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Let Us Never Forget the True Heroes of Society
Let us never forget that the true heroes of society quietly get the job done, and do so with incredible dedication, perseverance, and dignity in an environment of steadily diminishing resources. When the 2002 World soccer championships were held jointly in Japan and South Korea, Hugo Enciso, a Los Angeles marketing executive, decided to take his son to Tokyo. Mr. Enciso, Mexican by birth, American by education and lifestyle, worked for La Opinion, the biggest Spanish-language daily in the United States of America. In Japan they met members of the tiny community of Latin Americans who lived there and were introduced to Japanese food, manners and its mania for sports. For Mr. Enciso it was an experience he would long remember. Hundreds of thousands of other foreigners, from all parts of the globe, poured into Korea and Japan to attend the games. We later met Mr. Enciso in California at the wedding of two young software executive—he born in Pakistan, she in India. His family was Muslim, hers Hindu. When the speaker system blared Pashtun music, Mr. Enciso joined the crowd of frenetic, happy dancers, most of whom had never heard a note of Pashtun before that night. Among them where WASP executives, Asian students, American Jewish people, and many with still other ethnic, religious or geographical backgrounds. It was not merely a mixed marriage but a mixed celebration. And it was truly symbolic. We are not only still shifting the center of World economic gravity toward Asia, including South Asia, where the married couple have their ancestral roots. We are not only altering the criteria that will determine where tomorrow’s jobs will be found, where new factories, offices and homes will be built, and where revolutionary wealth will be created. We are expanding something we might call our personal “spatial reach.” Twenty-four hundred years ago in ancient China, where the less affluent were rooted to the soil, the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu declared that people who travel are apt to be “troublesome, false, restless, and engaged in secret plots.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Today an estimated 8 percent of the human race—roughly 640 million people—travel across some national boundary in the course of the year. This number is larger than the entire population of the Earth in the year 1700, which was 603 million, right after the dawn of the industrial age. Troublesome or not, engaging in secret plots or not, searching for a job or just flying to Milwaukee to visit a customer, we are a species on the move. Americans on average drive fifteen thousand miles per year. However, most car trips are back and forth to one’s workplace—an average round-trip journey of twenty-three miles, or to destinations closer to home, like the supermarket or the bank. Vacation travel may take the family father. We could easily track our car travel on a map. A business traveler can also pinpoint the cities to which one has journeyed in the course of the year and the trips within those places. The results would be a map showing one’s “travel reach.” However, we could also show on the map all the locations to and from which we have sent or received e-mail, post office mail, phone calls, text messages, faxes, plus the physical addressed of all the people in our electronic Rolodex and sites visited online. With considerably more difficulty, we could even track the geographical origin of the products we buy and the destinations of the waste matter and pollution we create. Even these do not exhaust all the geographical locations with which we have, or wish to have, some relationship. However, they would give us a rich image of our spatial reach—a continually changing map of our personal geography. Compare our individual spatial reach today with that of the average less affluent European in, say, the twelfth century, who in the course of an entire lifetime was unlikely to ever have traveled more than fifteen miles from one’s village. Except, perhaps, for religious ideas that came over the centuries all the way from Rome, fifteen miles largely bounded in one’s life. That was the less affluent personal footprint on the planet. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
If we apply this kind of mapping to companies, industries or nations, we promptly discover that the spatial reach of each varies and continually changes. Similarly, different segments of each economy require a different “reach.” A country may need to import raw materials or components from many countries in order to sell exports to only a few. Or vice versa. Hollywood uses equipment from Japan and acting talent from Britain, but its films are exported all over the World. However, that is just a simple example. Your personal digital assistant (PDA) or camera phone may include a processor from America, a circuit board from China, chips designed in Taiwan, Austria, Ireland, or India, a color display from South Korea and a lens from Germany. It is the combination of these spatial relationships that together define each company’s spatial reach. The Japanese, for example, have had a decades-long debate over whether to focus their economy on ties with Asia or spread them around globally. During Japan’s momentary triumphalism in 1980s and ‘90s, flag-waving politicians like former governor Shintaro Ishihara, urged Japan to replace the United States of America as the dominant power in Asia. That, however, was before Japan’s economic slowdown and China’s simultaneous rocketlike rise, not to mention its big military buildup and recent explosions of anti-Japanese sentiment. However, Mr. Ishihara new Japan had new vulnerabilities in the region, and called for stronger relations with the United States of America. Today, Japan is one of the World’s most successful democracies and largest economies. The U.S.