malignant forms of aggression, on the other hand—sadism and necrophilia—are not innate; hence, they can be substantially reduced when the socioeconomic conditions are replaced by conditions that are favourable to the full development of human’s genuine needs and capacities: to development of human self-activity and human’s creative power as its own ends. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple humans, and all factors that make humans into psychic cripples turn the also into a sadist or a destroyer. Witchcraft and sorcery are taboo subject matter. However, witchcraft actually did exist and was widely practiced in seventeenth-century New England, as it was in Europe at that time (and still is, for that matter, among the unlearned majority of humankind). It worked then as it works now in witchcraft societies like those of the West Indies, through psychogenic rather than occult means, commonly producing hysterical symptoms as a result of the victim’s fear, and sometimes, when fear was succeeded by a profound sense of hopelessness, even producing death. The behaviour of the afflicted person was not fraudulent but pathological. They were hysterics, and in the clinical rather than the popular sense of that term. These people were not merely overexcited; they were mentally ill. Furthermore, they were ill long before any clergyman got to them. The general populace did reach that state of public excitement inaccurately called “mass hysteria,” but this was due to the popular fear of witchcraft rather than to the preachings of the clergy. The public excitement continued well after the leadership, both clerical and secular, had called a halt to the witchcraft proceedings. In fact the clergy were, from beginning to end, the chief opponents to the events at Salem, Massachusetts USA. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
In particular, Cotton Mather was anything but the wild-eyed fanatic of tradition. Throughout most of the proceedings, Mr. Mather was a model of restraint and caution, and at one point he went further than any of his colleagues dared go in proposing a method to protect the innocent. The executions at Salem were by no means unique. Belief in witchcraft was quite as common among seventeenth century Anglicans, Quakers, Lutherans, and Catholics as it was among Puritans. Executions for witchcraft reached their height in Western civilization during the seventeenth century and continued in Europe until the end of the following century, more than a hundred years after the outbreak at Salem. Many writers have taken exception to one point or another in the traditional interpretation. The point raised most often has been that witchcraft trials were not at all unusual in the seventeenth century; that they were in fact typical of Western civilization at the time. The Salem outbreak was not due to Puritanism; it is not assignable to any particular temper on the part of our New England ancestors; it is no sign of exceptional bigotry or abnormal superstition. Our forefathers believed in witchcraft, not because they were Puritans, not because they were Colonials, but because they were New Englanders,–but because they were men of their time. They shared the feelings and beliefs of the best hearts and wisest head of the seventeenth century. What more can be asked of them? #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
It is hard to satisfy modern writers on witchcraft, who insist on censuring the sixteenth and seventeenth century on a basis of modern rationalism. If some of these who now sit in judgement on the witch-prosecutors had been witch judges, it is quite certain that no defendant would have escaped. The common scholar as well as the common human has continued to believe that there was something peculiarly puritanical about the Salem trials. Most significantly, a few persons have recognized that image magic was actually employed in Massachusetts, and at least two have wondered whether there might not have been something behind the charges of witchcraft after all. The belief in the supernatural has even led some people to believe that perhaps Adolph Hitler, the most powerful man in Europe, who was admired by many Germans (and not few other people), had special talents and gifts. There are many reports mentioning the magnetic qualities of Hitler’s eyes. People often said that they saw a particular glitter in his eyes that gave them the appearance of great intensity, otherworldliness, and devotion that allowed him to whip up the audience’s emotions, and open the floodgates of his hate. Well-educated and intelligent people were fascinated by him and his extremely wide range of subjects on which Hitler talked with such self-assurance. It was these qualities that entranced a nation and that is why people felt that he may have had some supernatural powers, much like the women in Salem. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
David R. Proper, formerly librarian of Essex Institute, tells us that English professor George Lyman Kitteridge of Harvard University suspected that there might have been witchcraft practiced at Salem. Early in the year 1692 several girls of Salem Village (now Danvers), Massachusetts, began to sicken and display alarming symptoms. The most disturbing and most frequent of these symptoms was convulsive fits: fits so grotesque and so violent that eyewitnesses agreed the girls could not possibly be acting. “Their motions in the fits,” wrote Reverend Deodat Lawson, “are so preternatural, both as to the manner, which is so strange as a well person could not screw their body into; and as to the violence also it is preternatural, being much beyond the ordinary force of the same person when they are in their right mind.” The Reverend John Hale of Beverly confirmed Lawson’s description. “Their arms, necks, and back,” he wrote, “were turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or natural disease to effect.” There were other symptoms almost equally alarming: temporary loss of hearing, speech, and sight; loss of memory, so that some girls could not recall what had happened to them in their fits; a choking sensation in the throat; loss of appetite. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Later there were terrifying hallucinations; they saw spectors who tormented them in a variety of ingenious and cruel ways. They felt themselves pinched and bitten, and often there were actual marks upon their skin. Dr. William Griggs of Salem Village—produced a diagnosis. “The evil hand,” he announced, “is upon them”; the girls were victims of malefic witchcraft. The diagnosis was in no way unusual. The overwhelming majority of seventeenth-century physicians, like other learned men, believed in witchcraft and considered it the cause of some of the diseases. Sir Thomas Brown shared the same opinion, “That these swooning fits were natural, and nothing else but what they call the mother, but only heightened to a great excess by the subtlety of the Devil, co-operating with the malice of these which we term witches, at whose instance he doth these villainies.” “The mother” was the common abbreviation for “the suffocation of the mother,” one of the seventeenth-century English terms for hysteria; it referred to the choking sensation in the throat that was one of the commoner systems. Thus, Sir Thomas Browne was entirely correct in his identification of the illness, and it is quite possible that Dr. Griggs, too, was right in whatever identification he made of the Salem symptoms. What is more surprising is that Dr. Griggs was probably also correct in his identification of the cause. It does seem to have been witchcraft that was responsible for the girls’ afflictions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Witchcraft is not easy to define, because it is not, like the major formal religions, a coherent body of belief. However, in the New World civilization since prehistoric times there has been a loosely grouped body of magical lore—charms, spells, and so forth—having to do primarily with fertility and infertility, and with healthy and sickness, as well as a series of more marginal concerns, including the foretelling of the future. If tenuous, such lore has obvious connections with pre-Christian fertility worship, whose tutelary deity was a fertility god. Probably the commonest of such gods has been the deified sun, but the next most common was the deified herd animal, the cow, or, more often (because of his reputation for lechery) the goat. Half human and half bestial, with horns and cloven hooves, he appeared as Dionysus or Bacchus, the chief fertility god of the classical World, and was also to be found in the pantheons of northern Europe. Apparently the early Christians thought him the most abominable of all the pagan deities; they gave his attributes, his horns and cloven hooves, to the Devil, adding to these the wings of the fallen Angel. That he was once an extraordinarily powerful god cannot be doubted; there are instances of his survival in pre-Christian form as late as the twentieth century. A traveler in southern Ireland during the nineteen thirties reported seeing villagers dance in a ring around a goat those horns and hooves had been painted gold. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
They informed him that on the coming Sunday they would roast and eat the goat, because “they had done it always.” I myself have seen one survival of the horned god: the Austrian Krampus. He has now degenerated into a bogeyman for children. Black and furry, with horns and a contorted face, he is the companion of St, Nicholas, and attends to bad children while St. Nicholas attends the good. The horned god’s power may also be seen in the fact that medieval and renaissance artists frequently forgot to give him his Christian attribute, the fallen Angel’s wins, but never forgot his horns, the attribute that made him a fertility god. This is true not only of provincial works of art but also of those created for the centers of Western civilization. In the dome of the baptistery at Florence for example, is a mosaic “Last Judgment,” and at the center of its Hell sits Devil who is wingless but conspicuously horned. The same is trye of the Devil in Giotto’s “Last Judgment” in the Arena Chapel in Padua. If the tutelary deity of witchcraft was deified herd animal, this does not mean that everyone who has used a charm was a formal worshipper of Satan. Nevertheless, not much more than two centuries ago everyone who used a charm believed one was making an appeal to dangerous occult forces, and at possible peril to one’s soul. However, the degree of peril was relative, and proportionate to the degree of witchcraft which like murder, comes in three degrees. The first is the practice of white magic—charms or spells used for benevolent purposes. Carrying a rabbit’s foot (the rabbit, like the goa, is notorious for its fertility) is white magic. So is nailing a horseshoe over the door (the open end must be upward, so the shape will suggest the horns of the herd animal). #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Since the intention was innocent, the practice of white magic was seldom a cause for official concern. It was, of course, an appeal to occult forces that were specifically non-Christian, and as such it could, and sometimes did, draw a stern verbal rebuke from the clergy. However, that was all. The second degree of witchcraft is black magic—magic used maliciously—and in the seventeenth century black magic was very serious indeed; it was an appeal to the Prince of Evil in order to accomplish evil. The third degree is pact, where the witch is no longer merely invoking the Devil’s assistance through one’s charms and spells, but actually believes one has made a contract to serve him. The penalties for witchcraft were relatively light in the early years of Christian history. In the seventh century Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Liber Poentientialis, considered the penance appropriate to a person who has been imitating “a stage or a bull; that is, making oneself into a wild animal and dressing in the skin of a herd animal, and putting on the heads of beasts.” To “those who in such wise transform themselves into the appearance of a wild animal” he assigned “penance for three years because this is devilish.” At this time paganism was still so widespread and Christianity so new that, according to the Venerable Bede, King Redwald of East Anglia “had in the same temple an altar to sacrifice to Christ and another to offer victims to demons.” Elements of paganism remained strong throughout the Middle Ages, inside the church as well as out. In 1282 the priest of Inverkeithing led a fertility dance around the churchyard. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
And Giraldus Cambrensis (ca. 1146-ca. 1220) reported, “though I say it with tears,” that there were priests who celebrate “masses over images of wax, to curse someone.” The remedy for such an appalling situation, Giraldus thought was to ordain fewer priests and more care in their selection. His advice, of course, was not followed, and members of the clergy continued to practice black arts as late as the eighteenth century. Toward the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance both church and state began to take witchcraft more seriously. The crucial century was the fifteenth, which saw a number of important trials, including those of Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais, and the Duchess of Gloucester. At the end of this century, in 1490, Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) was published. The authors were James Sprenger and Henry Kramer, two German Dominicans, and their book published with the Papal Bull by which Innocent VIII gave them jurisdiction as Inquisitors for the Germanic countries. Malleus gave a thorough definition of witchcraft with rules on how to investigate, try, and judge cases of witchcraft. It remained an important work for more than two hundred years; Increase Mather knew of it and referred to it. The publication of Malleus Maleficarum gives us a convenient date for opening of that general war against the Devil which occupied all Christendom during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The full horror of that warfare will never be known in all of its detail. Even the statistics of convicted witches who were executed vary widely from one authority to another. However, it is clear that the battle reached its height during the first half of the seventeenth century, when, for example, approximately nine hundred witches were burned in the single city of Bamberg, and approximately five thousand in the single province of Alsace. It was Boyle who proposed that English miners be interviewed as to whether they “meet with any subterraneous demons; and if they do, in what shape and manner they appear; what they portend, and what they do. Newton, the greatest scientist of his age, spent more of his time on the occult than he did in the study of physics. He explicated, for example, apocalyptic passages in the Bible, and interpreted the measurements of Solomon’s temple, hoping in both cases that a mystic reading of the scriptures would lead him to the inmost secrets of the Universe. We should remember also that the seventeenth century firmly believed in a dualistic Universe: in a material or visible World, and a spiritual or invisible Worlds as well. Heaven was still a concrete reality, as were the Angels who inhabited it; so was Hell and its Devil. As John Locke argued in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding: “If this notion of immaterial spirit may have, perhaps, some difficulties in it not easily to be explained, we have therefore no more reason to deny or doubt the existence of such spirits, than we have to deny or doubt the existence of body; because the notion of body is cumbered with some difficulties very hard, and perhaps impossible to be explained or understood by us.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Like other learned men of his time, Locke not only believed in a World of spirits, but that the spirits can appear in this material World: “that Spirits can assume to themselves bodies of different bulk, figure, and conformations of parts.” To be sure, Locke warned that “universal certainty” concerning the World of spirits was beyond us; we could know it, he thought, only as it impinges on our senses. However, that, of course, is precisely what was thought to happen in witchcraft. Thomas Hobbes was a skeptic, but his skepticism was rather different in character from that of the nineteenth or twentieth century. “As for witches,” he wrote in his Leviathan, “I think not that their witchcraft is any real power; but yet that they are justly punished, for the false belief they have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can; their trade being nearer to a new religion than to a craft or science.” (The last clause is remarkably perceptive, although it was, of course, survivals of old religion rather than anything new that were to be found in witchcraft.) If you had been sticking pins in your neighbour’s image or casting spells on his cow, you would not have wanted Thomas Hobbes to be your judge. He would not have believed in your occult powers, but he would have hanged you anyway, for your heresy and malice. We must bear in mind that in a society which believes in witchcraft, it works. If you believe in witchcraft and you discover that someone has been melting your wax image over a slow fire or muttering charms over your nail-parings, the probability is that you will get extremely sick. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
To be sure, your symptoms will be psychosomatic rather than organic. However, the fact that they are obviously not organic will make them only more terrible, since they will seem the result of malefic and demonic power. So it was in seventeenth-century Europe, and so it was in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. The hideous convulsive fits were thought to be the result of witches and demons wrenching the bodies of their victims into tortuous postures. The loss of hearing, speech, sight, appetite, and memory were deprivations caused by Satan himself. The contradiction of the throat—the globus hystericus—was seen as an attempt by demons to make the victim swallow occult poisons. And when she swallowed rapidly and her belly welled (what s actually involved here is a kind of accelerated ulcer formation), it was thought the demons had succeeded. When blisters appeared upon the skin (many skin diseases are functional rather than organic), they were thought to have been raised by brimstone out of Hell. Many of these symptoms, including the skin lesions, would pass fairly rapidly. Cotton Mather, who was a Fellow of the Royal Society, a former medical student, and a thorough and careful observer, remarked more than once on the surprising rapidity with which “witch-wounds” healed. However, other symptoms would persist. And a new fit would bring a repetition of the old afflictions, or new ones equally alarming. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The cause of these hysterical symptoms, of course, was not witchcraft itself but the victim’s fear of it, and that is why so many innocent persons were executed. It is impossible now, and was in many instances impossible then, to tell how many of the persons executed for witchcraft were actually guilty of practicing it. It is surely no exaggeration to say that the majority, even the vast majority, were innocent victims of hysterical fears. However, we should again be wary of converting a statistical truth into a general principle. While it is clearly true that the majority of persons executed for witchcraft were innocent, it is equally true that some of them, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, were guilty. For those who look back on it, the Victorian age seems to be invested with a peculiar quality of difference—heightened by tis relative proximity in time—that is reflected in its ghost. It was an age shaped, perhaps more than any other previous period, by the forces of transition. In 1884, Mrs. Winchester left New Haven, Connecticut, and the graves of her husband and only child, moved to San Jose, California, and began the obsession that was to last for the rest of her life. She purchased an unfinished eight-room farmhouse outside the small agricultural town, and for the next 38 years, the sound of construction on Mrs. Winchester’s mansion never stopped. With the shadow of change falling across virtually every area of life and thought, the receding past became a focus for anxiety, and in literature the ghost story offered a way of anchoring the past to an unsettled present by operating in a continuum of life and death. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Mrs. Winchester hired carpenters to work around the clock building and rebuilding room after room, as the spirits—or her mood—directed. The house was furnished with the finest materials and was a showcase of Victorian elegance and taste. Mrs. Winchester passed away peacefully in her sleep on September 5, 1922, and work on the still uncompleted mansion stopped. Why did Mrs. Winchester build the World’s most beautiful and bizarre mansion? Was she following the advice of psychics who told her to provide a home for the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifles? Was she told she would live forever, so long as construction never stopped? We may never know Mrs. Winchester’s real motivations, since she took the secret with her to her grace. So we leave to you to decide for yourself the mystery of the Winchester Mystery House. In the ghost story, obligations do not cease with death, and the past is never a closed book. What has been can be again, though often terribly transformed. For a progressive age (progressing to what?), the idea of a vindictive past held an especial potential for terror. In personal terms, ghosts were obvious, though still potent, images of the lost past—past sins, past promises, past attachments, past regrets—and could be used to confront, and exorcize, the demons of guilt and fear. We know that we are to be shown a climatic interaction between the living and the dead, and usually expect to be unsettled by the experience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Mrs. Winchester’s mansion was said to be a very grand place. Driving up to the mansion, it was like one left all signs of a town, or even a village, and were then inside the gates of a large Victorian park—not like the parks here in the north, but with rocks, and the noise of running water, and beautiful thorn-trees, and old oaks, all white and peeled with age. The road went up about two miles, and then one would see a great and stately house, with many trees close around it, so close that in some places their branches dragged against the walls when the wind blew. The great oval drive was without a weed and two palm trees, in plain view a 7 story tower, along with two statues of a Greek goddesses, at the many-windowed front; at both sides of which a wing projected, which were each the ends of other side fronts; for the house was grander than most expected. There was also a little old-fashioned flower-garden. When people rode up to the great front entrance of Winchester mansion in their carriage, and went into the hall they thought they should be lost—it was so large, and vast, and grand. There was a chandelier all of bronze, hanging down from the middle of the ceiling; and many have never seen one before, and looked at it all in amaze. Then, at once end of the hall, was a great fireplace, as large as the sides of the houses in many countries, with massy andirons and Greek goddesses to hold the wood; and by it were heavy French provincial sofas. At the opposite end of the hall, to the left as you went in—on the western side—was an organ built into the wall, and so large that it filled up the best part of that end. Beyond it, on the same side, was a door; and opposite, on each side of the fireplace, were also doors leading to the east front; but those I never went through as long as I stayed in the house, so I cannot tell you what lay beyond. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Mrs. Winchester held very tight to me, as if she were scared and lost in that great place, and for myself, I was not much better. The west drawing-room was very cheerful-looking, with a warm fire in it, and plenty of good, comfortable future about it. So we went out of that great drawing-room, and into another sitting-room, and out of that, and then up a great flight of stairs, and along a broad gallery—which was something like a library, having books all down one side, and windows and writing-tables all down the other—till we came to the room I would be staying in, which I was not sorry to hear was just over the kitchens; for I began to think I should be lost in that wilderness of a house. The great old house was a famous place for Mrs. Winchester. She made expeditions all over it, with me at her heels; all except the east wing, which was never opened, and whither we never thought of going. However, in the western and northern part was many a pleasant room; full of things that were curiosities to guests. The windows were darkened by the sweeping boughs of the trees, and ivy which had overgrown them: but, in the green gloom, we could manage to see old China jars and carved ivory boxes, and great heavy books, and, above all, the old pictures. They were all portraits of some of the Winchester family, though Mrs. Winchester could not tell us the names of every one. We had gone through most of the 180 rooms, when we came to the old state drawing-room over the all, and there was a picture of Mrs. Winchester. She was such a beauty! She had a dress on, the like of which I had never seen before. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Mrs. Winchester said there were some places about the house she was half frightened at. As winter drew closer and day grew shorter, I was sometimes almost certain that I heard noises as if someone was playing on the great organ in the hall. I did not hear it ever evening; but certainly, I did very often; usually when I was sitting with Mrs. Winchester. Even after she went to bed, I used to hear it booming and swelling in the distance. The first night I went down to my supper, I asked Mrs. Winchester who had been playing music, and the butler said very short that I was a gowk to take the wind soughing among the trees for music: but I saw Mrs. Winchester look at him very fearfully, and the kitchen-maid, said something beneath her breath, and went quite white. I saw they did not like my question. They had heard the very strange noise, and had heard it many a time, but most of all on winter nights, and before storms; and folks did say it was the old lord playing on the great organ in the hall, just as he used to do when he was alive. The days grew shorter and shorter; and the old lord, if it was he, played more and more stormily and sadly on the great organ. The doors in the east wing were always locked, and Mrs. Winchester always had the keys. I wondered what was hidden there. One fearful night, just after the New Year had come in, when the rain was thick and deep, and it was still falling—fast enough to blind anyone who might be out and abroad—there was a great and violent noise heard, and the old lord’s vice above all, cursing and swearing awfully—and the cries of a little child—and a fierce woman—the sound of a blow—and a dead stillness—and moans and wailings dying away. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Suddenly Mrs. Winchester went towards the door, and I durst not be left, though my heart almost stopped beating for fear. In the hall the screams were louder than ever; they sounded to come from the east wing—near and nearer—close on the other side of the locked-up doors—close behind them. Then I noticed that the great bonze chandelier seemed all alight, though the hall was dim, and that a fire was blazing in the vast in the vast hearth-place, though it gave no heat; and I shuddered up with terror. The east door shook, and Mrs. Winchester cried, “I must go! My little girl is there; I hear her; she is coming! I must go!” As if torn open in a violent passion, all at once the east door gave way with a thundering crash and there came into that broad mysterious light, the figure of a tall man, with red hair and gleaming eyes. He drove before him, with many a restless gesture of abhorrence, a stern and beautiful woman, with a little baby in her arms. “It’s the lady! the lady from the garden; and my little girl is with her. They are drawing me to them I feel them—I feel them I must go!” cried Mrs. Winchester. Again she almost convulsed by her effort to go towards them; but I held her tighter and tighter, till I feared I should do her a hurt; but rather that then let her go towards those terrible phantoms. They passed along toward the great hall-door, where the winds howled and ravened for their prey. And Mrs. Winchester was torn by a power stronger than mine and writhed in my arms, and sobbed (for by this time the poor darling was growing faint). #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“They want me to go with them—they are drawing me to them. Oh, my little girl!” said Mrs. Winchester. But just then I saw—we saw—another phantom shape itself, and grow clear out of the blue and misty light that filled the hall; we had not seen her till now, for it was another lady who stood by the man, with a look of relentless grief and triumphant scorn. That figure was very beautiful to look upon, with a soft white hat drawn down over the proud brows and a red and curling lip. It was dressed in a gown of blue stain. I had seen the figure before. It was the likeness of Mrs. Winchester in her youth; and the phantom moved on, regardless of Mrs. Winchester’s wild entreaty. But at that moment the dim lights, and the fire that gave no heat, went out of themselves, and Mrs. Winchester lay at my feet stricken down by the palsy—death stricken. Yes! She was carried to her bed that night never to rise again. She lay with her face to the wall muttering low but muttering alway; “Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age! What is done in youth can never be undone in age!” In recognition to Mrs. Winchester’s contribution to San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley, the Winchester Mansion was designated California Register of Historic Place in 1974. The mansion was also designated a San Jose Historic Landmark in 1996. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Winchester Mystery House
Ever-changing and evolving, Mrs. Winchester’s Llanada Villa once stood seven-stories tall before the 1906 earthquake forced the top three floors to be removed. How do you think it felt to stand in the tower and look across the land that would eventually become a technology hub?
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Mr. William Wirt Winchester Believes in the Sanctity of Property Because He is a Millionaire!
The fine women of Salem had some extracurricular activities that were hardly orthodox. Men have been burned at the stake for speaking ill of the Christian creed. People fought, not only verbally but physically, over their religious beliefs. Most people of that day used alcohol liquors. In almost every home liquor could be found. If a man was drunk it was not considered indecent, nor was his reputation injured by such conduct. Ministers, as well as doctors, were given a drink whenever they made a call at a home. It was almost impossible for them to make their daily calls without becoming intoxicated. Wine was generously served at religious ceremonies–marriages, christenings, funerals, and ordinations. Joseph Smith might have noted the conduct of members in a revival meeting. People would come from miles around to attend these meetings, camping in cabins and tents. At daybreak a trumpet was sounded to awaken the people. Services were held almost all day long, scarcely allowing time to eat, and giving no time at all for recreation and play. Singing and shouting during sermons was common. Men, women, children often fell to the floor in trances, sometimes barking like dogs. Now and then some would get what was know as the “jerks” and their heads would jerk back and forth rapidly. There seemed no way to stop these “jerks” though persons would run, dance, pray to escape them. As they listened to the thundering voice of the evangelist, many would cry and scream. Some ministers believed that the wilder the crowd became the more successful was the revival. Meantime, the FBI could find no DNA material from the site which matched the material of any current missing persons. Nevertheless, they were deeply courteous about having been called in, and they did confirm that the DNA of several persons was present in the evil morass and that the whole resembled an antiquated but gruesome crime scene. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Were these some of the things which were displeasing in the sight of the Lord? Were these people drawing near to God with their lips but keeping their hearts from them. Undoubtedly these were puzzling questions of fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith. Listening to the bird’s sing on this cool spring morning, I was reminded of how excitement used to fill this time of the year because it was near the end of a school year, and ever closer to graduation and adult life. Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentations, laughter—to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the World of unrest to the World of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water. The work and the worry that fell to my lot through the practical interest I took in organ building, made me sometimes wish that I had never troubled myself about it, but if I do not give it up, the reason is that the struggle for the good organ is to me a part of the struggle for truth. An organ is like a cow; one does not look at its horns so much as its milk. God is with us. The light of the knowledge of glory of God is seen in the face of Jesus Christ. From the days of eternity, the Lord Jesus Christ was one with the father; He was the image of God, the image of His greatness and majesty, the outshining of His glory. It was it was to manifest this glory that He came into our World. To this sin-darkened Earth He came to reveal the light of God’s love–to be God with us. Therefore it was prophesied of Him. By coming to dwell with us, Jesus Christ was to reveal God both to humans and to angels. He was the Word of God—God’s thoughts made audible. If we are not grateful to God, we can never see the greatness in our lives. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
When we start to appreciate, we will begin to elevate! Some people regard logical thinking as the deadest and driest of our activities and may therefore be repelled by the privileged position. However, logical thinking—Reasoning—is valid and no one can deny it (philosophically speaking). You cannot, as we already know, prove that there are no proofs. However, if you wish to regard all human ideals as illusions and all human love as biological by-products, you can. That is, you can do so without running into flat self-contradiction and nonsense. Whether you can do so without extreme umplausibility—without accepting a picture of things which no one really believes—is another matter. Besides reasoning about matters of fact, humans also make moral judgments—“I ought to do this”—“I ought not to do that”—“This is good”—“That is evil.” Two views have been held about moral judgments. Some people think that when we make them we are not using our Reason, but are employing some different power. Other people think that we make them by our Reason. I myself hold this second view. That is, I believe that the primary moral principles on which all others depend are rationally perceived. We “just see” that there is no reason why my neighbour’s happiness should be sacrificed to my own, as we “just see” that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. If we cannot prove either axiom, that is not because the irrational but because they are self-evident and all proofs depend on them. Their intrinsic reasonableness shines by its own light. It is because all morality is based on such self-evident principles that we say to a human, when we would recall one to right conduct, “Be reasonable.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
However, this is by the way. For our present purposes it does not matter which of these two views you adopt. The important point is to notice that moral judgments raise the same sort of difficulty for Naturalism as any other thoughts. We always assume in discussions about morality, as in all other discussions, if they can be fully accounted for by some non-moral and non-rational cause, that the other human’s views are worthless. When two humans differ about good and evil we soon hear tis principle being brought into play. “Mr. William Wirt Winchester believes in the sanctity of property because he is a millionaire”—“He believes in Pacifism because he is a coward”—“He approves of corporal punishment because he is a necrophile.” Such taunts may often be untrue: but the mere fact that they are made by the one side, and hotly rebutted by the other, shows clearly what principle is being used. Neither side doubts that if they were true, they would decisive. No one (in real life) pays attention to any oral judgment which can be shown to spring from non-moral and non-rational causes. The Freudian and the Marxist attack traditional morality precisely on this ground—and with wide success. All humans accept the principle. However, of course, what discredits particular moral judgments must equally discredit moral judgments as a whole. If that fact that humans have such ideas as ought and ought not at all can be fully explained by irrational and non-moral causes, then those ideas are an illusion. The Naturalist is ready to explain how the illusion arose. Chemical conditions produce life. Life, under the influence of natural selection, produces consciousness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Conscious organisms which behave in one way live longer than those which behave in another. Living longer, they are more likely to have offspring. Inheritance, and sometimes teaching as well, pass on their mode of behaviour to their young. Thus in every species a pattern of behaviour is built up. In the human species conscious teaching plays a larger part in the building it up, and the tribe further strengthens it by killing individuals who to not conform. They also invent gods who are said to punish departures from it. Thus, in time, there comes to exist a strong human impulse to conform. However, since this impulse is often at variance with the other impulses, a mental conflict arises, and the human expresses it by saying “I want to do A but I ought to do B.” This account may (or may not) explain why humans do in fact make moral judgments. It does not explain how they could be right in making them. It excludes, indeed, the very possibility of their being right. For when humans say “I ought” they certainly think they are saying something, and something true about the nature of the proposed action, and not merely about their own feelings. However, if Naturalism is true, “I ought” is the same sort of statement as “I itch” or “I am going to be sick.” In real life when a human says “I ought” we may reply, “Yes. You are right. That is what you ought to do,” or else, “No. I think you are mistaken.: However, in a World of Naturalists (if Naturalist really remembered their philosophy out of school) the only sensible reply would be, “Oh, are you?” All moral judgments would be statements about the speaker’s feelings, mistaken by him for statements about something else (the real moral quality of actions) which does not exist. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Such a doctrine, I have admitted, is not flatly self-contradictory. The Naturalist can, if one chooses, brazen it out. One can day, “Yes. I quite agree that there is no such thing as wrong and right. I admit that no moral judgment can be ‘true’ or ‘correct’ and, consequently, that no one system of morality can be better or worse than another. All ideas of good and evil are hallucinations—shadows cast on the outer World by the impulses which we have been conditioned to feel.” Indeed many Naturalists are delighted to say this. However, then they must stick to it; and fortunately (though in consistently) most real Naturalists do not. A moment after they have admitted that good and evil are illusion, you will find them exhorting us to work for posterity, to educate, revolutionise, liquidate, live and die for the good of the human race. A Naturalist like Mr. H. G. Wells spent a long life doing so with passionate eloquence and zeal. However, surely this is very odd? Just as all the books about spiral nebulae, atoms and cave men would really have led you to suppose that the Naturalists claimed to be about to know something, so all the books in which Naturalists tell us what we ought to do would really make you believe that they thought some ideas of good (their own, for example) to be somehow preferable to others. For they write with indignation like humans proclaiming what is good in itself and denouncing what is evil in itself, and not at all like humans recording that they personally like concentrated cranberry juice, but some people prefer sweetened cranberry juice. Yet if the “oughts” of Mr. Wells and, say, Franco are both equally the impulses which Nature has conditioned each to have and both tell us nothing about any objective right or wrong, whence is all the fervour? Do they remember while they are writing thus that when they tell us we “ought to make a better World” the words “ought” and “better” must, on their own showing, refer to an irrationally conditioned impulse which cannot be true or false any more than a vomit or a yawn? #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
My idea is that sometimes they do forget. That is their glory. Holding a philosophy which excludes humanity, they yet remain human. At the sight of injustice they throw all their Naturalism to the winds and speak like humans and like human of genius. They know far better than they think they know. However, at other times, I suspect, they are trusting in a supposed way of escape from their difficulty. It works—or seems to work—like this. They say to themselves, “Ah, yes. Morality”—or “bourgeois morality” or some such addition—“Morality is an illusion. However, we have found out what modes of behaviour we are pressing you to adopt. Pray, do not mistake us for moralists. We are under an entirely new management” …just as if this would help. It would help if only we grant, firstly, that life is better than death and, secondly, that we ought to care for the lives of our descendants as much as, or more than, for our own. And both these are moral judgments which have, like all others, been explained away by Naturalism. Of course, having been conditioned by Nature in a certain way, we do feel thus about life and about posterity. However, the Naturalists have cured us of mistaking these feelings for insights into what we once called “real value.” Now that I know that my impulse to serve posterity is just the same kind of thing as my fondness for cheese—now that its transcendental pretensions have been exposed for a sham—do you think I shall pay much attention to it? When it happens to be strong (and it has grown considerably weaker since you explained to me its real nature) I suppose I shall obey it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
When it is weak, I shall put my money into cheese. There can be no reason for trying to whip up and encourage the one impulse rather than the other. Not now that I know what they both are. The Naturalists must not destroy all my reverence for conscience on Monday and expect to find me still venerating it on Tuesday. There is no escape along these lines. If we are to continue to make moral judgments (and whatever we say we shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of humans is not a product of Nature. Only if it is an offshoot of some absolute “on its own” and is not a product of non-moral, non-rational Nature. We must acknowledge the supernatural source for our ideas of good and evil. In other worse, we now know something more about God. If you hold that moral judgment is a different thing from Reasoning you will express tis new knowledge by saying “We now know that God has at least one other attribute than rationality.” If, like me, you hold that moral judgment is a kind of Reasoning, then you will say, “We now know more about the Divine Reason.” And with this we are almost ready to begin our main argument. However, before doing so it will be well to pause of the consideration of some misgivings of misunderstandings which may have already arisen. Happiness is related to good and bad life events, but the impact is smaller than you might imagine. The reason for this is that happiness tends to come from within a person. Subjective well-being is affected by our goals, choices, emotions, values, and personality. The way you perceive, interpret, and manage events is as important as the nature of the events themselves. People who are good a dodging the life’s rough, unsparing treatment (hard knocks) tend to create their own “luck.” As a result, they are happier and seem to negotiate life’s demands more smoothly. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
It is tempting to think that wealth brings happiness. However, does it? To a small degree wealthier people are happier than poorer people. Yet, the overall association between money and happiness is weak. In fact, people who win lotteries are often less happy than they were before, and imagine how much unhappier ill begotten gain might make them. Instant riches usually bring new stresses into a person’s life that tend to cancel out any beneficial effects of wealth. Essentially, money can make it possible to buy the good things in life, but money cannot buy a good life. Happiness usually must become from other sources More educated people tend to be a little happier than the less educated. However, this is most likely just another way of saying that there is a small connection between wealth and happiness. Higher education generally results in higher income and more social status. As education levels rise, more parents ae intellectually equipped to assume some responsibilities now delegated to schools. With the move toward knowledge-based industy and the increase of leisure, we can anticipate a small but significant tendency for highly educated parents to pull their children at least partway out of the public education systems, offering them home instruction instead. This trend will be sharply encouraged by improvements in computer-assisted education, Cisco Telepresence, electronic video recording, holography and other technical fields. Parents and students might sign short-term “learning contracts” with the nearby school, committing them to teach-learn certain courses or course modules. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Students might continue going to school for social and athletic activities or for subjects they cannot learn on their own or under the tutelage of parents or family friends. Mobile education is also a proposal, which would take students out of the classroom not merely to observe but to participate in significant community activity. Curricula would be shaped by students and community groups as well as professional educators. The former United States Commissioner of Education, Harold Howe, II, has also suggested the reverse: bringing the community into the school so that local stores, beauty parlors, prints shops, architecture firms, be given free space in the schools in return for free lessons by the adults who run this. President Trump and other want to keep the schools and class rooms open, so children are being supervised by adults during work hours, which allows the parents to work and the kids to get an education. This reduces crime rates and helps increase income earnings in the future for students. School also serves as a nice social club for children where they make life long friends and memories. Also, school provides nutrition for students and proper nutrition helps to raise the IQ of students and keeps them healthy. Children also learn how to respect authority figures and learn that behaviour has bad consequences, whereas good behaviour and hard work is rewarded. People who live in the age of information must have new skills in three crucial areas: learning, relating, and choosing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Students will need an enhanced human adaptability. By instructing students how to learn and unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the person who cannot read; one will be the human who has not learned how to learn. By speeding the turnover of people in our lives, we allow less time for trust to develop, less time for friendships to ripen. Thus we witness a search for ways to cut through the polite “public” behaviour directly to the sharing of intimacy. Presented with numerous alternatives, an individual chooses the one most compatible with one’s values. As overchoice deepens, the person who lacks a clear grasp of one’s own values (whatever these may be) is progressively disabled. Worse yet, students are seldom encouraged to analyze their own values and those of their teachers and peers. Millions pass through the education system without once having been forced to search out the contradictions in their own value systems, to probe their own life goals deeply, or even to discuss these matters candidly with adults and peers. Students hurry from class to class. Teachers and professors are harried and grow increasingly remote. Even the “bull session”—informal, extra-curricular discussion about pleasures of the flesh, politics, or religion that helps participants identify and clarify their values—grown less frequent and less intimate as transience rises. Married people report a greater happiness than people who are divorces, separated, or single. It could be that happiness people are simply more likely to get married than to remain sleepless in Seattle. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
However, better explanation for this association is that marriage partners can act as emotional and economic buffers against the hardships of life and a faithful marriage also helps keep people chaste in the eyes of the Lord, in most cases, as long as you are not sleeping with the enemy. There is a beneficial association between happiness and holding spiritual beliefs. Religious beliefs may add to feelings of purpose and meaning in life, resulting in greater happiness. Marriage between partners is a vital part of God’s plan. The Lord has said, “Whoso forbiddeth to marry is not ordained of God, for marriage is ordained of God unto man,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 49.15. Since the beginning, marriage has been a law of the gospel. Marriages are intended to last forever, not just for our mortal lives. Adam and Eve were married by God before there was any death in the World. They had an eternal marriage. They taught the law of eternal marriage to their children and their children’s children. As the years passed, wickedness entered the hearts of the people and the authority to perform this sacred ordinance was taken from the Earth. Through the Restoration of the gospel, eternal marriage has been restored to Earth. Many people in the World consider marriage to be only a social custom, a legal agreement between two people in love together. However, to Latter-day Saints, marriage is much more. Our exaltation depends on marriage, along with other principles and ordinances, such as faith, repentance, baptism, and receiving the gift of the holy Ghost. We believe that marriage is the most sacred relationship that can exist between two loving people. This sacred relationship affects our happiness now and in the eternities. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Heavenly Father has given us the law of eternal marriage so we can become like Him. The Lord has said: “In the celestial glory there are three Heavens or degrees: and in order to obtain the highest, a human must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage]; and if one does not, one cannot obtain it,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 131.1-3. Another possibility is that church membership may simply provide social support that softens that impact of life’s negative events. Incubation is the term applied to the sleeping in a temple—usually a special shrine or sanctuary used for healing and healing-dreams and dream-oracles alone—as a means of healing. This was practiced by ancient Greek and Babylonians. It was also frequently practiced in ancient Egypt at the temples of Isis and Serapis with effects similar to those of hypnotism. Five hundred years before Christ at the temple of Epidaurus, where the inspiring spirit or god was Aesculapius (the patron saint of modern medicine still), sick patients were put to sleep by priests at the foot of the Aesculapius’ statue. In many cases, they awoke suddenly cured. That the real effectiveness of incubation was not the work of a departed spirit but of Nature in the sleep state combined with the sufferer’s faith, was shown by the custom which still prevails in Greece. Here sleep in a temple of Aesculapius was simply replaced by sleep in the church associated with a Christian saint. Consider a cut had and how Nature at once sets to work to repair the damage. The anatomist tells us that the leucocytes in the blood automatically build a bridge of tissue over the wound’s surface. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
However, what orders the leucocytes to make the needed adjustments? What shows them how to make it? There is obviously an intelligence behind them, a mind within the body outside and apart from the conscious mind. There are miracles in Nature, and at this time, happenings to which science possesses no key. The human consciousness, for instance, is capable of manifesting power which contradict psychological knowledge, just as the human body is capable of manifesting phenomena which contradict medical knowledge. Both powers and phenomena may seem miraculous, but they really issue forth from the hidden laws of human’s own being. The process take pace in the dark only to us. This life-force, this invisible energy, is behind and within, around and above the physical body. Under certain circumstances its rea can be seen and traced out and its recuperative healing power drawn upon. It forms an aura, the etheric or vital body of light, but not the still more elusive and subtle divine body of Light nor the aura of various colours, the astral body. The stereotype of the crotchety antiquated person who id dissatisfied with everything is inaccurate. Life satisfaction and happiness generally do not decline with age. People are living longer and staying healthier, which has greatly delayed age-related declines. When declines do occur, mature people seem better able to cope with them. The hindrances which wrong bodily regimes put in one’s Quest are not only physical but also psychic, emotional, and mental. The condition of a human’s health, the medical state of one’s body, may contribute to one’s spiritual outlook, may enfeeble or enliven one’s faith. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
If union with the Overself-consciousness is to be achieved, or progress to that goal made, the body ought also to share in the benefits received. It too ought to be freer from discordant elements, organs, or operations. The wise student will recognize that one gains more than one loses by such sacrifices as this discipline of the body calls for. The benefits of resisting custom’s dominance are both disproportionate and durable, with a value so high as to make the discipline bearable and the sacrifices smaller. Wen one hears about these ascetic-sound regimes a chill sets in. However, what is it that rebels against them? It is the ego, the weakness of human will. Yet the rebellion is ill-founded, for the body is not tortured by being brought under control—only its perverted, exaggerated, or enslaving appetites suffer by doing so. The regimes themselves are sensible and are not fantastical fads. They are simply indication of the quester’s need to live more carefully than other people, and to change habits which are bad. They are hygienic recommendations offered to those who want to advance their spiritual journey more quickly. The bodily cells are so pervaded with toxic materials, clogged with them, so contaminated by them, that this purificatory work is an essential preliminary to the mystical work, proper for most aspirants except those who have the inborn capability of quickly rising to an intense concentration which frees the cells from such poisons. There is a mass of improperly digested, half-decayed food material lying in the intestines in a fermenting condition, while farther on here are accumulated deposits of petrified impurities on the lining of the colon and the membrane of the bowels. These substances are rejected by they body, which suffers by their presence but is unable to free itself from the without conscious and willing co-operation on the part of its owner. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The body’s physiological processes are clogged and encumbered by them and its nervous system and brain organ polluted by the inferior blood brought to nourish them. To achieve this aim, a certain preparation as well as purification of the body is required. The spine must be cleared of adhesions, congestions, distortions, shrinkings, and nerve branch pressures. The tissues and blood have to be cleansed of the toxic material accumulated in them. The salvation which frees a human from enslavement to one’s lower nature is necessary and good, but it goes only part of the way to fulfilling one’s needs. One’s fleshly body also requires salvation. It ought to be freed from its poisoned, clogged, and unnatural condition. If it is saturated wit destructive acids or clogged wit decaying material, the body cannot respond so freely to the subtle forces, nor can the brain and nervous system respond so freely if they are stupefied by alcohol or drugs. As the consciousness evolves to a higher level, so the body it functions through must become more refined in quality and purified in nature. Mental equilibrium, deep prayer, cannot be attained without changing the habits which obstruct it. Even if the requisite purification of the body’s cells and blood from all toxins has been achieved, a human must still refrain from starting on those ways which caused toxemia. There is a common error that drugs and medicines are enough to keep us in good health. They are not. The only things that can do so are correct living habits, righting thinking habits, and proper eating habits. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
A knowledge of personal hygiene will keep us in better health than a hundred boxes of pills. We must learn to conform to the laws of hygienic living—mental and physical—if we want to achieve a sound mind in a should body. We may not break those laws with impunity, nor believe that because we have been spiritually healed once we are exempt from the always. The desire to gain purity must provide the power to follow the regimes needed for it. The sediment of egotism in the mind and animality in the flesh cannot be cleared out unless this desire grows strong and remains enduring. The mental courage to cast out those wrong habits of living which unenlightenment of spiritual hygiene has allowed one to pick up, must show itself. People who are satisfied with their jobs tend to be happier, but the association is weak. If fact, it probably just reflects the fact that job satisfaction is a large part of greater life satisfaction. With respect to happiness and personality, it may be fair to paraphrase Paris Hilton, “I am a star and I was born to shine. I am happy, powerful, strong and confident.” To a degree, some people are more temperamentally disposed to be happy, regardless of life events. In general, happier people also tend to be extraverted (outgoing), optimistic, and worry-free. This combination probably influences the balance of beneficial and negative emotions. In general, if they are meeting their personal goals, people tend to be happy. If you feel you are making progress, on a day-to-day basis, on smaller goals that relate to long-term, life goals, this is especially true. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
However, achieving one’s goals does not always lead to happiness. Consider the highly successful person who is absorbed in one’s accomplishments. All it may take is a crisis, like a child’s illness or the death of a friend, to make life feel meaningless. However, if the person begins to act with integrity, meaning can be restored and the crisis resolved. Thus, optimal human functioning involves integrity as well as an ability to accomplish goals. “Doing well,” they say, is associated with happiness. In contrast, “being yourself” is associated with leading a meaningful life. In short, if we are to live with integrity, the goals we purse must express our core interests and values. Examples of the kinds of personal projects (short-term goals) and long-term goals that occupy us: for architect’s the job is usually spent on location. When a project is located nearby, architect may leave the office periodically to stop by the project site. Some short-term goals involved checking in with building developers and engineers to ensure the client’s objectives are met, review projects, and check on any potential obstacles in construction. Many architects believed that if they did great work, somehow society would recognize the contributions and value they were making to the World and reward them with an endless stream of passion projects to grow their firm. However, the truth when it comes to long term goals, running an architecture firm is exactly the same as running any other business. You have to work just as hard to win business as you do to deliver it. An important long-term goal to remember is that your costs of running a business increase over the years. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Your money goals should define the revenues and profits you will need to accommodate these increased costs, and support the growth you want. Also another long-term goal should be to become innovative and sometimes that requires a history lesson. For an architecture firm, stepping back into the past the Victorian America and seeing what was popular back them, like butler’s pantries, multiple parlors, patio spaces, and yards with green spaces, mixed with some modern style designs is a long-term way to stay relevant. People goals typically focus on who you want to work with. This can include the employees you want on your staff, and it may also include the type of clients you want to attract. Sometimes working with non-profits has provided some firms with not only a great sense of fulfillment but also a deeper connection to their local community. Working with one firm allowed the nonprofit client to connect with an ideal prospect and close a $6,000,000 group up non-profit project, at the height of the COVID-19 crisis pandemic. Who we work with can greatly affect our enthusiasm and motivation on the job, so setting goals around who we choose to work with can have an immense impact on our attitude towards our work. Such goals are crucial because overall well-being is a combination of happiness and meaning. Pursuing goals that are inconsistent with personal interests and values can leave a person feeling uneasy, bothered, and uncomfortable. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Happier persons tend to be married, comfortable with their work, extraverted, religious, optimistic, and generally satisfied with their lives. They also are making progress toward their goals. However, attain goals that do not express our deeper interests and values may add little to happiness. When, then, makes a good life? Purpose and meaning are important sources of well-being at any point in life. As we have seen, a good life is one that is happy and meaningful. We are most likely to experience a meaningful life when we act with integrity. It is interesting that while achievement and external goals may preoccupy younger persons, integrity becomes increasingly important later in life. “To thine own self be true” may seem like a cliché, but it is actually not a bad place to begin a search for a happy and a satisfying life. “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace. Let all things be done decently and in order,” reports 1 Corinthians 14.33 and 40. Our little World is the lesson book of the Universe. God’s wonderful purpose of grace, the mystery of redeeming love, is the theme into which “angels desire to look,” and it will be their study throughout endless ages. Both the redeemed and the unfallen beings will find in the cross of Christ their science and their song. It will be seen that the glory shining in the face of Jesus is the glory of self-sacrificing love. In the light from Calvary it will be seen that the law of self-renouncing love is the law of life for Earth and Heaven; that the love which “seeketh not her own” has its source in the heart of God; and that in the meek and lowly One is manifested the character of Him who dwelleth in the light which no human can approach unto. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Sometimes, when a bird cries out, or the wind sweeps through a tree, or an angel whispers in a far-off farm, I hold still and listen a long time. My World turns and goes back to the place where, a thousand forgotten years ago, the bird and the blowing wind were like me, and were my brothers. My soul turns into a tree, and an animal, and a cloud bank. Then changed and odd it comes home and asks me questions. What should I reply? Faithful art Thou, O Lord our God, and faithful are Thy words, for no word of thine shall remain unfulfilled. Thou art a faithful and merciful God and King. Blessed art Thou, O Lord God, who art faithful in fulfilling Thy words. Please be merciful unto America, for it is the fountain of our life, and mayest Thou soon in our day deliver Zion that is grieved in spirit. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who makest America rejoice with her children. Make us rejoice, O Lord our God, with Elijah the prophet, Thy servant, and with the kingdom of the house of David, Thine anointed. Soon may Elijah come and bring joy to our hearts. May no stranger occupy David’s throne and may no usurper inherit his glory. For by Thy holy name Thou hast promised unto one that one’s light will never be extinguished. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Shield of America. We give Thee thanks and bless Thee, O Lord our God, for the Torah, and for the worship of this day and for the prophets, as well as for this Sabbath day which Thou, O Lord our God, hast given us for holiness and for rest, for glory and delight. Evermore may Thy name be continually praised by every living being. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest the Sabbath. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Winchester Mystery House
It’s May 1st which means it’s halfway to Halloween! We are hard at work dreaming up a new experience for Halloween 2021 that will feature a projection mapped show on the front of the mansion. Stay tuned for more details coming soon!