-Japan Alliance is the cornerstone of the United States of America’s security interests in Asia and is fundamental to regional stability and prosperity. The Alliance is based on shared vital interests and values, including: the maintenance of stability in the Indo-Pacific region: the preservation and promotion of political and economic freedoms; support for human rights and democratic institutions; and, the expansion of prosperity for the people of both countries and the international community as a whole. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
In fact, 2020 marked the 60th anniversary of the signing of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Both countries need each other, and they collaborate closely on international diplomatic initiatives. The countries are also cooperating on a broad range of global issues, including development assistance, global health, environmental and resource protection, and women’s empowerment. Other common goals are also the promotion integrity in Information and Communications Technology supply chains and to ensure a secure transition to 5G networks. There are also common objectives in the fields of science and technology in such areas as brain science, gaining, infectious disease, personalized medicine, and international space exploration. Japan and America are also working towards intensively expanding already strong people-to-people ties in education, science, and other areas. However, the real question has to do with the spatial reach of Japan’s economy. Is Japan a regional or a global player? What is its economic and cultural foot-print on the World? At a time of rising populism and authoritarianism around the World, Japan stands out as a relative island of social and economic stability. And though it owes its current situation to unique economic and geopolitical circumstances, it might still have something to teach other developed countries. By and large, Japan feels relatively stable and peaceful when compared to other advanced economies. Moreover, the Japanese government has been publicizing its efforts to attract certain foreign-born workers having recognized that immigration will be necessary for future growth. Japan is also the third largest source of foreign direct investment (FDI) into the United States of America, behind the United Kingdom, and Canada, with a total stock of FDI in 2020 at $647.72 billion U.S dollars (the total foreign direct investments in the United States of America were valued at approximately 4.63 trillion U.S. dollars in that year). Japan’s FDI positions in the United States on a historical cost basis has grown every year for the past several years from $238 billion in 2009. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Japan’s influence on culture—the Japanese influence on America culture has expanded beyond Sushi, Bento Boxes, and Japanese cars. The Japanese have fully integrated in American culture and are actually starting to leave a lot of their traditional culture behind and are embracing American ways and lifestyles. Although they may still embrace customs inside of the home such as a clean minimal design layout, no shoes in the house, and family dinners, outside of the home, Japanese have started buying American and Germany cars, have desegregated their housing choices, are opening up technology businesses, and working in traditional corporations, and are even marrying other Americans who may not be of the same ethnic background. They have moved outside of the niche as being see as “exotic,” and have become red blooded Americans. They like the American flag, take their kids to baseball games, basketball games, and football games. With American being such a huge melting pot, it is hard to find any traditional cultures still around. Every culture is some blend of American culture and that is generally accepted. Many people love the diversity. America has become like one big international city. And while Japanese are expanding their horizons in fashion and automobiles, many Americans have fallen in love with Japanese cars, food, and clothing. So, that little island has had a tremendous impact on America and the globe. Japan is flourishing as a regional economic power. Its output of cars, SUVs, Sony Play Stations, flat-panel TVs, and computers are marketed around the World. Japanese companies operate plants on virtually every continent. Whether anyone likes it or not, Japan needs resources, markets opportunities, energy, ideas and information from all over the globe, not just from its nearby neighbors. Japan’s global influence is real. The spatial reach or footprint of every person, company and country is undergoing major change. And it is not just people and products that are on the move. Money, too, has spatial reach. And that, too, is changing rapidly, with deep implications for the global economy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It is common knowledge that trillions of dollars are continually zapping across electronic channels at phenomenal speeds, from nation to nation, bank to bank, and person to person, in