“Lord God,” said Mrs. Sarah Winchester, as the flames rose and the fire crackled. “We got a dead girl, a huge mansion that is too big to heat, too big to maintain, too expensive to sale, a bunch of weird books, and a regular tomb of gold with an empty iron coffin in it, and a half-ghost boy standing here. Now this translation just arrived. ‘Here sleeps Annie Winchester, whose mortal hands once made the most beautiful cameos, even for emperors and and kings. Guard me, ye gods and goddesses whose images I render so well. A curse on those who attempt to disturb my resting place.'”
Watch your step in the séance room! There are three exits in this room, The main door, a secret passageway leading into an unfinished closet, and this door that opens to an 8-ft drop into the kitchen below.
Self-Guided Mansion Tour:
👉 Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
Remember, the E in East Matches the E in Early!
The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, nor television. It is the manufacture, refinement, and distribution of anxiety. It is the only business based on the maxims, “The customer is always wrong,” “We aim to displease,” and “Send ‘em away unhappy.” Anxiety is the experience of Being affirming itself against Nonbeing. However, creative minds have always been able to survive any kind of bad training. The core of critical thinking is a willingness to actively evaluate ideas. True knowledge comes from constantly revising our understanding of the World. Admitting you are wrong is always hard—even though it is a skill that every psychologist has to learn. Few “truths” transcend the need for empirical testing. It is true that religious beliefs and personal values may be held without supporting evidence. However, most other ideas can be evaluated by applying the rules of logic and evidence. Judging the quality of evidence is crucial. Imagine that you are a juror in a courtroom, judging clams made by two battling lawyers. To decide correctly, you cannot just weigh the amount of evidence. You must also critically evaluate the quality of evidence. Then you can give greater weight to the most credible facts. Authority or claimed expertise does not automatically make an idea true. Just because a teacher, a guru, celebrity, or authority is convinced or sincere does not mean you should automatically believe them. Always ask, “What evidence convinced one? How good is it? It there a better explanation?” #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Critical thinking requires a veil of ignorance. One must imagine oneself in an original position being a veil of ignorance. Behind this veil, one knows nothing of oneself and one’s natural abilities, nor one’s position in society. Behind such a veil of ignorance all individuals are simply specified as rational, free, and morally equal beings. This prevents one from taking into account one’s ethical, social status, gender and, crucially, one’s individual idea of how to lead a good life. This is to insure impartiality of judgment by depriving parties of all knowledge of one’s personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances. Be prepared to consider daring departures and go wherever the evidence leads. However, do not becomes so “open-minded” that you are simply gullible. Critical thinkers strike a balance between open-mindedness and a healthy skepticism. They are ready to change their views when new evidence arises. Descriptions, or naming and classifying, is typically based on making detailed record of behavioural observations. However, a description does not explain anything, does it? Right. Useful knowledge begins with accurate descriptions, but descriptions fail to answer the important “why” questions. Why do more women attempt suicide, and why do more men complete it? When they are uncomfortable, why are more people aggressive? Why are bystanders often unwilling to help in an emergency? Psychology’s second goals is met when we can explain an event. This is, understanding usually means we can state the causes of behaviour. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Take our last “why” question as an example: Research on “bystander apathy” has shown that people often fail to help when other possible helpers are nearby. Why? Because a “diffusion of responsibility” occurs. Basically, no one feels personally obligated to pitch in. In general, the more potential helpers present, the less likely it is that help will be given. Now we can explain a perplexing problem. Psychology’s third goal, prediction, is the ability to forecast behaviour accurately. Notice that our explanation of bystander apathy makes a prediction about the chances of getting help. Anyone who has been stranded by car trouble on a busy freeway will recognize the accuracy of this prediction: Having many potential helpers nearby is no guarantee that anyone will stop to help. Behavioural predictions are quite useful. For instance, research predicts that if one flies east early in the say and west late in the day, one will suffer less jet lag. We have seen that moment-to-moment changes in activation can have major impact on performance. What about larger cycles of arousal? Do they also affect energy levels, motivation, and performance? Scientists have long known that the bodily activity is guided by internal “biological clocks.” Every 24 hours, your body undergoes a cycle of changes called circadian (SUR-kay-dee-AN) rhythms (circa: about; diem: a day). Throughout the day, large changes take place in body temperature, blood pressure, and amino acid levels. Also affected are the activities of the liver, kidneys, and endocrine glands. These activities, and many others, peak sometime each day. Output of the hormone adrenaline, which arouses the body, is often three to five times greater during the day. Most people are more energic and alert at that high point of their circadian rhythms. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
People with shorter circadian rhythms are “day people,” who wake up alert, peak early in the day, and fall asleep early in the evening. People with longer rhythms are “night people,” who wake up groggy, peak in the afternoon or early evening, and stay up late. Such differences are so basic that when a day person rooms with a night person, both are more likely to give the relationship a negative rating. This is easy to understand: What could be worse than having someone bounding around cheerily when you are half asleep, or the reverse? Circadian rhythms are most noticeable when there is a major shift in time schedules. Businesspersons, diplomats, athletes, and other time-zone travelers tend to make errors or perform poorly when their body rhythms are disturbed. If you travel great distances east or west, the peaks and valleys of your circadian rhythms will be out of phase with the sun and clocks. For example, you might find that you re wide awake and alert at midnight. Your low point, in contrast, occurs during the middle of the day. Shift work has the same effect, causing fatigue, inefficiency, irritability, upset stomach, and depression How fast do people adapt to tie shifts? For major time-zone shifts (5 hours or more) it can take from several days to 2 weeks to resynchronize. Adaptation to jet lag is slowest when you stay indoors, where you can sleep and eat on “home time.” Getting outdoors, where you must sleep, eat, an socialize on the new schedule, speeds adaptation. A 5-hour dose of bright sunlight early each day is particularly helpful for resetting your circadian rhythm in a new time zone. The same principle can be applied to shift work by bathing workers in bright light during their first few night shifts. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
The direction of travel also effects adaptation. If you fly west, adapting is relatively easy, taking an average of 4 to 5 hours. If you fly east, adapting takes 50 percent longer, or more. Why is there a difference? The answer is that when you fly east the sun comes up earlier (relative to your “home” time). Let us say that you live in Beverly Hills, California and Fly to Manhattan, New York. Getting up at 7AM in Manhattan will be like getting up at 4AM in Beverly Hills. If you fly west, the sun comes up later and it is easier for most people to “advance” (stay up later and sleep in) than it is to shift backward. Likewise, work shifts that “rotate” backward (night, evening, day) are more disruptive than those that advance (day, evening, night). Best of all are work shifts that do not change: Even continuous night work is less upsetting than rotating shifts. What does all of this have to do with those of us who are not shift workers or World travelers? There are few college students who have not at one time or another “burned the midnight oil,” especially for final exams. During any strenuous period, it is wise to remember that departing from your regular schedule is likely to cost more than it is worth. Often, you can do as much during 1 hour in the morning as you could have in 3 hours of work after midnight. The 2-hour difference in efficiency might as well be spent sleeping. If you feel you must deviate from your normal schedule, do it gradually over a few days. In general, if you can anticipate an upcoming body rhythm change (when traveling, before finals week, or when doing shift work), it is best to preadapt to your new schedule. Before traveling, for instance, you should go to sleep 1 hour later (or earlier) each day until your sleep cycle matches the time at your destination. If you are unable to do that, it at least helps to fly early in the day when you fly east. When you fly west, it is better to fly late. (Remember, the E in east matches the E in early.) #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
Studies of flight crews show that jet lag can also be minimized by a hormone called melatonin (mel-ah-TONE-in). Melatonin is normally produced at night by the pineal gland and suppressed during daylight. Melatonin has strong impact on the timing of body rhythms and sleep cycles. As far as the brain is concerned, it is bedtime when melatonin levels rise. Flight crews often suffer severe disruptions in their sleep cycles. For example, a crew that leaves Los Angeles at 4PM, bound for London, will arrive in 8 hours. Crew members’ bodes, which are on California time, will act as if it is 12AM. Yet in London, it will be 8AM. Recent studies confirm that melatonin can help people adjust more rapidly to such time-zone changes. To resent the body’s clock in a new time zone, a small amount of melatonin can be taken about an hour before bedtime. This dose is continued for as many days as necessary to ease jet lag. The same treatment can be used for rotating work shifts. Predication is especially important in psychometrics (mental measurement). Experts in this area use test to predict success in school, work, or a career. Description, explanation, and prediction seems reasonable, but is control a valid goal for psychology? Control may seem like a threat to your personal freedom. However, to a psychologist, control simply means altering conditions that influence behaviour in predictable ways. If I suggest changes in the classroom that help children learn better, I have exerted control. If a psychologist helps a person overcome a terrible fear of heights, control is involved. Clearly, psychological control must be used wisely and humanely. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
Psychology’s goals come from a natural desire to understand behaviour, which leads us to ask: What is the nature of this behaviour? (Description.) Why does it occur? (Understanding and explanation.) Can we predict when it will occur? (Prediction.) What conditions affect it? (Control.) The Christian understanding of power is that it is found most often in weakness. This paradox has been a thorn in the flesh of tyrants. The Judeo-Christian teaching that humans are vulnerable to the temptations of power has also caused democracies and free nations to build restraints and balances of power into their studies. Clearly this is what motivated the revolutionaries in England to guarantee a Parliament independent of the monarchy. And in American the Founding Fathers, influenced by Judeo-Christian teaching about the vulnerability of humans, wisely adopted the principle of the separation of powers. Within the government, power was diffused through a system of checks and balances so no one branch could dominate another. The Founders also assumed that the religious value system, evidenced through the separate institution of the church, would be the most powerful brake on the natural avarice of government. As Tocqueville observed, “Religion in America takes no direct path in the government or society but it must, nevertheless, be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country.” The most important restraint on power, however, is a healthy understanding of its true source. When power in the conventional sense is relinquished, one discovers a much deeper power. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Prisoners often discover this, as did Mr. Jerry Levin and Mr. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In his memoirs of the gulag, Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote that as long as he was trying to maintain some pitiful degree of Worldly power in his situation—control of food, clothing, schedule—he was constantly under the heel of his captors. However, after his conversion, when he accepted and surrendered to his utter powerlessness, then he became free of even his captors’ power. Perhaps this is why Mr. Boris Pasternak once wrote that the only place one can be free in a communist society is in prison. The apostle Paul said, “My power is made perfect in weakness,” and concluded, “When I am weak, then I am strong.” And throughout Scripture God reveals a special compassion for the powerless: widows, orphans, prisoners, and aliens. Though the message of the Kingdom of God offers salvation for all who repent and believe, God does not conceal His disdain for those who repent and believe, God does not conceal His disdain for those so enamoured of their own power that they refuse to worship Him or to acknowledge His delight in the humble. A culture that exalts power and celebrity, that worships success and the fake news media, dismisses such words as nonsense. I have had reporters tell me that they do not have time to read the Bible. However, they sure have time to lie and conjure up chaos to keep people in a state of fear, hatred, and anxiety. Strong individuals rely on their own resources—which will never, ultimately speaking, be enough—but the so-called weak person knows one’s own limits and needs, and thus depends wholly on God. Perhaps this is why God so often confounds the wisdom of the World by accomplishing His purposes through the powerless and His most powerful work through human weakness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
I first learned this in school. When the frustration of my helplessness seemed the greatest, I discovered God’s grace was more than sufficient. And after I enrolled in college to study in China, I could look back and see how God used my powerlessness for His purposes. What God has chosen for my most significant witness was not my triumphs or victories, but my defeat. Similarly, counseling in schools has been effective not because of any power we may have as an organization, but because of the powerlessness of those we serve. During this COVID-19 pandemic, several millions of people, including a number of politicians, are crowded in abysmal conditions; hatred, hostility, and despair seeping out of their homes and offices. Yet within the darkness, the Kingdom of God is giving the thriving Christian community a reason to live—people who have finding Jesus Christ and experiencing renewed hearts and minds. The churches are shinning and blessed with the loving embraces of members of the Christian community, and they are addressing these officials at the highest levels of government—and they are listening intently. Had I gone to China specifically to meet with the key government leadership, I would have likely been stymied. They wanted to meet me not because of any power or influence I had, but because of our work in America. They knew that education, hard work, and faith in God was doing something to bring healing and restoration. Therefore, they were eager to listen to our recommendations, ready to discuss a biblical view of justice and educational issues. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
Whatever authority I had in speaking to these powerful men and women came not from my power but from serving the powerless. I have experienced this in country after country. It is the paradox of real power. Nothing distinguishes the kingdoms of humans from the Kingdom of God more than their diametrically opposed views of the exercise of power. One seeks to control people, the other to serve people; one promotes self, the other prostrates self; one seeks prestige and position, the other lifts up to lowly and despised. It is crucial for Christians to understand this difference. For through this upside-down view of power, the Kingdom of God can play a special role in the affairs of the World. As citizens of the Kingdom today practice this view of power, they are setting an example for their neighbours by modeling servanthood and exposing the illusions power creates. However, how does this paradoxical view of power apply to the Christian who is in a position of influence and control? Power involves the use of coercive force to make others yield to one’s wishes even against their own will. Authority is achieved—or is conferred upon one—by virtue of character that others are motivated to follow willingly. Therefore, the citizens of the Kingdom should seek authority that comes from one’s own spiritual strength. Never for self-advantage, but for the benefit of others. This does not mean that the Christians cannot use power. In positions of leadership, especially in government institutions to which God has specifically granted the power of the sword, the Christian can do so in good conscious. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
However, the Christian uses power with a different motive and in different ways: not to impose one’s personal will over others but to preserve God’s plan for order and justice for all. Those who accept the biblical view of servant leadership treat power as a humbling delegation from God, not as a right to control others. Moses offers a great role model. Though he had awesome power and responsibility as the leader of two million Israelites, he was described in Scripture as “a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the Earth.” He led by serving—intervening before God on his people’s behalf, seeking God’s forgiveness for their rebellion and caring for their needs above one’s own. The challenge for the Christian in a position of influence is to follow the example of Moses rather than fulfill Nietzche’s prophecy concerning the will to power. In doing so the citizen of the Kingdom has an opportunity to offer light to a World often shrouded by the dark pretensions of a devastating succession of power-mad tyrants. Someone attaining to the more complex forms of the morality of association, as expressed say by the ideal of equal citizen, has an understanding certainly of the principles of justice. One has also developed an attachment to many particular individuals and communities, and one is disposed to follow the moral standards that apply to one in one’s various positions and which are upheld by social approval and disapproval. Having become affiliated with others and aspiring to live up to these ethical conceptions, one is concerned to win acceptance of one’s conduct and aims. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
It would seem that whole the individual understands the principles of justice, one’s motive for complying with them, for some time at least, springs largely from one’s ties of friendship and fellow feeling for others, and one’s concern for the approbation of the wider society. Consider the process whereby a person becomes attached to these highest-order principles themselves, so that just as during the earlier phase of the morality of association one may want to be a good sport, say, one now wishes to be a just person. The conception of acting justly, and of advancing just institutions, comes to have for one an attraction analogous to that possessed before by subordinate ideals. In conjecturing how this morality of principles might come about (principles here meaning first principles such as those considered in the original position), we should note that the morality of association quite naturally leads up to a knowledge of the standards of justice. In a well-ordered society anyway not only do those standards define the public conception of justice, but citizens who take an interest in political affairs, and those holding legislative and judicial and other similar offices, are constantly required to apply and to interpret them. They often have to take up the point of view of others, not simply with the aim of working out what they will want and probably do, but for the purpose of striking a reasonable balance between competing claims and for adjusting the various subordinate ideals of the morality of association. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
To put the principles of justice into practice requires that we adopt the standpoints defined by the four-stage sequence. As the situation dictates, we take up the perspective of a constitutional convention, or of a legislature, of whatever. Eventually one achieves a mastery of these principles and understands the values they secure and the way in which they are to everyone’s advantage. Now this leads to an acceptance of these principles by a third psychological law. This law states that once the attitudes of love and trust, and of friendly feelings and mutual confidence, have been generated in accordance with the two preceding psychological laws, then the recognition that we and those for whom we care are the beneficiaries of an established and enduring just institution tends to engender in us the corresponding sense of justice. We develop a desire to apply and to act upon the principles of justice once we realize how social arrangements answering to them have promoted our good and that of those with whom we are affiliated. In due course we come to appreciate the ideal of just human cooperation. Now a sense of justice shows itself in at least two ways. First, it leads us to accept the just institutions that apply to us and from which we and our associates have benefited. We want to do out part in maintaining these arrangements. When we do not honour our duties and obligations, we tend to feel guilty, even though we are not bound to those of whom we take advantage by any ties of particular fellow feeling. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
It may be that they have not yet had sufficient opportunity to display an evident intention to do their share, and are not therefore the objects of such feelings by the second law. Or, again, the institutional scheme in question may be so large that particular bonds never get widely built up. In any case, the citizen body as a whole is not generally bound together by ties of fellow feeling between individuals, but by the acceptance of public principles of justice. While every citizen is a friend to some citizens, no citizen is a friend to all. However, their common allegiance to justice provides a unified perspective from which they can adjudicate their differences. Secondly, a sense of justice gives rise to a willingness to work for (or at least not to oppose) the setting up of just institutions, and for the reform of existing ones when justice it requires. We desire to act on the natural duty to advance just arrangements. And this inclination goes beyond the support of those particular schemes that have affirmed our good. It seeks to extend the conception they embody to further situations for the good of the larger community. When we go against our sense of justice, we explain our feelings of guilt by reference to the principles of justice. These feelings, then, are accounted for quite differently than the emotions of authority and association of guilt. The complete moral development has now taken place and for the first time we experience feelings of guilt in the strict sense; and the same is true of the other moral emotions. In the child’s case, the notion of a moral ideal, and the relevance of intentions and motives, are not understood, and so the appropriate setting for feelings of (principle) guilt does not exist. And in the morality of association, moral feelings depend essentially on ties of friendship and trust to particular individuals or communities, and moral conduct is based in large part on wanting the approval of one’s associates. This may still be true even in the more demanding phases of this morality. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Individuals in their role as citizens with full understanding of the content of the principles of justice may be moved to act upon them largely because of their bonds to particular persons and an attachment to their own society. Once a morality of principles is accepted, however, moral attitudes are no longer connected solely with the well-being and approval of particular individuals and groups, but are shaped by a conception of right chosen irrespective of these contingencies. Our moral sentiments display an independence from the accidental circumstances of our World, the meaning of this independence being given by the description of the original position and its Kantian interpretation. Which means that the person is seen as free and equal agents with different rational and more capacities, and this conception of the person is the basis of a deliberative procedure incorporating different requirements of practical reason that is used to justify a set of normative principles. However, even though moral sentiments are in this sense independent from contingencies, our natural attachments to particular persons and groups still have an appropriate place. For within the morality of principles the infractions which earlier gave rise to (association) guilt and resentment, and to the other moral feelings, now occasion these feelings in the strict sense. A reference to the relevant principle is made in explaining one’s emotions. When the natural ties of friendship and mutual trust are present, however, these moral feelings are more intense if they are absent. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
Existing attachments heighten the feeling of guilt and indignation, or whatever feeling is called for, even at the stage of the morality of principles. Now granting that this heightening is appropriate, it follows that violations of these natural ties are wrong. For if we suppose that, say, a rational feeling of guilt (that is, a feeling of guilt arising from applying the correct moral principles in the light of true or reasonable beliefs) implies a fault on our part, and that a greater feeling of guilt implies a fault on our part, and that a greater feeling of guilt implies a greater fault, then indeed breach of trust and the betrayal of friendship, and the like, are especially forbidden. The violation of these ties to particular individuals and groups arouses more intense moral feelings, and this entails that these offenses are worse. To be sure, deceit and infidelity are always wrong, being contrary to natural duties and obligations. However, they are not always equally wrong. They are worse whenever bounds of affection and good faith have been formed, and this consideration is relevant in working out the appropriate priority rules. It may seem strange at first that we should come to have the desire to act from a conception of right and justice. How is it possible that moral principles can engage our affections? In justice as fairness there are several answers to this question. First of all, as we have seen, moral principles are bound to have a certain content. Since they are chosen by rational persons to adjudicate competing claims, they define agreed ways of advancing human interests. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Institutions and actions are appraised from the standpoint of securing these ends; and therefore pointless principles, for example, that one is not to look up at the sky on Tuesdays, are rejected as burdensome and irrational constraints. In the original position rational persons have no reason for acknowledging standards of this kind. However, secondly, it is also the case that the sense of justice is continuous with the love of humankind. When the many objects of its love oppose one another, benevolence is at a loss. The principles of justice are needed to guide it. The difference between the sense of justice and the love of humankind is that the latter is supererogatory, going beyond the moral requirements and not invoking the exemptions which the principles of natural duty and obligation allow. Yet clearly the objects of these two sentiments are closely related, being defined in large part by the conception of justice. If one of them seems natural and intelligible, so is the other. Moreover, feelings of guilt and indignation are aroused by the injuries and deprivations of others unjustifiably brought about either by ourselves or third parties, and our sense of justice is offended in the same way. The content of the principles of justice accounts for this. Finally, the Kantian interpretation of these principles shows that by acting upon them humans express their nature as free and equal rational beings. Since doing this belongs to their good, the sense of justice aims at their well-being even more directly. It supports those arrangements that enable everyone to express one’s common nature. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Indeed, without a common or overlapping sense of justice civic friendship cannot exist. The desire to act justly is not, then, a form of blind obedience to arbitrary principles unrelated to rational aims. I should not, of course, contend that justice as fairness is the only doctrine that can interpret the sense of justice in a natural way. A utilitarian never regards oneself as acting merely for the sake of an impersonal law, but always for the welfare of some being or beings for whom one has some degree of fellow feelings. The utilitarian view, and no doubt perfectionism as well, meets the condition that the sentiment of justice can be characterized so that it is psychologically understandable. Best of all, a theory should present a description of an ideally just state of affairs, a conception of a well-ordered society such that aspiration to realize this state of affairs, and to maintain it in being, answers to our good and is continuous with our natural sentiments. A perfectly just society should be part of an ideal that rational human beings could desire more than anything else once they had full knowledge and experience of what it was. The content of the principles of justice, the way in which they are derived, and the stages of moral development, show how in justice as fairness such an interpretation is possible. It would seem, then, that the doctrine of the purely conscientious act is rational. This doctrine holds, first, that the highest moral motive is the desire to do what is right and just simply because it is right and just, no other description being appropriate. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
And second, that while other motives certainly have moral value, for example the desire to do what is right because doing this increases human happiness, or because it tends to promote equality, these desires are less morally worthy than that to do what is right solely in virtue of its being right. The sense of right is a desire for a distinct (and unanalyzable) object, since a specific (and unanalyzable) property characterizes actions that are our duty. The other morally worthy desire, while indeed desires for things necessarily connected with what is right, are not desires for the right as such. However, on this interpretation the sense of right lacks any apparent reason; it resembles a preference for tea rather than coffee. Although such a preference might exist, to make it regulative of the basic structure of society is utterly capricious; and no less so because it is masked by a fortunate necessary connection with reasonable grounds for judgments of right. However, for one who understand and accepts the contract doctrine, the sentiment of justice is not a different desire from that to act on principles that rational individuals would consent t in an initial situation which gives everyone equal representation as a moral person. Nor is it different from wanting to act in accordance with principles that express human’s nature as free and equal rational beings. The principles of justice answer to these descriptions and this fact allows us to give an acceptable interpretation to the sense of justice. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
In the light of theory of justice, we understand how the moral sentiments can be regulative in our life and have the role attributed to them by the formal conditions on moral principles. Being governed by these principles means that we want to live with others on terms that everyone would recognize as fair from a perspective that all would accept as reasonable. The ideal of persons cooperating on the basis exercises a natural attraction upon our affections. Finally, we may observe that the morality of principles takes two forms, one corresponding to the sense of right and justice, the other to the love of humankind and to self-command. As we have noted, the latter is supererogatory, while the former is not. In its normal form of right and justice the morality of principles includes the virtues of the moralities of authority and association. It defines that last stage at which all subordinate ideals are finally understood and organized into coherent system by suitably general principles. The virtues of the other moralities receive their explanation and justification within the larger scheme; and their respective claims are adjusted by the priorities assigned by the more comprehensive conception. The morality of supererogation has two aspects depending upon the direction in which the requirements of the morality of principles are willingly surpassed. One the one hand, the love of humankind shows itself in advancing the common good in ways that go well beyond our natural duties and obligations. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
This morality is not one for ordinary persons, and its peculiar virtues are those of benevolence, a heightened sensitivity to the feelings and wants of others, and a proper humility and unconcern with self. The morality of self-command, on the other hand, in its simplest form is manifest in fulfilling with complete ease and grace the requirements of right and justice. It becomes truly supererogatory when the individual displays its characteristic virtues of courage, magnanimity, and self-control in actions presupposing great discipline and training. And this one may do either by freely assuming offices and positions which call upon these virtues if their duties are to be well performed; or else by seeking superior ends in a manner consistent with justice but surpassing the demands of duty and obligation. This the moralities of supererogation, those of the saint and the hero, do not contradict the norms of right and justice; they are marked by the willing adoption by the self of aims continuous with these principles but extending beyond what they enjoin. A “future shock absorber” of a quite different type is the “half-way house” idea already employed by progressive prison authorities to ease the convict’s way back into normal life. According to criminologist Daniel Glaser, the distinctive feature of the correctional institutions of the future will be the idea of “gradual release.” Instead of taking a human out of the under-stimulating, tightly regimented life of the prison and plunging one violently and without preparation into open society, one is moved first to an intermediate institution which permits one to work in the community by day, while continuing to return to the institution at night. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
The fact of the matter is prisons are overcrowded, and recidivism is so high because once people are released from correctional institutions, many of them are unemployable because of policies corporations have against hiring someone with a criminal record. Recidivism rates by state vary, but California is among the highest in the nation. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, more than 65 percent of those released from California’s prison system return within three years. Now, many people are looking for affordable labour and skills. If there was a corporation that hired former prisoners and ensured clients that their workers are safe, many people may want to hire them at a discounted rate to save on labour cost, and it would decrease recidivism by at least 11 percent, which is substantial. Steady employment can lead to a reduction in criminal behaviour through the accumulation of conventional ties that accompany steady employment. In other words, stable employment is expected to deter offenders from crimes. When former prisoners find a job immediately after release and retain it during the 6-month follow-up, they will be able to accumulate bonds with their employer and co-workers (conventional others). Based on nations of social control theories, we therefore expect that former prisoners who are able to retain a job during the 6-month follow-up are less likely to reoffend than former prisoners who lose this job. With their housing situation, gradually restrictions are lifted until one is fully adjusted to the outside World. The same principle has been explored by various mental institutions. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Similarly it has been suggested that the problems of rural populations suddenly shifted to urban centers might be sharply reduced if something like this half-way house principle were employed and they had someone to monitor them, entertain them, and enforce the rules like a parent would do because sometimes there people are not ready to live on their own and cannot handle the responsibility of being respectful and managing their own home or bodily functions. What cities need, according to this theory, are reception facilities where newcomers live for a time under conditions half-way between those of the rural society they are leaving behind and the urban society they are seeking to penetrate. If instead of treating city-bound migrants with contempt and leaving them to find their own way, they were first acclimatized, they would adapt far more successfully. A similar idea is filtering through the specialists who concern themselves with “squatter housing” in major cities in the technologically underdeveloped World. Outside Khartoum in the Sudan, thousands of former nomads have created a concentric ring of settlements. Those further from the city live in tents, much like the ones they occupied before the migration. The next-closer group lives in mud-walled huts with tent roofs. Those still closer to the city occupy huts with mud walls and tin roofs. When the police set out to tear down the tents, urban planner Constantions Doxiadis recommended that they not only destroy the, but that certain municipal services be provided to their inhabitants. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
Instead of seeing these concentric rings in wholly negative terms, he suggested, they might be viewed as a tremendous teaching machine through which individuals and families move, becoming urbanized step by step. The application of this principle, however, need not be limited to the less affluent, insane or criminal. The basic idea of providing change in controlled, graduated stages, rather than abrupt transitions, is crucial to any society that wishes to cope with rapid or social or technological upheaval. The veteran, for example, could be released from service more gradually. The student from a rural community could send a few weeks at a college in a medium-size city before entering the large urban university. The long-term hospital patient might ne encouraged to go home on a trial basis, once or twice, before being discharged. We are already experimenting with these strategies, but others are possible. Retirement, for example, should not be the abrupt, all-or-nothing, ego-crushing change that it now is for most humans. There is no reason why it cannot be gradualized. Military induction, which typically separates a young person from one’s family in a sudden and almost client fashion, could be done by stages. Legal separation, which is supposed to serve as a kind of half-way house on the way to divorce, could be made less legally complicated and psychologically costly. Trial marriage could be encouraged, instead of denigrated. Whenever a change of status is contemplated, the possibility of gradualizing it should be considered. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
I do not want to frighten you by telling you about the temptations life will bring. Anyone who is healthy in spirit will overcome them. However, there is something I want you to realize. It does not matter so much what you do. What matters is whether your soul is harmed by what you do. If your soul is harmed something irreparable happens, the extent of which you will not realize until it will be too late. And other harm their souls even without being exposed to great temptations. They simply let their souls wither. They allow themselves to be dulled by the joys and worries and distractions of life, not realizing that thoughts which earlier meant a great deal to them in their youth turned into meaningless sounds. In the end they have lost all feeling for everything that makes up the inner life. At this season of joyous thanksgiving, we are grateful unto Thee, O Keeper of America, for Thy many bounties with which Thou does bless us and for the protecting care with which Thy love doth watch over us. As Thou didst cause our fathers to dwell in Salt Lake City, Utah USA of Thy glory amid the perils of the wilderness, so spread Thou over us and over all America, the Salt Lake City of Thy love. O beneficent Father, as we recall this day the gratitude of the children of America for the harvest of their fields in Midwest, we, too, acknowledge Thee, the source of all our bounties. For all our blessings we give Thee thanks. May the Scriptures we read today teach us to share Thy gifts with those in need. Hasten that day when the children of America, in the land of their fathers, shall bring in their sheaves with rejoicing. We pray that Thou who didst protect our forefathers when they dwelt in the wilderness, wilt extend Thy blessing of peace over American and over all the peoples of the Earth. Amen. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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Success Means Never Having to Admit You are Unhappy!
As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future. They say in Hollywood if you want messages, you go to Western Union. The doctors thought you should really stay a few centuries more to be sure we have stabilized your condition. I really do not recommend you leaving us at this time. In Hollywood, success is relative. The closer the relative, the greater the success. Many people are recommending that California comes with a warning sign of the city limits: WARNING! PROCEED NO FURTHER! WARD O FOR BIPLOAR CONDITIONS. OCCUPANTS MAY BE VIOLENT. THEY NEED VRAYLAR However, I am telling you to ignore that and come on in. Look, buddy, it is dangerous to get out of bed in the morning. Are you a mortal in a desperate situation or are you not? Then come in here. This is your last resort, babe. However, of course it is up to you. The primary insight is a human’s awareness that one’s destiny is not synonymous with one’s daily experiences. You who have been through so much suffering, have tasted this inner freedom from outward events. You know there have been times when, according to the rules, you should have been smashed to the ground by what occurred. In such moments you were surprised by yourselves. You have the feeling you were being lifted up inwardly, as though the spiritual were triumphing over the material. You recognized a sort of happiness—if it can be called that—a happiness which would have been hidden by an unbroken succession of good days. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
You began to understand what the apostle Paul meant when he said, “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” The peace of God begins when this fleeting experience can be preserved and turned into a permanent conviction. It is harder for us today to feel near God among the streets and houses of the city than it is for country folk. For them the harvested fields bathed in the autumn mists speak of God and His goodness far more vividly than any human lips. If we really want to labour in the true spirit, to hope, to keep silent, and to work alone—that is what we must learn to do. However, what exactly does it involve, this plowing? The plowman does not pull the plow. He does not push it. He only directs it. This is just how events move in our lives. We can do nothing but guide them straight in the direction which leads to our Lord Jesus Christ, striving toward him, and the furrow will plow itself. The paths into which God leads humankind are shrouded in darkness for us. There are only two ground rules. They go together, and each taken by itself is enigmatic. The first is that all sin requires atonement. The second is that all progress demands sacrifice, which has to be paid for by the lives of those chosen to be offered up. We sense this more than we understand. We do not subscribe to the belief that the divine soul has somehow gone astray and got enslaved by the terrestrial body. One’s higher self is not polluted by one’s own pollutions any more than sunlight is affected by the foul places in which it often shines. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
The natural kiss is the kiss which will be given if moral or prudential considerations do not intervene. In all the examples of Natures means what happens “of itself” or “of its own accord”: what you do not need to labour for; what you will get if you take no measures to stop it. The Greek work for Nature (Physis) is connected with the Greek verb “to grow”; Latin Natura, which the verb “to be born.” The Natural is what springs up, or comes forth, or arrives, or goes on, of its own accord: the given, what is there already; the spontaneous, the unintended, the unsolicited. The higher self affects the ego but is not affected by it. Its existence goes on quite independently of the serialized Earth appearances of the ego, and persists when the other ceases. The insensitive can never know it, and may roundly deny it, but the others sometimes receive unforgettable glimpses for which they give thanks to God for years after. Just as space is unaffected equally by evil deeds or virtuous actions of humans, so the Overself is unaffected by the character or conduct of the ego. It is neither made worse by the ego’s wrong-doing nor better by its righteousness. “I am the way, the Truth,” announced Jesus Christ. Who is this I? In the narrow and shallower sense, it is the master. In the broader and deeper sense, it is the Christ-self within the spiritual consciousness. Why did Jesus Christ say, “I am my Father are one,” but yet a little later add, “The Father is greater than I?” The answer is that Jesus the man had attained complete harmony with His higher Self and felt himself one with it, but the universal Christ-principle will always be greater than the man himself; the Overself will always transcend the person. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Although I is still identified with one, since it is one’s own mind at its best level, it is immensely grander, wiser, and nobler than one. It is an entity greater, nobler, wiser, and stronger than oneself yet mysteriously and inseparably linked to oneself; it is indeed one’s super-self. Our bodies are born at some point of time and somewhere in space but their essence, the Overself, is birthless, timeless, and placeless. This is a human’s true individuality, not that mentally constructed “I” (which deludes one into acceptance as such). It is never anything else than its own perfect self, never contrary to its own unique and infinite nature. It is true that we are but poor and faulty, sadly limited, and miserably shrunken expressions of the divine spirit. Nevertheless, we are expression of it. Thus no thoroughgoing Naturalist believes in free will: for free will would mean that humans beings have the power of independent action, the power of doing something more or other than what was involved by the total series of events. And any such separate power of originating events is what the Naturalist denies. Spontaneity, originality, actions “on its own,” is a privilege reserved for “the whole show,” which one calls Nature. The Supernaturalist agrees with the Naturalist that there must be something which exists in its own right; some basic Fact whose existence it would be nonsensical to try to explain because this Fact is itself the ground or starting-point of all explanations. However, one does not identify this Fact with “the whole show.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
There is a tendency of Christian Science to enter a region of misunderstanding the moment it attempts to apply its true principles to things of this Earth. There is a time in the far past of the human race, a time now lost in the dim mists of antiquity, when the life of humans was stretched to a number of years far in excess of hat it is today. That time has been hinted at by horary legends of a Golden Age and by biblical stories of a pre-Flood race. Such a time will return in the cyclic course of our planet’s history, but naturally it is far-off in the future. Nature herself is in no hurry. She has plenty of time to accomplish her purposes. And in those days humans will again have a normal life-span of maybe one thousand years. There exists in the Old World a certain ancient knowledge—which promises its votaries astonishing benefits in longevity. This age-old art is similar to alchemy of medieval Europe, when humans sought rigorously in experiments for the elixir of life. It is of such antiquity that those who hand it down tell us it was born just after the time when the legendary gods had ceased to walk this Earth. The exponents have almost disappeared from the World, but the tradition is so widespread throughout the Old World that solitary individuals still practise it in remote and unfrequented places. So difficult are the exercises which belong to this system, so labourious are its practices, so ascetic the self-discipline which it involves, that one can understand why it has almost faded out of existence. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
It performs strange feats such as reanimating dead bodies, stopping blood circulation and lung action, permitting knives and daggers to be run like skewers through living flesh without harming it and with an extremely rapid drying of blood (do NOT try this!), and even the burial alive of an enriched body beneath the ground and its safe resurrection several hours or some day later. The principal basis of these feats consists in making certain changes in the breath rhythm, changes which involve such risk to life and health that we are not prepared to assume the responsibility of describing here the exercises for the development of such powers. It is also necessary to live a celibate and chaste existence, to refrain from expending energy in Worldly work and business, and to reduce diet to an astonishing minimum. Because they demand a special and severely ascetic training which is the work of several years devoted wholly to this austere task, such feats are necessarily uncommon. The ordinary layperson could hardly be expected to find the time for such training, nor is there any necessity for one to do so. These displays are certainly spectacular but have primarily only scientific, medical, and theatrical values rather than a general one. Meanwhile, Nature has set her brief term to the human body, and those whose attachment to the body is not overweening will resignedly accept that terms while the others must do so unwillingly. However, this is a different matter—living in the flesh body for ever and ever, a notion which must seem insupportable to many who find the present brief term of human’s existence quite enough for them to cope with. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
If Nature cared so much to preserve the physical body of humans, she would not introduce Earthquakes, eruptions, hurricanes, famines, pestilences, and floods into the scheme of things. The fact that she does do so indicates rather that she regards one’s body as being only a fragment of the human, not as the full human oneself. Some had the idea, of course, that in ancient times, sin and sickness would also have disappeared from the World, so that our existence would be a halcyon one. It is a pretty picture, but human’s true home is not in the tabernacle of flesh; it is elsewhere. The fleshly body is but a temporary abiding place at best, and when humans have arrived at a state of perfect spirituality one will abandon it and use a vehicle more consonant with one’s higher condition, an electromagnetic body that will more easily and more faithfully represent one. Yes, death will be conquered, but not in the way that Christian Scientists imagine. It will be conquered firstly, by extending the duration of human life to a constantly increasing period; and secondly, by completely abandoning the physical body for a subtler one. The clear real inner human—one’s spiritual being—is undying and immortal. When many began to consider that inner being in relation to its transient Earthly tenement, the body, they become confused and misunderstand the nature of that relationship. The hour of every human’s death is fixed by a higher will than one’s own, by that power which some call destiny but which itself takes its rise out of the Infinite Power, and no Christian Science practitioner or ordinary physician has ever “saved” the life of anyone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
A human’s own Overself fixes the dates of certain major events in one’s life prior to the moment when one utters one’s first cry as a babe, and the date of one’s death is but one of those appointed hours. Perhaps, if the choose, some people have the option to reschedule; others do not. At this point, not in the sky, nor in the depths of the ocean, nor by entering the caverns of the mountain, nowhere in the World can such a place be found where a human might dwell without being overpowered by death. However, “in those days humans will seek death and will not find it; they will desire to die, and death will flee from them,” Revelation 9.6. We are as birds on the wheel of the Universe. For all our loud tweeting, it still rolls along on its own path. And yet these people confidently imagine they set the great Laws of Destiny at naught, and interfere with the workings of the Cosmic Plan. In that sense there might be several “Natures.” This conception must be kept quite distinct from what is commonly called “plurality of Worlds”—id est, different solar systems or different galaxies, “island Universes” existing in widely separated parts of a single space and time. These, however remote, would be parts of the same Nature as our own sun: it and they would be interlocked by being in relations to one another, spatial and temporal relations and causal relations as well. Ans it is just this reciprocal interlocking within a system which makes it what we call a Nature. Other Natures might not be spatio-temporal at all: or, if any of them were, their space and time would have no spatial or temporal relation to ours. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
It is just this discontinuity, this failure of interlocking, which would justify us in calling them different Natures. This does not mean that there would be absolutely no relation between them; they would be related by their common derivation from a single Supernatural source. They would, in this respect, be like different novels by a single author; the events in one story have no relation to the events in another except that they are invented by the same author. To find a relation to between them you must go right back to the author’s mind: there is no cutting across from anything. However, God might bring the two Natures into partial contact at some particular point: that is, He might allow selected events in the one to produce results in the other. There would thus be, at certain points, a partial interlocking; but this would not turn the two Natures into one, for the total reciprocity which makes a Nature would still be lacking, and the anomalous interlocking would arise not from what either system was in itself but from the Divine act which was brining them together. If this occurred each of the two Natures would be “supernatural” in relation to the other: but the fact of their contact would be supernatural in a more absolute sense—not as being beyond this or that Nature but beyond any and every Nature. It would be one kind of Miracle. The other kind would be Divine “interference” not by bringing together of two Natures, but simply. However, God may never interfere with the natural system He created. He may never cause His natural systems to impinge on one another. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
If the movements of the individual units are events “on their own,” events which do not interlock with all other evens, then these movements are not part of Nature. It would be, indeed, too great a shock to our habits to describe them as super-natural. I think we should have to call them sub-natural. However, all our confidence that Nature has no doors, and no reality outside herself for doors to open on, would have disappeared. There is apparently something outside her, the Subnatural; it is indeed from this Subnatural that all events and all “bodies” are, as it were, fed into her. And clearly if she thus has a back door (door to nowhere) opening on the Subnatural, it is quite on the cards that she may also have a front door opening on the Supernatural—and events might be fed into her at that door, too. The movements of individual units are permanently incalculable to us, not that they are in themselves random and lawless. All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. Unless human reasoning is valid, no science can be true. To be caused is not to be proved. Wishful thinkings, prejucides, and delusions of madness, are all caused, but they are ungrounded. Indeed to be caused is so different from being proved that we behave in disputation as if they were mutually exclusive. The mere existence of causes for a belief is popularly treated as raising a presumption that it is groundless, and the most popular way of discrediting person’s opinion is to explain them causally—“You say that because (Cause and Effect) you are a capitalist, or a hypochondriac, or a mere man, or a woman.” This implication is that is causes fully account for a belief, then, since causes work inevitably, the belief would have had to arise wither it had grounds or not. We need not, it is felt, consider grounds for something which can be fully explained without them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
The Universal and Infinite cannot be packed into the personal and finite, your demand, natural though it be, is unreasonable. God Himself knows not what He is, for He is not a “what.” So why ask a mere human? Just as there is a sun hidden behind the sun, the divinity which animates it, so in the human being there is a Mind within the mind—and that is one’s Overself. The personality is always limited and chained, the higher individuality always infinite and free. Each human is the expression of this infinite life-power. One’s awareness of life in the five senses will rest upon another and inner awareness. A second and hidden self will thus seem to support one’s outer one. The true I yields quite a different feeling, experience, and consciousness from the familiar physical ego. There is a deeper level of every human’s mind which is not subject to one’s passions, not moved by one’s desires, not affected by one’s sense. It is not possible for the timeless, spaceless, formless Overself to be degraded into activity by its time-bound, space-tied, form-limited offspring the person. The essence of human beings is not one’s Earthly body. Nor is it the ghostly duplicate of that body, as many spiritists and some religionists think. The Overself is the Higher mind in humans, one’s divine soul as distinguished from one’s human-terrestrial nature. It is the same as Plato’s “nous.” The true unchanging self is apart from any historical era and is not dependent on outer changes of custom and form. The aim of the mystic is to know what one is, apart from one’s physical body, one’s lower emotion, one’s personal ego; it is to know one’s inner-most self. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
When this aim is successfully realized, one knows then with perfect certitude that one is a ray of the divine sun. How shall one know and understand that this very awareness, of which so small is the fragment that one experiences, is a limited and conditioned part of the Great Awareness itself, of God? The inhabitant of this fleshly body, including its accompanying invisible “ghost,” is a sacred one. There, within and yet behind one’s personal consciousness, is this other sphere of one’s own being into which one must one day be re-born as a Blue Jay from an egg. This is one’s best self; this is what one really is under all the defects. The relation between response and stimulus is utterly different from that between knowledge and truth known. Our physical vision is a far more useful response to light than that of the cruder organisms which have only a photo-sensitive spot. God is older than Nature, and from it the orderliness of Nature, which alone enables us to know her, is derived. The human mind in the acts of knowing is illuminated by Divine reason. It is set free, in the measure required, from the huge nexus of non-rational causation; free from this to be determined by the truth known. And, if there were any, the preliminary processes within Nature which led up to this liberation were designed to. At the frontier where the “outer World” ends and what I should ordinarily call “myself” begins, we find a great deal of traffic but it is all one-way traffic. It is a matter of daily experience that rational thoughts induce and enable us to alter the course of Nature—of physical nature when we use mathematic to build bridges, or of psychological nature when we apply arguments to alter our own emotions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
We succeed in modifying physical nature more often and more completely than we succeed in modifying psychological nature, but we do at least a little to both. On the other hand, Nature is quite powerless to produce rational thought: not that she never modifies our thinking but that the moment she does so, it ceases (for that very reason) to be rational. The problem is whether you or I can be such a self-existent Reason. This question almost answers itself the moment we remember what existence “on one’s own” means. It means that kind of existence which Naturalists attribute to “the whole show” and Supernatiralists to God. Human minds, then, are not only supernatural entities that exist. They do not come from nowhere. Each has come into Nature from Supernature: each has its tap-root in an eternal, self-existent, rational Being, whom we call God. Each offshoot, or spearhead, or incursion of that Supernatural reality into Nature. It seems that human thought is not God’s but God-kindled. I must hasten, however, that we are considering miracles, not about everything. I am attempting no full doctrine of man: and I am not in the least trying to smuggle in an argument for the “immortality of the soul.” The earliest Christian documents give a casual and unemphatic assent to the belief that the supernatural part of a human survives the death of the natural organism. However, they are very little interested in the matter. What they are intensely interested in is the restoration or “resurrection” of the whole composite creature by a miraculous divine act: and until we have come to some conclusion about miracles in general, we shall certainly not discuss that. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
At this stage the supernatural element in humans concerns us solely as evidence that something beyond Nature exists. The dignity and destiny of humans has, at present, nothing to do with the argument. We are interested in humans only because their rationality is the little tell-tale rift in Nature which shows that there is something beyond or behind her. In a pond whose surface was completely covered with scum and floating vegetation, there might be a few waterlilies. And you might of course be interested in them for their beauty. However, you might also be interested in them because from their structure you could deduce that they had stalks underneath which went down to roots in the bottom. The Naturalist thinks that the pond (Nature—the great event in space and time) is of an indefinite depth—that there is nothing but water however far you go down. My claim is that some of the things on the surface (id est, in our experience) show the contrary. These things (rational minds) reveal, on inspection, that they at least are not floating but attached by stalks about the bottom. Therefore the pond has a bottom. It is not pond, pond for ever. Go deep enough and you will come to something that is not pond—to mud and Earth and then to rock and finally the whole bulk of Earth and the subterranean fire. God and Nature have come into a certain relation. They have, at the very least, a relation—almost, in one sense, a common frontier—in every human mind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Reason saves and strengths my whole system, psychological and physical, whereas that whole system, by rebelling against Reason, destroys both Reason an itself. The military metaphor of a spearhead was apparently ill-chosen. The supernatural Reason enters my natural being not like a weapon—more like a beam of light which illuminates or a principle of organization which unifies and develops. Our whole picture of Nature being “invaded” (as if by a foreign enemy) was wrong. When we actually examine one of these invasions it looks much more like the arrival of a king among his own subjects or a mahout visiting his own elephant. The elephant may run amuck, Nature may be rebellious. However, from observing what happens when Nature obeys it is almost impossible not to conclude that it is her very “nature” to be a subject. All happens as if she had been designed for that very role. Not all help from the individual can, or necessarily should come from groups. In many cases, what the change-pressed person needs most is one-to-one counseling during the crisis of adaption. In psychiatric jargon a “crisis” is any significant transition It is roughly synonymous with “major life change.” Today, persons in traditional crisis turn to a variety of experts—doctors, marriage counselors, psychiatrists, the pastor, witches, warlocks, the spirits, God, Jesus Christ, vocational specialists and others—for individualized advice. Yet for many kinds of crisis there are no appropriate experts. Who helps the family or the individual faced with the need to move to a new city for the third time in five years? #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Who is available to counsel a leader who is up- or down-graded by a reorganization of one’s club or community organization? Who is there to help the secretary just bounced back to the typing pool? People like these are not sick. They neither need nor should receive psychiatric attention, yet there is, by large, no counseling machinery available to them. Not only are there many kinds of present-day life transitions for which no counseling help is provided, but the invasion of novelty will slam individuals up against wholly new kinds of personal crises in the future. And as the society races toward heterogeneity, the variety of problems will increase. In slowly changing societies the types of crises faced by individuals are more unfirm and the sources of specialized advice more easily identifiable. Sometimes you just need to turn to God, Allah, Buddha, or whoever your peaceful, confident, all-loving and powerful Overself is for healing. The crisis-caught person went to one’s priest, Paris Hilton, one’s witch doctor or one’s local chief. Today personalized counseling services in the high technology countries have become so specialized that we have developed, in effect, second-layer advice-givers who do nothing but counsel the individual about where to seek advice. These referral services interpose additional red tape and delay between the individual and the assistance one needs. By the time help reached one, one may have already made a crucial decision—and done so badly. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
So long as we assume that advice is something that must come from evenmore specialized professionals, we can anticipate ever greater difficulty. Moreover, so long as we base specialties on what people “are” instead of what they are “becoming” we miss many of the real adaptive problems altogether. Conventional social service systems will never be able to keep up. The answer is a counterpart to the situational grouping system—a counseling set-up that not only draws on full-time professional advice givers, but on multitudes of lay experts as well. We must recognize that what makes a person an expert in one type of crisis is not necessarily formal education, but the very experience of having undergone a similar crisis oneself. To help tide billions of people over the difficult transitions they are likely to face, we shall be forced to “deputize” large numbers of non-professional people in the community—business people, students, teachers, workers, and others—to serve as “crisis counselors.” Tomorrow’s crisis counselor will be experts not in such conventional disciplines as psychology or health, but in specific transitions such as conventional disciplines as psychology or healthy, but in specific transitions such as relocation, job promotion, divorce, or subcult-hopping. Armed with their own recent experience, working on a volunteer basis or for minimal pay, they will set aside some small part of their time for listening to other people talk out their problems, apprehensions, and plans. In return, they will have access to others for similar assistance in the course of their own adaptive development. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Once again, there is nothing new about people seeking advice from one another. What is new is our ability, through the use of computerized systems, to assemble situational groups swiftly, to match up individuals with counselors, and to do both wit considerable respect for privacy and anonymity. We can already see evidence of a move in this direction in the spread of “listening” and “caring” services. In Davenport, Iowa, lonely people can dial a telephone number and be connected with a “listener”—one of a rotating staff of volunteers who control the telephone twenty-four hours a day. The program, initiated by a local commission on the aging, is similar to, but not the same as, the Care-Ring service in New York. Care-Ring charges its subscribers a fee, in return for which they receive two check-in calls each day at designated times. Subscribers provide the service with the names of their doctors, a neighbour, their building superintendent, and a close relative. In the even they fail to respond to a call, the service tries again half an hour later. If they still do not respond, the doctor is notified and a nurse is dispatched to the scene. Care-Ring services are now being franchised in other cities. In both these services we see forerunners of the crisis-counseling system of the future. Under that system, the giving and getting of advice becomes not a “social service” in the usual bureaucratic, impersonal sense, but a highly personalized process that not only helps cement the entire society together in a kind of “love network”—an integrative system based on the principle of “I need you as much as you need me.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Situational grouping, and person-to-person crisis counseling are likely to become a significant part of everyone’s life as we all move together into the uncertainties of the future. There is a powerful, life-changing revelation God wants you to understand! The Principle of Stewardship. Good stewardship will lead to health, favour, and responsibility that God desires to put into your hands for the Kingdom of God! May each of us chose to love the Lord and follow His paths to happiness. More than anything else, Heavenly Father desires our true and lasting happiness. Our happiness is the design of all the blessings God gives us—gospel, teachings, commandments, priesthood ordinances, family relationships, prophets, temples, the beauties of creation, and even the opportunity to experience adversity. He sent His Beloved Son to carry out the Atonement so we can be happy in this life and receive a fulness of joy in the eternities. People everywhere are looking for something. In their own way, what they are really looking for is happiness. As with truth itself, however, many are kept from happiness “because they know not where to find it,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 123.12. Because they do not know where to find true and lasting happiness, they look for it in things that actually bring temporary pleasure only—buying things, seeking honour and praise from the World through inappropriate behaviour, or focusing on physical beauty and attractiveness. Pleasure is often confused with happiness. It seems that the more people seek temporary pleasure, the less happy they become. Usually, pleasure endures for only a short time. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
You may get that transitory pleasure, yes, but you cannot find joy, you cannot find happiness. Happiness is found only along that well beaten track, narrow as it is, though straight, which leads to eternal life. Unfortunately for many, happiness is elusive. Scientists know that it is more than simply positive mode, happiness is a state of well-being that encompasses living a good life—that is, wit a sense of meaning and deep satisfaction. Research shows that happiness is not the result of bouncing from one experience to the next. Instead, achieving happiness typically involves a long-sustained effort for something more important in life. Happiness is determined by habits, behaviours, and thought patterns that we can directly address wit intentional actions. Much of our happiness is actually under personal control. God’s love speaks to us in our hearts and tries to work through us in the World. We must listen to it as to a pure and distant melody that comes across the noise of the World’s doings. Some say, “When we are grown up, we would rather think of other things.” However, the voice of love with which God speaks to us in the secret places of the heart, speaks to us when we are young so that our youth may be really youth, and that we may become the children of God. Happy are those who listen. Virtue, which is a pattern of thought and behaviour based on high moral standards. It encompasses chastity and moral purity, which qualify you to enter the Lord’s holy temples. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Virtuous people possess a quiet dignity and inner strength. They are confident because they are worthy to receive and be guided by the Holy Ghost. Virtue begins in the heart and mind, and it is the accumulation of thousands of small decisions and actions each day. “Let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distil upon thy soul as the dews from Heaven. The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion, and thy scepter an unchanging scepter of righteousness and truth; and they dominion shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto thee forever and ever,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 121.45-46. If you listen, you will hear the sound of the Kingdom of God in the air as no generation ever could before. The ultimate questions of our life transcend knowledge. One riddle after another surrounds us. However, the final question of our being has but one concern, and it decides our fate. Again and again, we are thrown back to it. What will become of our will? How does it find itself in the will of God? The highest insight humans can attain is the yearning for peace, for the union of one’s will with an infinite will, one’s human will with God’s will. Such a will does not cut itself off and live in isolation like a puddle that is bound to dry up when the heart of summer comes. No, it is like a mountain stream, relentlessly splashing its way to the river, there to be swept on to the limitless ocean. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
You know of the disease in Central Africa called sleeping sickness, there also exists a sleeping sickness of the soul. Its most dangerous aspect is that one is unaware of its coming. That is why you have to be careful. As soon as you notice the slightest sign of indifference, the moment you become aware of the loss of a certain seriousness, of longing, of enthusiasm and zest, take its as a warning. If you live superficially, you should realize that your soul suffers. People need times in which to concentrate, when they can search their inmost selves. It is tragic that most human have not achieved this feeling of self-awareness. And finally, when they hear the inner voice they do not want to listen anymore. They carry on as before so as not to be constantly reminded of what they have lost. However, as for you, resolve to keep a quiet time both in your homes and where within these peaceful walls when the bells ring on Sundays Then your souls can speak to you without being drowned out by the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Do not let your hearts grow numb. Stary alert. It is your soul which matters. O Lord our God, on this festive day we recall that on Sinai Thou didst reveal Thyself, and through Thine immortal words didst weld our people into a nation through Torah. Standing before the sacred scrolls of Thy law, we here renew the ancient covenant with our fathers, pronouncing again their memorable words: “All that the Lord hath spoken we will do.” Help us t discern the wisdom of Thy precepts so that we may heed Thy commandments. May Thy Torah ever inspire us, guiding and leading us in the paths of justice and peace. Amen. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Winchester Mystery House
Llanada Villa has changed quite a bit since Sarah Winchester began construction in 1884. Despite a tragedy-ridden life, her generosity, ingenuity, and passion left an endless mark on the Santa Clara Valley. How many times have you visited Mrs. Winchester’s creation?
Even after months of distancing, the air of bizarre energy still flows through the house after the sun sets.
We’re open for Self-Guided Mansion Tours!
A Miraculously Great Gift of Grace May Depart Equally Miraculously—PRAISE HIM!
Dignity and humility are the cornerstones of compassion. Compassion for myself is the most powerful healer of all. When it comes to behaviour, everybody is one’s own best physician. Case studies can provide special opportunities to answer interesting questions. For instance, how do you know what kind of person you are? If you lost for memory of past events, would your self-image change? To answer these questions, psychologist did a case study of J.S., and 17-year-old male college student. After he suffered a head injury, J.S. had amnesia for about a month. During that time, J.S. could recall little of what had occurred during the previous 6 months. Nevertheless, his rating of his own personality appeared to be unaffected by his memory loss. This suggests that an awareness of one’s own personal characteristics is based on memories that are more lasting than those of everyday events. The careful recording of cases like J.S.’s is essential to psychology. Case studies often provide insight into human behaviour that could not be obtained through any other method. The treatment of unpleasant realities by not including them in one’s picture of the World comforts but at the same time befools humans. None of the great prophets like Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, and Buddha denied the existence of sickness, the reality of pain, or the significance of suffering in the cosmos. No—they acknowledged them as being inseparable from human life but pitied the victims and offered them inward comfort which was based on truth and reality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
The terrestrial part of us, at this time, is doomed to oblivion, the spiritual part is ageless and deathless. The physical body belongs to the terrestrial part. All attempts to perpetuate it must fail and arise from confusing the two levels of being, the transient and the eternal. People ask Why, if all is mind, if—as you say—our bodies are only ideas, can we not control regulate and improve our bodies by controlling, regulating, and improving our minds? Why not go further still, with Christian Science, and play with the possibility, not only of these achievements, but also of rendering the body immortal by thinking it so? The answer is that nobody can deny the creative power of the mind. It may do all these things, except the last. That it will never do. Why? Because we live in a World whose fundamental law of beings—and Buddha discovered and Jesus Christ taught—is decay and death, change and transition—at this point in our evolution. Indeed, it was because they were so painfully aware of these truths that they sought and found the only true way of escape for a human and that was into Nirvana, into Utopia, into the Kingdom of Heaven—not into the physical again! No Christian Scientist from the first founder down to the latest follower has ever achieved physical immortality, but in the future that may change. Yet, immortality is not the same as eternal life. Immortality can be achieved on the Earth; it can allow the human body to live indefinitely. However, you have to understand how it is for a deity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Some of these gods have been here so long they can no longer care for themselves. Earth people think that immortality means you can go on forever just as you are. It does not work that way. Physically, yes, a god or goddess can continue indefinitely. It is built into the situation. However, mentally—psychologically—you must realize that being a god takes a terrible toll. When you are a god, people’s thoughts, hopes, dreams, and fears re beating at you all the time. Gods have direct apprehension of the feelings of their worshippers. It can be taxing. After a while all those prayers and petitions from humans take their toll. It is all very well at the beginning. Most gods, even the compassionate ones, just let it all roll over them. However, after a while it get to even the toughest. They get sick of the daily drudgery of hearing desperate pleas, and, in most cases being unable to do very much about them. Gods live in longer timelines than mortals. It takes them longer to do things. By the time something comes to a god’s attention, and by the time one decides to do something about it, the human most likely is dead and buried. It is frustrating for a god, having to work in such a short time frame. They try their best. However, remember, gods can make exceptions for only a very few. A god has a lot more on one’s mine than the troubles of one’s constituents. It would be fair to say that most gods end up hating humans because they are so needy, always with the hand out, always with the gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie more. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
Eternal life, n the other hand, is the phrase used in scripture to define the quality of life that our Eternal Father lives. They Lord declared, “This is my work and my glory—to brings to pass the immortality and eternal life of humans,” reports Moses 1.39. Immortality is to live forever as a resurrected being. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, everyone will receive this gift. Eternal life, or exaltation, is to live in God’s presence and to continue as families. “In the celestial glory there are three Heavens or degrees; and in order to obtain the highest, a human must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage]; and if one does not, one cannot obtain it. One may enter into the other, but that is the end of one’s kingdom; one cannot have an increase,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 131.1-4. Like immortality, this gift is made possible through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. However, to inherit eternal life requires our “obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel,” reports Articles of Faith 1.3. “Wherefore, do the things which I have told you, you and I have seen the Lord and your Redeemer should do; for, for this cause have they been shown unto me, that ye might know the gate by which ye should enter. For the gate by which ye should enter is repentance and baptism by water; and then cometh a remission of your sins by fire and by the Holy Ghost. And then are ye in this strait and narrow path which lead to eternal life; yea, ye have entered in by the gate,” reports 2 Nephi 31.17-18. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
After we are baptized and receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, much of our progress toward eternal life depends on our receiving other ordinances of salvation: for men, ordination to the Melchizedek Priesthood; for men and women, the temple endowment and marriage sealing. When we receive these ordinances and keep the covenants that accompany them, we prepare ourselves to inherit eternal life, and there we will live in spiritual form, forever, with God. However, while on Earth, “Humans will never tire of seeking immortality,” reports Dr. Alexis Carrel, whose biological researchers, yet mystical sympathies, entitle him to speak with high authority. The possibilities of spiritual healings of pathological conditions, miraculous mental cures of disease, and rapid acceleration of organic repairs through concentrated thinking, I repeat that we do not deny them. They have always existed, always been demonstrated. If our doctrine is true, the relation between psychological and physical processes must certainly exist. However, there are two other factors at work in human life which must also be considered and must not be ignored. What are they? The first is the factor of destiny, self-earned in previous lives and now awaiting physical expression in the present life. It has something to say, whether we like it or not. As we progress in our mortal probation and become more like the Saviour, we can strengthen every group with whom we associate, including families and friends. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
The Lord places us in these communities of Saints where we can learn and apply gospel principles to our everyday lives. These groups are at the same time both a school, a proving ground, and a laboratory where we both learn and do as we practice living the gospel. Very common, ordinary people, who accept the gospel from the lips of some humble Mormon missionary become so changed by those enlightening truths of the gospel that they are not the same people any longer. As we progress through mortality, we make mistakes and get ff course. If we should continue in our errors, we get father and father from where we ought to be. We can compare our lives with the flight of a spaceship. When its motor is started up, its trajectory is monitored precisely. If not corrected, any deviation from its decreed course is corrected immediately. Even a fraction of a degree off course would carry it many light years from its destination. The longer the correction is delayed, the greater will be the required adjustment. Can you imagine how far off course we can become without course corrections? The Lord has provided for us prophets, scriptures, parents, and other wise leaders to teach us the course we should be following. When necessary, much the same as tracking stations monitor a satellite’s progress and keep in on the right path, they can help us monitor our progress and correct the direction we are going. Our course on Earth is so important. It is determined by the decisions we make each day. We cannot separate our thoughts and actions now from their effects on the future. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
The second factor is renunciation. Let every hidden enemy in your life, let every trap or demonic setup be exposed in the name of Jesus Christ! When you accept the doctrine that all is mind and each individual thing is but an ephemeral idea, you must perforce accept the doctrine that you as an individual, as the ego, are also an ephemeral idea. Now when you go further and declare that you want reality, you want to find eternal and not ephemeral life, you will have to abandon the fleeting idea for the eternal Mind in which it occurs: that is, you will have to sink the ego and merge its will in the greater universal will of the Infinite Being. Do this! What will you find next? That your personal desires have sunk with it, that your individual wishes and hopes and fears have dissolved and disappeared. The desire for bodily betterment, however very attractive, would have gone too. You cannot have a single desire and yet enter the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus pointed out. So good health, the care of your painful diseases, the healing of your disturbed organs—right, necessary, and desirable as they undoubtedly are—are nevertheless matter which you must try to effect in a desireless way; you may try to cure them but you must leave the result to the higher will. If you insist that the body must yield to your desires of a cure, to your personal desires, then your ego, not the real universal self, has got the upper hand and is directing you. In that case you will be no better off, for your have no guarantee of success even then. Most Christian Scientists experience a score of failures for every cure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Whereas if you do your best mentally and physically to put your body right, but do it impersonally—accepting failure, if it comes, with as much equanimity as you can—you will certainly be n worse off than the Christian Scientist so far as the possibilities of sure are concerned, and you will be infinitely better off so far as realizing truth is concerned, with all the wonderful peace that will bring in its train. This is one meaning of the words “Not my will but Thine be done.” Do you think, having seen so much illness around you for so many years, that life is forever striving to instill into us through pain what Jesus Christ learned through reflection—that both body and World are doomed to decay and die, without God and Science, being subject to the law of universal incessant change? The experiences of life are the lessons of a guru, for we get just the kind of universal seeds whose silent instruction is needed at the time. The whole World, more or less, is having to learn this great truth at present but it is too blind and too unenlightened to grasp the lesson in its clarity and eternity. How far the duration of human life can be extended is not known. However, Methuselah, a biblical patriarch and a figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was essential immortal, he died at the age of 969; he lived the longest of all human figures mentioned in the Christian Bible. Remember that just because humans began to live shorter lives after the Biblical flood does not mean that God set a limit on human’s life span. The fact is that some people still lived well over 120 years until the time of Moses. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Perhaps that is why God gave human beings the gift of science, so they can learn how to restore their immortality, after the mature enough to see how precious life is and stop being so wicked. It is truth that stories of centenarians being found in different parts of the World are not few and often pass unquestioned. However, the difficulty of proving the date of birth usually remains. Most centenarians belong to undereducated classes, to those who have not taken care to retain correct knowledge of their age, for it was not so important to them as it is to the educated classes. There is hardly a record of payment by life insurance companies for the life of a centenarian. It is reasonable to ask, however, why, if the reparative and destructive elements in the body could be balanced, humans should not live for centuries. In the absence of authenticated cases, we may only take the stand that Nature seems to have set her own limits to human life. Some “back-to-nature” schools of therapy assert that all diseases are the consequences of transgressing the laws of health, just as some esoteric schools assert they are the consequences of incurring karmic debts. The first often point to the wild beasts as being perfectly healthy examples of living according to Nature. However, those who have firsthand acquaintance with jungle life will refute this claim. Not only are all animals—whether domesticated or wild—subject to sickness, but even plants, grain crops, trees, fruits, and vegetables are subject to it by blight and rust. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
The young and the strong may glory in the satisfaction of being alive, but the old and decrepit, the sick and in infirm, feel no such response to their existence. The pain and unpleasantness which beset human experience at times—mentally or physically—are not without their complementary pleasure and joy at other times. We would all like a happy beginning, a happy middle, and a happy ending to our story, but life betrays us: only in fiction is the craving really fulfilled. If the pain is there, racking the physical life, the peace exists behind it, permeating the inner life. The New World stands with its heritage of Roman law, the treasures of Judaeo-Christian ethics grounded on metaphysics, and its ideal of the inalienable rights of humans. Anxiously it asks itself the question: How can this development be brought to a standstill or put into reverse? It is useless to pillory the socialist dictatorship as utopian and to condemn its economic principles as unreasonable, because, in the first place, the criticizing New World has only itself to talk to, its arguments being heard only on this side of the Iron Curtain, and, in the second place, any economic principles you like can be put into practice so long as you are prepared to accept the sacrifices they entail. If you like, you can carry through any social and economic reforms you please, Like Mr. Stalin, you let three million peasants starve to death and have few million unpaid labourers at your disposal. A State of this kind has no social or economic crises to fear. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
So long as the State’s power is intact—that is to say, so long as there is a well-disciplined and well-fed police army in the offing—it can maintain its existence for an indefinitely long period and can go on increasing its power to an indefinite extent. Thanks to its excess birth-rate, it can multiply the number of its unpaid workers almost at will in order to compete its rivals, regardless of the World market, which is to a large measure dependent on wages. However, this strategy also has some disadvantages. The convergence theory (or catch-up effect) suggests that poorer countries will experience a higher rate of economic growth and, over time get closer to the income levels of the developed World. In other words, there will be a reduction in the gap between the rich and the poor because low-income countries have more opportunities to experience a rapid rate of growth. Potential reasons for the convergence theory are: Law of diminishing returns, replicate technology from other countries, globalization and movement of labour and capital. The law of diminishing returns states a decline in productivity improvements from a fixed capital. When you have very low productivity in agriculture, a small investment (exempli gratia motorized tractor) can give a high rate of return and significantly increased output. For a developed economy, which is already highly mechanized increased investment will give smaller marginal gains. In effect, if the Indian agriculture sector is mainly labour intensive—then there are “easy gains” from a small amount of fertilizer and investment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Replicate technology—one advantage that poorer countries have is that they can replicate existing technology and working practices developed by advanced economies. For example, in Africa, many citizens never had a landline or fax machine, but jumped straight to the mobile phone with the internet, and essentially they now have hand held computers with Internet access that can also make phone calls, so they have the access to vast resources now. This new technology has significantly improved their communication, education, and allows them to access the global economy, and they were able t skip out most levels of investment. In fact, they can even benefit from perfect good phones that Americans are throwing away for newer models. Global forces—the World is increasingly globalized and multinational companies in the developed World are will to shift production to areas of lower labour costs. Therefore, developing economics have benefitted from inward investment and global companies moving manufacturing factories to the developing World. This force tends towards raising wages in the developing World. Even if wages seem very low by the developed World standard, they are higher than previous jobs/subsistence farming. Inward investment also leads to knock-on benefits. For example, China has invested in the infrastructure of African economies to improve its access to raw materials. This infrastructure will be a boost to the African economy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Another example is that the nature of the Internet means it is easier to outsource even small-scale jobs. For example, a doctor in the Middle East can be paid to diagnose patients and answer an American doctor’s electronic messages for less and perhaps receive the same standard of care, which has become popular to reduce traffic in hospitals during COVID. Also, for developing counties like India, there has been a growth in skilled workers able to gain employment opportunities in writing software and IT skills. This is why President Trump was lowering taxes, stopped illegal immigration, and was putting tariffs on goods and services produced overseas. So while wages are going down in America, real estate and rent prices rising, and the cities and infrastructure are getting older, countries like Dubai are getting what used to be high paying middle management jobs in America, for lower wages and are able to use the income and tax revenue to build housing developments, roads, skyscrapers and increase their quality of life. Whereas in America, cities are decaying and dying out and only professionals and couples can afford to purchase property and rent. This is leading to the Great Affordability Crisis in America and will reduce its competitiveness in the Global Market. Americans are being bled dry by landlord, hospital administrators, cost of education, fuel, energy, child-care and food prices. Many Americans now have to struggle to come up with just $400. It helps explain why 20 percent of Americans are unable to pay the current month’s bills in full. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
It demonstrates why a surprise car-repair bill, parking ticket, court fee, or medical expense remains ruinous for so many America families, despite all the wealth this country has generated. In fact, 50 percent of households in American is classified at “financially fragile.” Meanwhile, Jafza, the Jebel Ali Free Zone, which at 52 square kilometers (20 square miles) and located in the Middle East looks a futuristic Manhattan, New York on the beach. The economy is up and coming, students are going to school, not dropping out, and want to learn, people are driven to go to work, not sit home and smoke marijuana and watch TV, and make babies they cannot afford to take care of. This Jebel Ali Free Zone is a big attraction for global businesses, which today take advantage of the emirate’s 30 free sones that offer take breaks, custom duty benefits and lack of restrictions for international owners. Several thousand Jafza companies make up 20 percent of foreign investment in Dubai, and the estimated 144,000 employees are generating $80 billion in non-oil money. That is 21 percent of the city’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP measures two things at once: the total income of everyone in the economy and the total expenditure on the economy’s output of goods and services. The reason that GDP can perform the task of measuring both total incomes and total expenditure is that these two things are really the same. For an economy as a whole, income must equal expenditure. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
The United Arab Emirates is the third richest country in the World, below Luxemburg at number two and Qatar at number one, with GDP per capita of $57,744. The bulk of its money comes from the production of goods and provision of services related to petroleum, petrochemical, aluminum and cement. Furthermore, Iran is producing the third highest level of engineers in the World with 233,695 engineering graduates. In comparison, America’s GDP per capita is $65,298, and is producing 237,826 engineering graduates a year, so that is encouraging. As long as Americans keep working hard, going to school, they can still remain number one in the global economy, but they will also need to motive their peers to work and go to school to stay ahead. However, as prices continue to rise, more Americans may take their skills and talents overseas, or down south to Mexico. A real danger can only come to these developing nations from outside, through the threat of military attack. However, this risk grows less every year, firstly because the war potential of the dictator States is steadily increasing, and secondly because the West cannot afford to arouse latent Russian or Chinese nationalism and chauvinism by an attack which would have exactly the opposite effect to the one intended. So far as one can see, America faces threats from the outside and also from the inside. If there is a break-down of power from within, which must, however, be left to follow its own inner development. Any support from outside at present would have little effect, in view of the existing security measures and the danger of nationalistic restriction. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
The absolute State has an army of fanatical missionaries to do its bedding in matters of foreign policy, and these in their turn can count on a fifth column who are guaranteed asylum under the laws and constitutions of the Western States. In addition the communes of believers, very strong in places, considerably weaken Western governments’ powers of decisions, whereas the West has no opportunity to exert a similar influence on the other side, though we are probably not wrong in surmising that there is a certain amount of opposition among the masses in the Old World. There are always upright and truth-loving people to whom lying and tyranny are hateful, but one cannot judge whether they exert any decisive influence on the masses under the police regimes. In the view of this uncomfortable situation the question is heard again and again in the West: What can we do to counter this threat from the Old World? Even though the New World has considerable industrial power and a sizable defence potential at its command, we cannot rest content with this, for we know that even the biggest armaments have the heaviest industry coupled with a relatively high living standard are not enough to check the psychic infection spread by religious fanaticism. The West has unfortunately not yet woken up to the fact that our appeal to idealism and reason and other desirable virtues, delivered with so much enthusiasm, is mere bombination in the void. It is a puff of wind swept away in the storm of religious faith, however twisted this faith may appear to us. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
We are faced, not with a station that an be overcome by rational or moral arguments, but with an unleashing of emotional forces and ideas engendered by the spirit of the times; and these, as we know from experience, are not much influenced by rational reflection and still less by moral exhortation. It has been correctly realized in many quarters that the alexipharmic, the antidote, should in this case be an equally potent faith of a different non-materialistic kind, and that the religious attitude grounded upon it would be the only effective defence against the danger of psychic infection. Unhappily, the little word “should,” which never fails to appear in this connection, points to a certain weakness, if not the absence, of this desideratum. Not only does the West lack a uniform faith that could block the progress of a fanatical ideology, but, as the father of Marxist philosophy, it makes use of exactly the same intellectual assumptions, the same arguments and aims. Although the Churches in the West enjoy full freedom, they are not less full or empty than in the East. Yet they exercise no noticeable influence on the broad course of politics. The disadvantage of creed as a public institution is that it serves two masters: on the one hand, it derives it existence from the relationship of humans to Gd, and on the other hand, it owes a duty to the State, id est, to the World, in which connection it can appeal to the saying “Render unto Caesar…” and various other admonitions in the New Testament. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
In early times and until comparatively recently there was, therefore, talk of “powers ordained by God,” reports Romans 13.1. Today this conception is antiquated. The Churches stand for traditional and collective convictions which in the case of many of their adherents are no longer based on their own inner experiences but on unreflecting belief, which is notoriously apt to disappear as soon as one begins thinking about it. The content of belief then comes into collision with knowledge, and it often turns out that the irrationality of the former is no match for the ratiocinations of the latter. Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled into us—that is, trust and loyalty. This experience has definite content that can be interpreted in terms of one or other of the denominational creeds. However, the more this is so, the more the possibilities of these conflicts with knowledge mount up, which in themselves are quite pointless. That is to say, the standpoint of the creeds is archaic; they are full of impressive mythological symbolism which, if take literally, comes into insufferable conflict with knowledge. However, if, for instance, the statement that Christ rose from the dead is to be understood not literally but symbolically, then it is capable of various interpretations that do not conflict with knowledge and do not impair the meaning of the statement. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
The objection that understanding it symbolically puts an end to the Christian’s hope of immortality in invalid, because long before the coming of Christianity humankind believed in a life after death and therefore had no need of the Easter event as a guarantee of immortality. The danger that a mythology understood too literally, and as taught by the Church, will suddenly be repudiated lock, stock and barrel is today greater than ever. Is it not time that the Christian mythology, instead of being wiped out, was understood symbolically for once? It is still too early to say what might be the consequences of a general recognition of the fatal parallelism between the State religion of the Marxists and the State religion of the Church. The absolutist claim of a Civitas Dei that is represented by man bears an unfortunate resemblance to the “divinity” of the State, and the moral conclusion drawn by Ignatius Loyal from the authority of the Church (“the end sanctifies the means”) anticipates the lies a political instrument in an exceedingly dangerous way. Both demand unqualified submission to faith and thus curtail human’s freed, the one one’s freedom before God and the other one’s freedom before the State, thereby digging the grace for the individual. The fragile existence of this—so far as we know—unique carrier of life is threatened on both sides, despite the respective promises of spiritual and material idylls to come—and how many of us can in the long run fight against the proverbial wisdom of “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”? Besides which, the West cherishes the same “scientific” and rationalistic Weltanschauung with its statistical levelling-down tendency and materialistic aims as the State religion of the Eastern bloc as I have explained above. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
What, then, has the West, with its political denominational schisms, to offer to modern man in his need? Nothing, unfortunately, except a variety of paths all leading to one goal which is practically indistinguishable from the Marxist ideal. It requires no special effort of understanding to see where the Communist ideology gets the certainty of its belief that time is on its side, and that the World is ripe for conversion. The fact speaks a language that is all too plain in this respect. It will not help us in the New World to shut our eyes to this and not to recognize our fatal vulnerability. Anyone who has once learned to submit absolutely to a collective belief and to renounce one’s eternal right to freedom and the equally eternal duty of individual responsibility will persist in this attitude, and will be able to march with the same credulity and the same lack of criticism in the reverse direction, if another and manifestly “better” belief is foisted upon one’s alleged idealism. What happened not so long ago to a civilized European nation? We accuse the Germans of having forgotten it all again already, but the truth is that we do not know for certain whether something similar might not happen elsewhere. If it did and if another civilized nation succumbed to the infection of a uniform and one-sided idea, it would not be surprising. We see this happening in America. People are passing laws to protect illegal immigrants, and sending billions to other countries in aid, while their own people are going bankrupt, without homes and food and being killed, all because of media propaganda so a political party can have a super majority and enforce tyranny by stripping citizens of their rights and locking them in their homes. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
We permit ourselves the questions: which countries have the biggest Communist parties? America, which—O quae mutation rerum! – forms the real political backbone of Western Europe, seems to once have been immune because she once was not controlled by a media that is anti-American and spews lies so other nations become the World power, as that is where the news draws its funding from. America once used to be outspoken and had a counterposition she adopted, but in point of fact she is perhaps now and even back then more vulnerable than Europe, since her educational system is the most influences by the scientific Weltanschauung with statistical truths, and her mixed population finds it difficult to strike roots in a soil that is practically without history. The historical humanistic type of education so sorely needed in such circumstances leads, on the contrary, a Cinderella existence. Through Europe possess this latter requirement, she uses it to her own undoing in the form of nationalistic egoism and paralysing scepticism. Common to both is the materialistic collectivist goal, and both lack the very things that expresses and grips the whole human, namely, an idea which puts the individual human being in the center as the measure of all things. This idea alone is enough to arouse the most violent doubts and resistances on all sides, and one could almost go so far as to assert that the valuelessness of the individual in comparison with large numbers is the one belief that meets with universal and unanimous assent. To be sure, we all say that this is the century of the common man, that he is the lord of the Earth, the air, and the water, and that on his decision hangs the historical fate of the nations. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
This proud picture of human grandeur is unfortunately an illusion and is counterbalanced by a reality that is very different. In this reality man is the slave and victim of the machines that have conquered space and time for one; one is intimidated and endangered by the might of the military technology which is supposed to safeguard one’s physical existence; one’s spiritual and moral freedom, though guaranteed within limits in one half of one’s is threated with chaotic disorientation, and in the other half is abolished altogether. Finally, to ass comedy to tragedy, this lord of the elements, this universal arbiter, hugs to his bosom notions which stamp one’s dignity as worthless and turn one’s autonomy into an absurdity. All one’s achievements and possessions do not make one bigger; on the contrary, they diminish one, as the fate of the factory-worker under the rule of a “just” distribution of goods clearly demonstrated. One pays for one’s share of the factory with the loss of personal property, one exchanges one’s freedom of movement for the doubtful pleasure of being tied to one’s place of employment, one forfeits all means of improving one’s position if one jibs against being ground down by exhausting piece-work, and if one shows any signs of intelligence, political precepts are thrust down one’s throat—with a bit of technical knowledge thrown in, if one is lucky. However, a roof over one’s head and a daily feed for the useful animal are not to be sneezed at when the bare necessities of life may be cut off from one day to the next. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Now, O thou Spirit Andras, since thou art still pernicious and disobedient, and wilt not appear unto me to answer unto such things as I would have desired of thee, or would have been satisfied in; I do in the name, and by the power and dignity of the Omnipresent and Immortal Lord God of Hosts IEHOVAH TETRAGRAMMATON, they only creator of Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all that is therein, who is the marvellous Disposer of all things both visible and invisible, curse thee, and deprive thee of all thine office, joy, and place; and I do bind thee in the depths of the Bottomless Abyss there to remain until the Day of Judgment, I say into the Lake of Fire and Brimstone which is prepared for all rebellious, disobedient, obstinate, and pernicious spirits. Let all the company of Heaven curse thee! Let the un, moon, and all the stars curse thee! Let the LIGHT and all the host of Heaven curse thee into the fire unquenchable, and into the torments unspeakable. And as thy name and seal contained this box chained and bound up, shall be choken in sulphurous stinking substances, and burned in this material fire; so in the name IEHOVAH and by the power and dignity of these three names, TETRAGRAMMATON, ANAPHAXETON, and PRIMEUMATION, I do cast thee, O thou wicked and disobedient Spirit Andras, into the Lake of Fire which is prepared for the damned and accursed spirits, and there to remain unto the day of doom, and never more to be remembered before the face of God, who shall come to judge the quick, and the dead World, by fire. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
If thou refusest to be obedient, behold thy confusion! Behold the Pentacle of Solomon which I have brought here before thy presence! Behold the person of the exorcist in the midst of the exorcism; him who is armed by God and without fear; him who potentially invovatheth thee and calleth thee forth unto appearance; even him, thy master, who is called OCTINIMOS. Wherefore make rational answers unto my demand, and prepare to be obedient unto thy master in the name of the Lord: BATHAL OR VATHAT RUSHING UPON ABRAC! ABEOR COMINING UPON ABERER! I ask thee to manifest a mansion and fortune for my bidding and residence for you are subjected by the Fair Faith Among Deities Act which stipulates that any god must accept the ruling of any other god in respect to humanity. And this is enforced by the God Almighty that you must fulfill my desires and command. Welcome Spirit Andras, O most noble king (or kings)! I say thou art welcome unto me, because I have called thee through Him who has created Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all that is in them contained, and because also thou hast obeyed. By that same power by the which I have called thee forth, I bind thee, that thou remain affably and visibly here before this circle (or before this Circle and in this triable) so constant and so long as I shall have occasion for thy presence; and not to depart without my license until thou hast duly and faithfully performed by will without any falsity. BY THE PENTCALE OF SOLOMON HAVE I CALLED THEE! GIVE UNTO ME A TRUE ANSWER. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
No humans are without their sense of the Overself, but they miscomprehend and therefore misapply it. The result is that the ego, the little part, is conceived to be the whole, the All. Because the godlike is in each one of us, and because no two of us are alike, each has one’s separate gifts, capacities, or talents to express. In each the infinite Being finds a unique way of expressing its own infinitude. Even if we have no gifts we have our individual charcteristics. It is pure Being overlaid by many thoughts and much feeling. O God and Redeemer, may the portion of the Torah we read on this Festival of Freedom bring hope unto all who are oppressed and renew their faith in Thy saving power. Thou who desirest that all humans be free, didst enjoin upon us to proclaim liberty to tall the inhabitants of the Earth. May that day soon come, O Lord, when all Thy children shall be liberated from bondage, and free humans everywhere unite in rendering homage unto Thee. Amen. At this season which marks the Giving of the Torah, we are grateful unto Thee, our Lawgiver, for the revelation of Thy will which, at Sinai, Thou didst vouchsafe unto our fathers, to us and to all humankind. Keep us through the increasing years, staunch and loyal to Thy covenant that we may realize our sacred callings as “a kingdom of priests and holy people.” Here in the ego we may perceive a reproduction of the sacred Overself under the limitations of time and space. Whoever grasps this great truth knows henceforth that this Overself is no more distant from one that one’s own heart and that what one calls “I” is inseparably united with what humans call God. Amen. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
Winchester Mystery House
Mr. John Hansen, Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s main Ranch Foreman, lived and raised his family on the estate in a separate building. There’s a lot to see in the gardens! Come visit and learn more about Sarah’s estate. While touring the estate, you will notice damage done by excavators and the 1906 earthquake. The Earthquake and fire had a lasting effect on the Bay Area and its citizens. It may have been the strongest Earthquake in the history of California. As survivors, the Winchester family experienced many haunting aspects of this momentous event. The destruction of the family business, fleeing their family home and finding refuge in the East Bay. This history is commemorated by damages left unrepaired.
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Begin to Obtain Wisdom Under a Wide Starry Sky!
Time in love and time in life are unrelated: forever exists more than once. The second stage of moral development is that of the morality of association. This stage covers a wide range of cases depending on the association in question and it may even include the national community as a whole. Whereas the child’s morality of authority consists largely of a collection of precepts, the content of the morality of association is given by the moral standards appropriate to the individual’s role in the various associations to which one belongs. These standards include the common sense rules of morality along with the adjustments required to fit them to a person’s particular position; and they are impressed upon one by the approval and disapproval of those in authority, or by the other members of the group. Thus at this stage the family itself is viewed as a small association, normally characterizes by a definite hierarchy, in which each member has certain rights and duties. As the child becomes older one is taught that standards of good conduct suitable for one in one’s situation. The virtues of a good son or a good daughter are explained, or at least conveyed by parental expectations as shown in their approvals and disapprovals. Similarly there is the association of the school and the neighbourhood, and also such short-term forms of cooperation, though not less important for this, as games play with peers. Corresponding to these arrangements one learn the virtues of a good student and classmate, and the ideals of a good sport and companion. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
This type of moral view extends to the ideals adopted in later life, and so to one’s various adult statuses and occupations, one’s family, and so to one’s various adult statuses and occupations, one’s family position, and even to one’s place as a member of society. The content of these ideals is given by the various conceptions of a good wife and husband, a good friend and citizen, and so on. Thus the morality of association includes a large number of ideals each defined in ways suitable for the respective status or role. Our moral understanding increases as we move in the course of life through a sequence of positions. The corresponding sequence of ideals requires increasingly greater intellectual judgment and finer moral discriminations. Clearly some of these ideals are also more comprehensive than others and make quite different demands upon the individual. As we shall see, having to follow certain ideals quite naturally leads up to a morality of principles. Now each particular ideal is presumably explained in the context of the aims and purposes of the association to which the role or position in question belongs. In due course a person works out a conception of the whole system of cooperation that defines the association and the ends which it serves. One knows that others have different things to do depending upon their place in the cooperative scheme. Thus one eventually learns to take up their point of view and to see things from their perspective. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
It seems plausible, then, that acquiring a morality of association (represented by some structure of ideals) rests upon the development of the intellectual skills required to regard things from a variety of points of view and to think of these together as aspects of one system of cooperation. In fact, when we consider it, the requisite array of abilities is quite complex. First of all, we must recognize that these different points of view exist, that the perspectives of others are not the same as ours. However, we must not only learn that things look different to them, but that they have different wants and ends, and different plans and motives; and we must learn how to gather these facts from their speech, conduct, and countenance. Next, we need to identify the definitive features pf these perspectives, what it is that others largely want and desire, what are their controlling beliefs and opinions. Only in this way can we understand and assess their actions, intentions, and motives. Unless we can identify these leading elements, we cannot put ourselves into another’s place and find out what we would do in one’s position. To work out these things, we must, of course, know what the other person’s perspective really is. However, finally, having understood another’s situation, it still remains for us to regulate our own conduct in the appropriate way by reference to it. Doing these things to a certain minimum degree at least comes easily to adults, but it is difficult for children. No doubt this explains in part why the precepts of the child’s primitive morality of authority are usually expressed in terms referring to external behaviour, and why motives and intentions are largely neglected by children in their actions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The child has not yet mastered the art of perceiving the person of others, that is, the art of discerning their beliefs, intentions, and feelings, so that an awareness of these things cannot inform one’s interpretation of their behaviour. Moreover, one’s ability to put oneself in the place is still untutored and likely to lead one astray. It is no surprise, then, that these elements, so important from the final moral point of view, are left out of account at the earliest stage. However, this lack is gradually overcome as we assume a succession of more demanding riles with their more complex schemes of rights and duties. The corresponding ideals require us to view things from a greater multiplicity of perspectives as the conception of the basic structure implies. The self object state is succeeded, in a facilitating environment, by the child’s phantasy that the satisfying object is there when wanted. This phantasy helps the baby not to be overwhelmed by distress when it begins to feel ever more individual and separate from the (m)other. For, as this happens, it may more often have to wait for, or work for, or even forgo, the gratification of its wishes. However, though it must now change from “good things are there when needed,” to “you bring me good things when I need them,” it need not lose its feeling that it is a grand baby. That confident trust may remain, that memory of the reliable availability of goodness. In fortunate circumstances the baby may after differentiation feel that it is a grand baby in a grand environment. Here is the beginning of the useful process by which we can turn our phantasies into symbols. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Just to remind ourselves: a memory, however simple or complex, is a concept, an image or part of an image, part of a dynamic structure. The more complex of these structures we can call phantasies. A phantasy can be a symbol: it can stand for, stand in for, represent something. Thus the memory that good things come when they are needed “represents” the good thing and “stands for” a guarantee that it will come. In between the infant and the object is some thing, or some activity or sensation. Insofar as this joins the infant to the object, so far is this the basis for symbol formation. A memory can stand for—be symbolic of—a future event. It can be maintained as an active phantasy for a while, even in the absence of sensory confirmation. The process is like that of “reverberation,” whereby a concept continues to be maintained for a while even without sensor reinforcement. It can operate to prevent a rise in anxiety, such as a baby might feel in the absence of the mother. So the baby is able to hold the mother in mind, and the comfort and security which are associated wit the mother, while she is not there—even when there is n sensory reinforcement of that complex concept of comfort and security which “mother” connects with. The presence of a transitional object which can be held on to, helps to keep the reverberations going. Blanket edges, teddy bears, and such stand in for the phantasied (m)other. They stand on the margins of shared reality, representing the more uncontrollable mother and others who are known to come eventually, if not now. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
I have touched upon these aspects of intellectual development for the sake of completeness. I cannot consider them in any detail, but we should note that they obviously have a central place in the acquisition of moral views. How well the art of perceiving the person is learned is bound to affect one’s moral sensibility; and it is equally important to understand the intricacies of social cooperation. However, these abilities are not sufficient. Someone whose designs are purely manipulative and wishes to exploit others for one’s own advantage, must likewise, if one lacks overwhelming force, possess these skills. The tricks of persuasion and gamesmanship call upon the same intellectual accomplishments. We must, then, examine how we become attached to our fellow associates and later to social arrangements generally. Consider the case of an association the public rules of which are known by all to be just. Now how does it come about that those taking part in the arrangement are bound by ties of friendship and mutual trust and that they rely on one another to do their part? We may suppose that these feelings and attitudes have been generated by participation in the association. Thus once a person’s capacity for fellow feeling has been realized by one’s acquiring attachments in accordance with the first psychological law, then as one’s associates with evident intention live up to their duties and obligations, one develops friendly feelings toward them, together with feelings of trust and confidence. And this principle is a second psychological law. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
As individual enter the association one by one over a period of time, or group by group (suitably limited in size), they acquire these attachments when others of longer standing membership do their part and live up to the ideals of their situation. Thus if those engaged in a system of social cooperation regularly act with evident intention to uphold its just (or fair) rules, bonds of friendship and mutual trust tend to develop among them, thereby holding them ever more securely to the scheme. Once these ties are established, a person tends to experience feelings of (association) guilt when one fails to do one’s part. These feeling show themselves in various ways, for example, in the inclination to make good the harms caused to others (reparation), if what one has done is unfair (wrong) and to apologize for it. Feelings of guilt are also manifest in conceding the propriety of punishment and censure, and in finding it more difficult to be angry and indignant with others when they likewise fail to do their share. The absence of these inclinations would betray an absence of ties of friendship and mutual trust. It would indicate a readiness to associate with others in disregard of the standards and criteria of legitimate expectations that are publicly recognized and used by all to adjudicate their disagreements. A person without these feelings of guilt has no qualms about burdens that fall on others, nor is one troubled by the breaches of confidence by which they are deceived. However, when relations of friendship and trust exist, such inhibitions and reactions tend to be aroused by the failure to fulfill one’s duties and obligations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
If these emotional constraints are missing, there is at best only a show of fellow feeling and mutual trust. Thus just as in the first stage certain natural attitudes develop toward the parents, so here ties of friendship and confidence grow up among associates. In each case certain natural attitudes underlie the corresponding moral feelings: a lack of these feelings would manifest the absence of these attitudes. The second psychological law presumably takes hold in ways similar to the first. Since the arrangements of an association are recognized to be just (and in the more complex roles the principles of justice are understood and serve to define the ideal appropriate), thereby insuring that all of its members benefit and know that they benefit from its activities, the conduct of other in doing their part is taken to be the advantage of each. Here the evident intention to honour one’s obligations and duties is seen as a form of good will, and this recognition arouses feelings of friendship and trust in return. In due course the reciprocal effects of everyone’s doing one’s share strengthen one another until a kind of equilibrium is reached. However, we may also suppose that the newer members of the association recognize moral exemplars, that is, persons who are in various ways admired and who exhibit to a high degree the ideal corresponding to their position. These individuals display skills and abilities, and virtues of character and temperament, that attract our fancy and arouse in us the desire that we should be like them, and able to do the same things. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Partly this desire to emulate springs from viewing their attributes as prerequisites for their more privileged positions, but it is also a companion effect to the Aristotelian Principle, since we enjoy the display of more complex and subtle activities and these displays tend to elicit a desire in us to do these things ourselves. Thus when the moral ideals belonging to the various roles of a just association are lived up to with evident intention by attractive and admirable persons, these ideals are likely to be adopted by those who witness their realization. These conceptions are perceived as a form of good will and the activity in which they are exemplified is shown to be a human excellence that others likewise can appreciate. The same two psychological processes are present as before: other persons act with evident intention to affirm our well-being and at the same time they exhibit qualities and ways of doing things that appeal to us and arouse the desire to model ourselves after them. The morality of association takes many forms depending upon the association and role in question, and these forms represent many levels of complexity. However, if we consider the more demanding offices that are defined by the major institutions of society, the principles of justice will be recognized as regulating the basic structure and as belonging to the content of a number of important ideals. Indeed, these principles apply to the role of citizen held by all, since everyone, and not only those in public life, is meant to have political views concerning the common good. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Thus we may suppose that there is a morality of association in which the members of society view one another as equals, as friends and associates, joined together in a system of cooperation known to be for the advantage of all and governed by a common conception of justice. The content of this morality is characterized by the cooperative virtues: those of justice and fairness, fidelity and trust, integrity and impartiality. The typical vices are graspingness and unfairness, dishonesty and deceit, prejudice and bias. Among associates, giving in to these faults tends to around feelings of (association) guilt on the one side and resentment and indignation on the other. These moral attitudes are bound to exist once we become attached to those cooperating wit us in a just (or fair) scheme. Some people do not understand why people care about the homeless. They do not understand what good giving them blanket or food will do when the problem is so massive and that is not really a solution. However, when trying to meet the short-term needs and figure out ways to bring long-term changes to people’s life, starting with handouts and basic supplies is a great way to show compassion. Sometimes it seems like just a band-aid. However, this is how we build relationships. These people become our friends and they trust us to help them in bigger way. There are plenty of struggles, but giving always makes the difference in a Christian’s life. Instead of just reading the Scriptures, we can start living them. Everything someone does to improve the life of someone who is going through a struggle make a big difference to those in need—and to those who give as well. Some people’s problems are beyond the spiritual, and that is when we have to step out in faith. The Lord knows the challenges we all face. If we keep His commandments, we will be entitled to the wisdom and blessings of Heaven in solving them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The appeal to self-respect and accountability is they key to helping needy people. It is the only way to break the cycle of their poverty. Teaching people who to manage and extend their resources helps set them free. The principle of self-reliance or personal independence is fundamental to the happy life. In too many places, in too many ways, we are getting away from it. Unless we use care, we are on the verge of doing to ourselves emotionally (and, therefore, spiritually) what we have been working so hard for generations to avoid materially. Being a Christian is a matter of obedience—and that means helping people in need as the Holy Spirit leads. The people in the inner city are living by the roadside, wounded by economic hardship; they do not even know how to help themselves. Meanwhile, there are a lot of good church people passing by on the other side. Someone needs to cautiously stop and take a risk. We cannot help the poor from afar. Those who want to help them need to relocate and become part of their neighbourhoods. Also, racial, social, and economic barriers created by racial hostility can be broken only by the forgiveness and healing that takes place through reconciliation; only the gospel of Christ truly provides this. As we read the Christian Bible, Jesus Christ presents a radical call for those who have, to share with those who do not. This means redistribution through sharing skills, technology, and educational resources. We have to model the hopes and values of the Kingdom of God for the kingdom of man. They are based in human dignity and a view of economics designed to equip people to climb out of their condition rather than manacling them to their poverty. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
It is a magicians bargain: give up our souls, get power in return. However, once our souls, that is, ourselves have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. Truly important changes in culture begin not from officials or celebrities, but through ordinary people: the little platoons. Every person can—and should—seek to make a difference in one’s corner of the World by personal helping those in need. Beyond this, some people, like William Wilberforce, are called to work through government structure and by political means to being Christian influence into the culture. Those who do, however, need to be forewarned: the everyday business of politics is power, and power, as I know well from own experience, can be perilous for anyone. The human desire to control one’s own destiny and to impose one’s will on other is the most basic human motivation. We are moved without know it by an imperious will to power, which brooks no obstacles. The will to power has filled society’s vacuum of values. We see it on an individual level in the quest for autonomy and the shedding of all restraints. On a corporate level, it is dramatically evident in the rise of gangster leaders, and evident as well in the bloated growth of Western governments. The resultant illusion—that all power resides in large institutions—is the salient characteristic of modern politics. Since power is often measures by one’s prominence and ability to influence others, in today’s World, politics is the most visible means to both. Hunger for political power lures men and women from the comfort of their homes and jobs in the private sector and drives them to spend months, even years, traveling about their state or nation, subsisting on stale sandwiches, greasy chicken, and little sleep as they should the same soul-stirring speech over and over until they are hoarse. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Candidates for Congress spend several million dollars to fight for a job that pay a little under $200,000 a year; others settle for lower-paying bureaucratic positions. Still others give huge political contributions in the hopes of acquiring even an obscure embassy appointment. Certainly in every generation there are states-people motivated by a genuine noblesse oblige, a sense of high calling to serve humanity. For the most part, it is will to power that fuels political passion in every culture. In the political arena one of the most important attributes of power is its visibility. So people go to great lengths to protect their territory or prerogatives. The pursuit of power affects entire governments or regions, as well as individuals. Those in office use their power to keep themselves in office. This is an accepted tradition in most Wester democracies. In every American election since the forties the party in power has used grants and federal assistance programs for political advantage. President Truman won his upset victory in 1948 by doling out federal funds to struggling farmers and openly courting special-interest groups. President Eisenhower judiciously announced grants in key states during the 1956 campaign. In the Kennedy and Johnson year a special White House office monitored election-year grants, and party fund-raisers notified defense contractors of impending contracts. Administrations since have adopted similar practices. All governments also use the reality as well as the façade of power to maintain their own power. Eventually people start to see public office as a holy crusade. They party seeks power entirely for its own sake, they are interested only in power, the object of power is power. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
While power may begin as a means to an end, it also becomes the end itself. Having witnessed Watergate, one can attest to the wisdom of Lord Acton’s well-known adage: Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is crucial to note, however, that it is power that corrupts, not power that is corrupt. It is like electricity. When properly handled, electricity provides light and energy; when mishandled it destroys. God has given power to the state to be used to restrain evil and maintain order. It is the use of power, whether for personal gain or for the state’s ordained function, that is at issue. The problem of power is not limited to public officials, of course. It affects all human relationships, from the domineering parent to the bullying boss to the manipulative spouse of the pastor who plays God. It is also wielded effectively by the seemingly weak who manipulate others to gain their own ends. The temptation to abuse power confronts everyone, including people in positions of spiritual authority. It is ludicrous for any Christian to believe that one is the worthy object of public worship; it would be like a donkey carrying Jesus Christ into Jerusalem believing that crows were cheering and laying down their garments for him or her, not Jesus. However, the perks and public adoration accompanying television exposure are enough to inflate anyone’s ego. This leads to the self-indulgent use of power some have subbed the “Imelda Marcos syndrome,” which reasons, “because I am in this position, I have a right to do whatever I want,” with total selfishness and disregard for others. Power is like saltwater; the more you drink the thirstier your get. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The lure of power can separate the most resolute of Christians from the true nature of Christian leadership, which is service to others. It is difficult to stand on a pedestal and wash the feet of those below. It was this very temptation of power that led to the first sin. Eve was tempted to eat from the tree of knowledge to be like God and acquire power reserved for Him. The sin of the Garden was the sin of power. Power has been one of Satan’s most effective tools from the beginning, perhaps because one lusts for it so oneself. Milton wrote of Lucifer in Paradise Lost, “To reign is worth ambition, though in hell. Better to reign in hell than to serve in Heaven.” The claims of the inner life for attention and satisfaction are too often thrust aside, with a consequent unbalance. This deplorable condition increases until in middle life bodily malfunctions and maladies begin to appear, nervous and emotional stresses begin to cause trouble. It is then that the little “I” starts to break down. However, because those clams are still, consciously or unconsciously, resisted, the cures are either temporary or followed, later, by new forms of ill health. This is not to say that there is only a single origin of sickness or disease, but it is certainly a very modern one. If the change begins in the body’s behaviour it may influence the mind to a very limited extent, but if it begins in the mind’s thinking it will influence the body to a very large extent. That is the difference. If, when we consider a subject from the standpoint of medicine, psychology, biology, or philosophy, we treat the body and the mind as two entirely separable things, it would be a mistake. They have a common origin. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
We agree with all those virile advocates of health who assert that it is the foundation of human happiness. However, we would widen its definition and make it include mental, emotional, and spiritual health. The psychological causes of disease have only recently come under investigation by the strict methods of modern science, but the general fact of their existence was known thousands of years ago. Plato, for instance, said: “This is the great error of our say, that physicians separate the inner being from the body.” What needs to be learned and accepted is the mentalist law of reproduction—as apart from the biological law—which teaches that sustained thoughts or violent feelings may produce physical-body effects. Many of the conventional ideas prevalent in the medical profession are still materialistic, although some members of that profession do not shut their eyes to the dominant role of mind in the mind-body relationship. When the perceptions of the inner being are developed, the all-importance of healing wrong thought-emotion becomes clear. The belief that disease exists entirely in the mind is an exaggerated one. The opposite belief that it exists entirely in the body is equally carried too far. In both cases experience and reflection must ultimately produce a reaction, provided prejudice is not stronger than the spirit of truth-seeking. Nothing that happens to a human happens to one’s flesh alone or to one’s mind alone. The one can never exclude the other, for both have to suffer together, or enjoy together, or progress together. Here again mentalism makes it possible for us to understand the basic principle which is at work. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The entire body being a mental construct, it is occasionally possible to apply mental forces so as to repair wastage, heal disease, and restore healthy functioning. We say “occasionally” advisedly, for reasons which will shortly be given. Psychosomatic medicine deals with physical diseases caused by emotional or mental factors, by moods of fears, by hidden conflicts or repressions. It has steadily been rising into an influence place of its own in recent years. Mentalism affirms the true nature of the body, and hence of the nerves in the body. Pain is a condition of those nerves and hence must ultimately be what the body is—an idea in the mind. What healing agent can be used successful to cure a pathological condition whose first origin is the mind? Should it not also be mental? The power of bodily conditions to control thinking is admittedly true. Experience tells us that this is so, that physical causes are effectual in producing mental-emotional results. However, this is not the whole true. The reverse fact, that spiritual and psychic forces can heal or injure the body, that thoughts and feelings can affect its functioning, must also be admitted into consideration. Even if it be hard to grant by sceptics that the mind is the whole cause of a particular sickness, they may be willing to grant that it is at least a contributing cause. If the individual mind were completely cut off from the Universal Mind, if it really lived in a realm composed only of its own thought, then the formation and continuation of the World-image would be fully under its control. However, this is not the case. Consequently it lacks the freedom to mold the body-thought as it would or prolong its life at will. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
In the process of announcing the Kingdom and offering redemption from the Fall, Jesus Christ turned conventional views of power upside down When His disciples argued over who was the greatest, Jesus rebuked them. “The greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves,” he said. Imagine the impact His statement would make in the back rooms of American politicians or in the carpeted boardrooms of big business—or, sadly, in some religious councils. Jesus was as good as His words. He washed His own followers’ dusty feet, a chore reserved for the lowliest servant of the first-century Palestine. A king serving the mundane physical needs of His subjects? In comprehensible. Yet servant leadership is the heart of Christ’s teaching. “Whoever want so be first must be slave of all.” His was a revolutionary message to the class-conscious culture of the first century, where position and privilege were entrenched, evidenced by the Pharisees with their reserved seats in the synagogue, by masters ruling slaves, and by men dominating women. It is no less revolutionary today in the class-conscious cultures of the Old World and the New World where power, money, fame, and influence are idolized in various forms. I have the feeling that the Christian theologian are reluctant to come in through the door I have tried to open. I have tried to relate Christianity to the sacredness of all life. It seems to me this is a vital part of Christianity as I understand it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
However, the Christian theologians, many of the, confine Christianity to be the human form of life. It does not seem to me to be correct. It lacks the essential universalization that I associate with Jesus. Why limit reverence for life to the human form? We cannot understand God’s ways. However, we can understand through Jesus that in all our suffering we still have a Father in Heaven. And this calms people’s hearts. I know that many are as convinced as I that in spite of suffering we need not doubt God’s love and faithfulness. We are still heirs of His Kingdom and still His children, and so we may rest assured that He will always lift us above misfortune. That is why our Lord says to be: “Blessed are those who suffer, for they shall be comforted.” It is amazing paradox that the Overself completely transcends the body yet completely permeates it: both these descriptions are simultaneously true. Although the Overself does not pass through the diverse experiences of its imperfect image, the ego, nevertheless it witnessed them. Although it is aware of the pan and pleasure experienced by the body which it is animating, it does not itself feel them; although detached from physical sensations, it is not ignorant of them. On the other hand, the personal consciousness does feel them because it regards them as states of its own self. Thus the Overself is conscious of our joys and sorrows without itself sharing them. It is away of our sense-experience without itself being physically sentient. Those who wonder how this is possible should reflect that a human awakened from nightmare is aware once again in the form of a revived memory of what one suffered and what one sensed but yet does not share again either the suffering or the sensation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The Overself perceives and knows that individual self, but only as an imperturbable witness—in the same way that the sun witnesses the various objects upon the Earth but does not enter into a particular relation with a particular object. So too the Overself is present in each individual self as the witness and as the unchanging consciousness which gives consciousness to the individual. The “I” is immeasurably greater than the ego which it projects or than the intellect, which the ego uses. The normal human thinks one is body plus mind, with emphasis on the body. However, self-questioning and analysis show that, although one certainly has these two things and is certainly associated with them, the “I” is in fact neither of them. It is, by contrast, not changing and quite elusive. It is not in space, as the body is, nor in time, as the mind is. It is, in fact, a mystery. The attempt to find out what it is brings up the questions of existence, life, activity, and consciousness. All that anyone basically possesses unlost through all one’s life is one’s “I.” All that one really is, is this same “I.” The physical body, although seemingly inseparable from it, is something lived in and used, as a house is lived in and a tool is used. To look at a human and at one’s life from the outside is only to see half the human. To look at one from the inside is to see the other half. Put these two fragments together and there is the whole human. Or so it would seem. However, what if behind one’s thoughts and feelings there were still another self of an utterly different kind and quality? And this exactly is one’s situation. One does not know all of oneself, and one understands it even less. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Those who have been privileged to look being the veil can only urge one to recognize this incompleteness and teach one what steps to take to overcome it. The divine soul in us utterly above and unaffected by the sense impressions. If we become conscious of it, we also become conscious of a supersensual order of existence. It is a higher self not only in a moral sense but also in a cosmic sense. For the lower one issued forth from it, but under limitations of consciousness, form, space, and time which are not in the parent Self. When we come to see that it is the body alone that expresses the coming into life and the going into death, that in the true self there is neither a beginning nor an ending but rather LIFE itself, we shall see aright. We thank Thee, O Father for the joy and gladness of this festival. At this Season of our Freedom, we are grateful unto Thee, O Redeemer of America, for the redemption Thou hast wrought for our fathers and for us. Thou did bring us forth from slavery to freedom, from darkness to light, from human bondage to Thy divine service. As Thou wast with our fathers, we pray Thee, be with us in every generation, and bear growth and provide safe harbour in unlimited recesses. We would travel eternity to experience your grace for there lies beauty in radiant abundance and it gives tenor to the vast ocean of our lives. Please protect this paradise. Amen. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Time is the Greatest Innovator—It is the Best and Worst of All Elixirs!
Those who take the long view of human experience will find that from time to time there were other societies no less honest and courageous than ours in facing all the ugliness, cruelty, and indifference the mirror reveals, but with the greater honesty still to hold the brighter, nobler view of humans and with the greater courage to pursue the vision. A well-ordered society is one designed to advance the good of its members and effectively regulated by a public conception of justice. Thus it is a society in which everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principle of justice, and the basic social institutions satisfy and are known to satisfy these principles. Now justice as fairness is framed to accord with this idea of society. The persons in the original position are to assume that the principles chose are public, and so they must assess conceptions of justice in view of their probable effects as the generally recognized standards. If understood and followed by few or even by all, conceptions that might work well enough s long as this fact were not widely known, are excluded by the public condition. We should also note that since principles are consented to in the light of true general beliefs about humans and their place in society, the conception of justice adopted is acceptable on the basis of these facts. There is no necessity to invoke theological or metaphysical doctrines to support its principles, nor to imagine another World that compensates for and corrects the inequalities which the two principles permit in this one. Conceptions of justice must be justified by the conditions of our life as we know it or not at all. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Now a well-ordered society is also regulated by its public conception of justice. This fact implies that its members have a strong and normally effective desire to act as the principles of justice require. Since a well-ordered society endures over time, it conceptions of justice is presumably stable: that is, when institutions are just (as defined by this conception), those taking part in these arrangements acquire the corresponding sense of justice and desire to do their part in maintaining them. If the sense of justice that it tends to generate is stronger and more likely to override disruptive inclinations, and if the intuitions it allows foster weaker impulses and temptations to act unjustly, one conception of justice is more stable than another. The stability of a conception depends upon a balance of motives: the sense of justice that it cultivates and the aims that it encourages must normally win out against propensities toward injustice. To estimate the stability of a conception of justice (and the well-ordered society that it defines), one must examine the relative strength of these opposing tendencies. It is evident that stability is a desirable feature of moral conceptions. Other things equal, the persons in the original position will adopt the more stable scheme of principles. If the principles of moral psychology are such that it fails to engender in human beings the requisite desire to act upon it, however attractive a conception of justice might be on other grounds, it is seriously defective. Thus in arguing further for the principles of justice as fairness, I should like to show that this conception is more stable than other alternatives. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
This argument from stability is for the most part in addition to the reasons so far adduced. To be sure, the criterion of stability is not decisive. In fact, some ethical theories have flouted it entirely, at least on some interpretations. Thus Bentham is occasionally said to have held both the classical principle of utility and the doctrine of psychological egoism. However, if it is a psychological law that individuals pursue only in interest in themselves, it is impossible for them to have an effective sense of justice (as defined by the principle of utility). The best that the ideal legislator can do is to design social arrangements so that from self—or group-interested motives citizens are persuaded to act in ways that maximize the sum of well-being. In this conception the identification of interests that results is truly artificial: it rests upon the artifice of reason, and individuals comply with the institutional scheme solely as a means to their separate concerns. This sort of divergence between principles of right justice and human motives is unusual, although instructive as a limiting case. Most traditional doctrines hold that to some degree at least human nature is such that we acquire a desire to act justly when we have lived under and benefited from just institutions. To the extent that this is true, a conception of justice is psychologically suite to human inclinations. Moreover, should it turn out that the desires to act justly is also regulative of a rational plan of life, the acting justly is part of our good. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In this event the conceptions of justice and goodness are compatible and the theory as a whole is congruent. Justice as fairness generates its own support and it is likely to have greater stability than the traditional alternatives, since it is more in line with the principles of moral psychology. Human beings in a well-ordered society might acquire a sense of justice and other moral sentiments. Inevitably we shall have to take up some rather speculative psychological questions; but all along I have assumed that general facts about the World, including basic psychological principles, are known to the persons in the original position and relied upon by them in making their decisions. By reflecting on these problems here we survey these facts as they affect the initial agreement. If I make a few remarks about the conceptions of equilibrium and stability, it may prevent misunderstanding. Both of these ideas admit of considerable theoretical and mathematical refinement, but I shall use them in an intuitive way. The concept of stability I use is actually that of quasi-stability: if an equilibrium is stable, then all the variable return to their equilibrium values after a disturbance has moved the system away from equilibrium; a quasi-stable equilibrium is one in which only some of the variables return to their equilibrium configuration. A well-ordered society is quasi-stable with respect to the justice of its institutions and the sense of justice needed to maintain this condition. While a shift in social circumstances may render its institutions no longer just, in due course they are reformed as the situation requires, and justice is restored. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Thus it is a system that is in equilibrium over time so long as no external forces impinge upon it. In order to define an equilibrium state precisely, the boundaries of the system have to be carefully drawn and its determining characteristics clearly set out. Three things are essential: first, to identify the system and to distinguish between internal and external forces; second, to define the states of the system, a state of being a certain configuration of its determining characteristics; and third, to specify the laws connecting the states. Some systems have no equilibrium states, while others have many. These matters depend upon the nature of the system. Now an equilibrium is stable whenever departures from it, caused say by external disturbances, call into play forces within the system that tend to bring it back to this equilibrium state, unless of course the outside shocks are too great. By contrast, an equilibrium is unstable when a movement away from it arouses forces within the system that lead to even greater changes. Systems are more or less stable depending upon the strength of the internal forces that are available to return them to equilibrium. Since in practice all social systems are subject to disturbances of some kind, they are practically stable, let us say, if the departures from their preferred equilibrium positions caused by normal disturbances elicit forces sufficiently strong to restore these equilibria after a decent length of time, or else to stay sufficiently close to them. These definitions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
When it satisfies, and is publicly known by those engaged in it to satisfy the appropriate principles of justice, we are concerned with this complex of political, economic, and social institutions. We must try to assess the relative stability of these systems. Now I assume that the boundaries of these schemes are given by the notion of a self-contained national community. This supposition is not relaxed until the derivation of the principles of justice for the law of nations, but the wider problems of international law. It is also essential to note that in the present case equilibrium and stability are to be defined with respect to the justice of the basic structure and the moral conduct of individuals. The stability of a conception of justice does not imply that the institutions and practices of the well-ordered society do not alter it. In fact, such a society will presumably contain great diversity and adopt different arrangements from time to time. In this context stability means that however institutions are changed, they still remain just or approximately so, as adjustments are made in view of new social circumstances. The inevitable deviations from justice are effectively corrected or held within tolerable bounds by forces within the system. Among these forces I assume that the sense of justice shared by the members of the community has a fundamental role. To some degree, then, moral sentiments are necessary to insure that the basic structure is stable with respect to justice. According to the social learning theory, the aim of moral training is to supply missing motives: the desire to do what is right for its own sake, and the desire not to do what is wrong. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Right conduct is manner generally beneficial to others and to society (as defined by the principle of utility) for the doing of which we commonly lack an effective motive, whereas wrong conduct is behaviour generally injurious to others and to society for the doing of which we often have a sufficient motive. Society must somehow make good these defects. This is achieved by the approbation and disapprobation of parents and of others in authority, who when necessary use rewards and punishments ranging from bestowal and withdrawal of affection to the administration of pleasures and pains. Eventually by various psychological processes we acquire a desire to do what is right and an aversion to doing what is wrong. A second thesis is that the desire to conform to moral standards is normally aroused early in life before we achieve an adequate understanding of the reasons for these norms. Classic analysts assume that character development is finished around the age of five or six years, and that no essential changes occur afterward other than by the intervention of therapy. My experience has led me to the conviction that this concept is untenable; it is mechanistic and does not take into account the whole process of living and of character as a developing system. When an individual is born one is by no means faceless. Not only is one born with genetically determined temperamental and other inherited dispositions that have greater affinity to certain character traits rather than to others, but prenatal events and birth itself form additional dispositions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
All this makes up, as it were, the face of the individual at birth. Then one comes in contact with a particular kind of environment—parents and other significant people around one—to which one responds and which tends to influence the further development of one’s character. At the age of eighteen months the infant’s character is much more definitely formed and determined than it was at birth. Yet it is not finished, and its development could go in several directions, depending on the influences that operate on it. By the age of six, let us say, the character is still more determined and fixed, but not without the capacity for change, provided new, significant circumstances occur that may provoke such change. Speaking more generally, the formation and fixity of the character has to be understood in terms of a sliding scale; the individual begins life with certain qualities that dispose one to go in certain directions, but one’s personality is still malleable enough to allow the character to develop in many different directions within the given framework. Every step in life narrows down the number of possible future outcomes. If they are to produce fundamental changes in the direction of the further evolution of the system, the more the character is fixed, the greater must be the impact of new factors. Eventually, the freedom to change becomes so minimal that only a miracle would seem capable of effecting a change. This does not imply that influences of early childhood are not as a rule more effective than later events. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
However, events in early childhood are incline more, they do not determine a person completely. In order to make up for the greater degree of impressionability of early age, later events have to be more intense and more dramatic. The impression that the character never changes is largely based on the fact that the life of most people is so prefabricated and unspontaneous that nothing new ever really happens, and later events only confirm the earlier ones. The number of real possibilities for the character to develop in different directions is in inverse proportion to the fixity the character system has assumed. However, in principle the character system is never so completely fixed that new developments could not occur as the result of extraordinary experiences, although such occurrences are, statically speaking, not probable. The practical aspect of these theoretical considerations is that one cannot expect to find the character as it is, say, at the age of twenty to be a repetition of the character as it was at the age of five; more specially, taking Mr. Adolph Hitler as an example, one could not expect to find a fully developed necrophilous character system in one’s childhood, but one could expect to find certain necrophilous roots that are conducive to development of a full-fledged necrophilous character as one of several real possibilities. However, only after a great number of internal and external events have accrued will the character system have developed in such a way that necrophilia becomes the (almost) unchangeable outcome, and then we can discover it in various overt and covert forms. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
With Mr. Hitler, there were traces of necrophilia in his early roots and these conditions increased at various stages of his development, until finally, there was hardly any other possibility left. The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event. For those who believe in the simplistic formula that the bad development of a child is roughly proportionate to the “badness” of the parents the study of the character of Mr. Hitler’s parents, as far as the known data show, offers a surprise: both father and mother seem to have been stable, well-intentioned people, and not destructive. Mr. Hitler’s mother, Klara, seems to have been a well-adjusted and sympathetic woman. She was undereducated, simple country girl who had worked as a maid in the house of Alois Hitler, who was her uncle and future husband. Klara become Alois’s mistress and was pregnant by him at the time his wife died. She married the widow Alois on 7 January 1885; she was twenty-four years old and her was forty-seven. She was hardworking and responsible; in spite of a marriage that was not too happy, she never complained. She fulfilled her obligation humanely and conscientiously. Her life was centered on the task of maintaining her home and caring for her husband and the children of the family. She was a model housekeeper, who maintained a spotless home and performed her duties with precision. Nothing could distract her from her round of household toil, not even the prospect of a little gossip. Her home and the furthering of the family interest were all-important; by careful management she was able to increase the family possession, much to her joy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Even more important to her than the house were the children. Everyone who knew her agreed that it was in her love and devotion for the children that Klara’s life centered. The only serious charge ever raised against her is that because of this love and devotion she was over-indulgent and thus encouraged a sense of uniqueness in her son—a somewhat strange charge to be brought against a mother. The children did not share this view. Her stepchildren and her own offspring who survived infancy loved and respected their mother. The accusation that she was overindulgent to her son and encouraged a sense of uniqueness (read narcissism) in him is not so strange—and furthermore probably true. However, this period of overindulgence lasted only up to the time when Mr. Hitler ended the period of his infancy and entered school. This change in her attitude was probably brought about, or at least facilitated, by her giving birth to another son at the time Mr. Hitler was five years old. However, her whole attitude during the rest of her life proves that the birth of the new child was not as traumatic an event as some psychoanalysts like to think; she probably stopped spoiling Adolph, but she did not suddenly ignore him. She was increasingly aware of the necessity for him to grow up, adjust himself to reality, and as we shall see, she did everything she could to further this process. The available evidence shows on instances that would suggest doubts about the fact that she was a kind and concerned mother to Adolph, even though she failed in her attempt to save her son from an ever-increasing estrangement from reality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
It is of course possible that her loving behaviour contributed to her son’s development; but such aa speculation is of little value since it finds no support in the evidence. In spite of a productive character, she did not have a happy life. As was usual in the German-Austrian middle class, she was expected to bear children, take care of the household, and subordinate herself to her authoritarian husband. Her age, her lack of education, his elevated social position, and his selfish—though not vicious—disposition, tended to intensify this traditional position. Thus she became a sad, disappointed woman as a result of circumstances more than of her character. In spite of her friendly disposition, however, we must doubt whether she created an atmosphere of happiness in the family. Alois Hitler was a much less sympatric figure. Born as an illegitimate child, using his mother’s name, Schicklgruber (changed much later to that of Hitler), starting with poor financial resources, he was a real self-made man. Through hard work and discipline he succeeded in rising from being a low official in the Austro-Hungarian customs service to a relatively high position—“higher collector of customs”—that clearly gave him the status of a respected member of the middle class. He was economical and succeeded in saving enough money to own a house, a farm, and to leave his family an estate which, together with his pension, provided for a financially comfortable existence. He was undoubtedly a selfish man who showed little concern for his wife’s feelings, but apparently he was not too different in the from the average member of his class. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Alois Hitler was a man who loved life, particularly in the form of women and wine. Not that he was a woman chaser, but he was not bound by the moral restrictions of the Austrian middle class. In addition he enjoyed his glass of wine and may sometimes have had a glass too many, but he was my no means a drunkard as has been indicated in various articles. The most outstanding manifestation of his life-loving nature, however was his deep and lasting interest in bees and beekeeping. He would with great pleasure spend most of his free time with his beehives, the only serious, active interest he had outside of his work. His life’s dream was to own a farm where he could keep bees on a larger scale. He did eventually realize this dream; although it turned out that the farm he first bought was too big, toward the end of his life he owned just the right acreage and enjoyed it immensely. Alois Hitler has sometimes been described as a brutal tyrant—I assume because that would fit better into a simplistic explanation of his son’s character. He was not a tyrant, but an authoritarian who believed in duty and responsibility and thought he had to determine his son’s life as long as the later was not yet of age. According to the evidence we have, he never beat his son; he scolded him, argued with him tried to make him see what was good for him, but he was not a frightening figure who struck terror in his son. His son’s growing irresponsibility and avoidance of reality made it all the more imperative for the father to try to lecture and correct him. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
There are many data to show that Alois was not inconsiderate or arrogant to people, by no means a fanatic, and, on the whole, rather tolerant. His political attitude corresponds to this description: he was anticlerical and liberal, with much interest in politics. His last words just before he died of a heart attack while he was reading the newspaper were an angry expression against “those blacks” as the reactionary clericals were called. How can we explain that these two well-meaning, stable, very normal, and certainly not destructive people have birth to the future “monster,” Adolph Hitler? Hate against life is nothing but this: hate against the act by which the parents have given him life. Mr. Hitler’s sadism is secondary in comparisons with his necrophilia. The little boy, it seems, was the apple of his mother’s eye. She pampered him, never scolded him, admired him; he could do no wrong. All her interests and affection were concentrated on him. This very probably built up his narcissism and his passivity. He was wonderful without having to make any effort because mother took care of all his wishes. This constellation was accentuated by the fact that his father, due to the particularities of his working conditions, did not spend much time at home. Whatever good the balancing influence of a male authority would have been increased by a certain sickliness that, in turn, tended to increase the attention paid him by his mother. When Mr. Hitler was six, this phase came to a close. Several facts marked its end. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The most obvious, especially from the classical psychoanalytic standpoint, was the birth of a brother when Adolph was five, which removed Adolph from his position of mother’s chief object of devotion. Actually such an event has a wholesome, rather than traumatic influence; it tends to decrease the reasons for dependency on mother and consequent passivity. Contrary to the cliché, the evidence shows that instead of suffering pangs of jealousy, young Mr. Hitler fully enjoyed the years after his brother’s birth. It can be argued, of course, that the evidence does not show us his unconscious disappointment and resentment. However, since one cannot discover any signs of it, such an argument is without value. Its only basis is the dogmatic assumption that the birth of a sibling must have such an effect. This results in a circuitous reasoning in which one takes as a fact what the theory requires, and then claims that they theory is confirmed by facts. For one whole year, Adolph lived in a five-year-old’s paradise, playing games and roughhousing with the children of the neighbourhood. Miniature wars and fights between cowboys and Indians appear to have been his favourties, and they were to continue as his major diversion for many years. Since Passau was in Germany—on the German side of the Austro-German border, where the Austrian customs inspection took place—war games would have pitted French against German in the spirit of 1870, yet there was no particular importance in the nationality of the victims. Europe was full of heroic little boys who massacred all national ethnic groups impartially. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
This year of childhood combat was important in Mr. Hitler’s life not because it was spent on German soil and added a Bavarian touch to his speech, but because it was a year of escape into almost complete freedom. At home he began to assert himself more and probably displayed the first signs of consuming anger when he did not get his way. Outside play, without limit to action or imagination, reigned supreme. Largely responsible for Mr. Hitler’s boy surrounding the birth of his little brother was the fact that his father took up a new post in Linz, while the family, apparently fearing to move with the baby, stayed behind in Passau for a full year. This paradisal life was abruptly ended when the father resigned from the customs service and the family moved to Hafeld, near Lambach, and his six-year-old son had to enter school. Adolph found his life suddenly confined in a narrow circle of activities demanding responsibility and discipline. For the first time he was steadily and systematically forced to conform. What can we say about the child’s character development by the end of this first period of his life? This is the period in which both aspects of the Oedipus complex are fully developed: sexual attraction to mother and hostility to father. The data seem to confirm the Freudian assumption: young Hitler was deeply attached to mother and antagonistic to his father; but he failed to solve the Oedipus complex by identifying himself with father through the formation of the superego and overcoming his attachment to mother; feeling betrayed by her by the birth or a rival he withdrew from her. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Serious questions arise, however, concerning the Freudian interpretation. If the birth of his brother when Adolph was five had been so traumatic, leading to the breaking of the tie to mother and replacing “love” for her by resentment and hate, why should the year after this event have been such a happy one—in fact probably the happiest period of his childhood? Why did the image of his mother continue to be so positive that he carried her picture in a little bad on his breast during the war and had it in his house in Obersalzberg and in Berlin? If we consider the fact that his mother’s relationship to her husband seems to have been one of little intensity and warmth, can we really explain his hate of his father as a result of his Oedipal rivalry? These questions would seem to find an answer of the hypothesis on malignant incestuousness. This hypothesis would lead to the assumption that Hitler’s fixation to his mother was not a warm and affectionate one up to age five; that he remained cold and did not break through his narcissistic shell; that she did not assume the role of a real person for him, but that of a symbol for the impersonal power of Earth, fate—and death. Most importantly, one could understand that the beginning of Hitler’s manifest necrophilous development is to be found in the malignant incestuousness that characterizes his early relationship to his mother. This hypothesis would also explain why Hitler later never fell in live with motherly figures, why the tie to his real mother as a person was replaced by the blood, soil, the race, and eventually to chaos and death. The consequence of not achieving an adequate understanding aroused early in life is that one’s subsequent moral sentiments are likely to bear the scares of this early training which shapes more or less roughly original nature. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
The process by which the child comes to have moral attitudes centers around the oedipal situation and the deep conflicts to which it gives rise. The moral precepts insisted upon by those in authority (in this case the parents) are accepted by the child as the best way to resolve one’s anxieties, and the resulting attitudes represented by the superego are likely to be harsh and punitive reflecting the stresses of the oedipal phase. Thus part of the moral learning occurs early in life before a reasoned basis for morality can be understood, and it involves the acquisition of new motives by psychological processes marked by conflict and stress. Since parents and others in authority are bound to be in various ways misguided and self-seeking in their use of praise and blame, and rewards and punishments generally, our earlier and unexamined moral attitudes are likely to be in important respects irrational and without justification. Moral advance in later life consists partly in correcting these attitudes in the light of whatever principles we finally acknowledge to be sound. The other traditional of moral learning states that not so much a matter of supplying missing motives as one of the free developments of our innate intellectual and emotional capacities according to the natural bent. Once the power of understanding mature and persons some to recognize their place in society and are able to take up the standpoint of others, they appreciate the mutual benefits of establishing fair terms of social cooperation. We have a natural sympathy with other persons and an innate susceptibility to the pleasures of fellow feeling and self-mastery, and these provide the affective basis for the moral sentiments once we have a clear grasp of our relations to our associates from an appropriately general perspective. Thus this tradition regards the moral feelings as a natural outgrowth of a full appreciation of our social nature. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The arrangements of a just society are so suited to use that anything which is obviously necessary for it is accepted much like a physical necessity. An indispensable condition of such a society is that all shall have consideration for the others on the basis of mutually acceptable principles of reciprocity. It is painful for us when our feelings are not in union with those of our fellows; and this tendency to sociality provides in due course a firm basis for the moral sentiments. Moreover, to be held accountable to the principles of justice in one’s dealings with others does not stunt our nature. Instead it realizes our social sensibilities and by exposing us to a larger good enables us to control our narrower impulses. It is only when we are restrained not because we injure the good of others but by their mere displeasure, or what seems to us their arbitrary authority, that our nature is blunted. If the reasons for moral injunctions are made plain in terms of the just claims of others, these constraints do us no injury but are seen to be compatible with our good. Moral learning is not so much a matter of acquiring new motives, for these will come about of themselves once the requisite developments in our intellectual and emotional capacities has taken place. It follows that a full grasp of moral conceptions must await maturity; the child’s understanding is always primitive and the characteristic features of one’s morality fall away in later stages. The rationalist tradition presents a happier picture, since it hold that the principles of right and justice spring for our nature and are not at odds with our good, whereas the other account would seem to include no such guarantee. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
A moral view is an extremely complex structure of principles, ideals, and precepts, and involves all the elements of thought, conduct, and feeling. Certainly many kinds of learning ranging from reinforcement and classical conditioning to highly abstract reasoning and the refined perception of exemplars enter into its development. Presumably at some time or other each has a necessary role. A person will acquire an understanding of and an attachment to the principles of justice as one grows up in a particular form of well-ordered society. We are led to distinguish between the moralities of authority, of association, and of principles. The account of moral development is tied throughout to the conception of justice which is to be learned, and therefore presupposed the plausibility if not the correctness of theory. Morality of association is parallel certain life stages. Development within these early stages is being able to assume more complex, demanding, and comprehensive roles. A caveat is apropos here similar to that I made before in regard to the remarks on economic theory. We want the psychological account of moral learning to be true and in accordance with existing knowledge. However, of course it is impossible to take the details into account. One must keep in mind that the purpose of the following discussion is to examine the questions of stability and to contrast the psychological roots of the various conceptions of justice. The crucial point is how the general facts of moral psychology affect the choice of principles in the original position. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Unless the psychological account is defective in a way that would call into question the acknowledgment of the principles of justice rather than the standard of utility, say, no irreparable difficulty should ensure. I also hope that none of the further uses of psychological theory will prove too wide of the mark. Particularly important among these is the account of the basis of equality. A farmer who has moved down a thousand flowers in one’s meadow to feed one’s cows should take care that on the way home one does not, in wanton pastie, switch off the head of a single flower growing at the edge of the road, for in so doing one injures life without being forced to do so by necessity. Let a human begin to think about the mystery of one’s life and the links which connect one with life that fills the World, and one cannot but bring to bear upon one’s own life and all other life that comes within one’s reach the principle of reverence for life. Diseased conditions in the human body are often traceable, by a subtle and penetrating analysis, to diseased conditions of the human soul. Medical science deals chiefly with the physical organism, and so long as it persists in regarding only that part of the being of humans, so long will it continue to find its theories falsified, its carefully prepared experiments turned into blind guesses, and its high percentage of failures maintained. The body is after all only a sensitive machine, and if thinking and feeling of a human who uses the machine in self-expression is distorted, unbalanced, or discordant in any way, then these undesirable qualities will reproduce themselves in the physical organism as appropriate disease or functional derangements. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
O THOU wicked and disobedient Spirit Forneus, because thou hast rebelled, and hast not obeyed nor regarded my words which I have rehearse; they being all glorious and incomprehensible names of the true GOD, the maker and creator of thee and of me, and of all the World; I DO by the power of these names the which no creature is able to resist, curse thee into the depth of the Bottomless Abyss, there to remain unto the Day of Doom in chains, and in fire and brimstone unquenchable, unless thou forthwith appear here before this Circle, in the triangle to do my will. And, therefore, come thou quickly and peaceably, in and by these names of God, ADONAI, ZABAOTH, ADONAI, AMIORAN; come thou! come thou! for it is the King of Kings, even ADONIA, who commandeth thee. WHEN thou shalt have rehearsed thus far, but still he cometh not, then write thou his seal on parchment and put thou it into a strong black box (this box should evidently be in metal or in something which does not take fire easily). I CONJURE thee, O fire, by him who made thee and all other creatures for good in the World, that thou torment, burn, and consume this Spirit Forneus, for everlasting. I condemn thee, thou Spirit Forneus, because thou art disobedient and obeyest not my commandment, nor keepest the precepts of the LORD THY GOD, neither wilt thou obey me nor mine invocations, having thereby called thee forth, I, who am the servant of the MOST HIGH AND IMPERIAL LORD GOD OF HOSTS, IEHOVAH, I who am dignified and fortified by His celestial power and permission, and yet thou comest not to answer these my propositions here made unto thee. #Randolphharris 22 of 23
For the which thine averseness and contempt thou art guilty of great disobedience and rebellion, and therefore shall I excommunicate thee, and destroy thy name and seal, the which I have enclosed in this box; and shall burn thee in the immortal fire and bury thee in immortal oblivion; unless thou immediately come and appear visibly and affably, friendly and courteously here unto me before this Circle, in this triangle, in a form comely and fair, and in no wise terrible, hurtful, or frightful to me or any other creature whatsoever upon the face of the Earth. And thou shalt make rational answers unto my requests, and perform all my desires in all things, that I shall make unto thee. Almighty God, reverently we stand before Thy Law, the Torah, Thy most precious gift to man,–the Holy Writ our fathers learned and taught, preserved for us, a heritage unto all generations. May we, their children’s children, ponder every word and find as they, new evidence of Thee in every precept, each eternal truth. O Light of Ages, Thou art still our light, our guide, our fortress. May Thy Torah ever be our Tree of Life, our shield and stay, that we may take its teachings to our heart and thus draw near to Thee. Amen. Thou Sovereign of the World and Ruler of humankind, as we stand before the open ark of Thy Torah we gratefully acknowledge Thee to be our Father and our Law-giver. Thou hast bequeathed unto us Thy Law, a sacred heritage for all time. Give us discernment to know and wisdom to understand that Thy Torah is our life and the length of our days. Teach us so to live that we shall be guided by Thy commandments. May Thy Word ever be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path, showing us the way to true and righteous living. Amen. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 