a grand unending monetary tango. Most people also know—or should by now know—that international currency trading is a global casino. What most people do not know, however, is that the dollar is not just an American currency. It is popularly believed that Americans use dollars, Germans use euros, Japanese use yen, and Argentineans use pesos. In fact, according to economist Benjamin J. Cohen of the University of California/Santa Barbara, “nothing could be further from the truth.” This idea had become “an outmoded and misleading caricature” because competition has “greatly altered the spatial organization of monetary relations,” and more people are switching to Crypto currencies. Put differently, each currency, like each person, has its own, continually changing spatial reach. At present the dollar, despite its recent plunge, has the longest reach, some countries actually forgoing a currency of their own in favor of “dollarization.” They make the U.S. dollar legal tender, and it becomes their own official currency. In other countries, the dollar unofficially supplants local money for many purposes. The American dollar was introduced as the official currency of the United States of America in 1785 and is used as official currency in 16 countries ranging from Panama and Ecuador to East Timor. In addition, there are numerous countries where the U.S. dollar is readily accepted even in regular retail transactions. Internationally, it has established itself as a reserve currency and is the most traded currency in the World. In fact, according to the Federal Reserve, more U.S. dollars are held by foreigners than by Americans—somewhere between 55 and 70 percent, mostly in hundred-dollar bills. The dollar is not the only currency that has supplemented or supplanted another. For all practical purposes, before the introduction of the euro, one could use the German mark in the Balkans, the French franc in parts of Africa, the Swiss franc in Liechtenstein, the Indian rupee in Bhutan, the Danish krone in Greenland. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
In all, a study by the International Monetary Fund found eighteen countries in which foreign currency makes up more than 30 percent of the money supply and another thirty-four in which it averages 16.4 percent or more. According to Dr. Cohen, currencies “increasingly are employed outside their country of origin, penetrating other national monetary spaces. The rapid acceleration of cross-border currency competition has transformed the spatial organization of global monetary relations. National currency domains are more interpenetrated today than at any time since the dawn of the era of territorial money.” In short, money had been unleashed from its former spatial limits. This shift carries important power consequences. An “invading” currency (our term) does not always benefit the nation from which it comes. Many factors play a role, and it can sometimes prove costly. The “invaded” country’s government usually loses a degree of control over its domestic monetary policy and is weakened in the eyes of its citizens. It loses a part of what economists call “seigniorage”—the money it makes for its own money, that is, printing and issuing it. And if it ranks low in the World pecking order of currencies, it can, as a rule, be more easily whipsawed by the action of other economies. The much bigger change, however, according to Dr. Cohen, is not in the relationship of nations to one another but in the relationship between governments and markets. Thus the use of more than one currency in a country opens more options for companies and financial institutions doing business there. It may offer choices with respect to currency risk, taxes, regulations, accounting rules, transaction and conversion costs, financial instruments and the like. Conversely, it reduces the local government’s influence or control. Finally, it also makes the “invaded” country more sensitive to, and potentially responsive to, World financial markets. Which is why the first stop of many a new president or prime minister is a de rigueur visit to Wall Street to perform a reassurance ritual promising financial prudence during the ensuing term of office. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
What we have seen so far—the great wealth shift toward Asian, the creation of cyberspace, the change in criteria by which locations are appraised, the expansion of global reach, and the geographical spread of the currently shaky dollar—are only some of the changes taking place in our relationship to the deep fundamental space. The public spokesman asks for new inspiration to give us a “more meaningful existence.” However, other public spokesmen say that the juvenile delinquents get that way because they do not attend the churches we have. One explanation of this contradiction, of course, is that we are human and have new problems, but the boys are hardly human and ought to be better socialized to the appropriate institutions. This is not serious. What is the actual religious plight of a young man growing up in our society? Let us discuss it theologically, though I am aware that this vocabulary is at present puzzling. If a person asks “How am I justified? What is the meaning of my life?” he will surely find no rational answer. The bother is that the question has arisen and begun to plague one. If the question arises, as an important question, something is wrong; he will feel unworthy and damned, and wasted. Historically, appeal has then been had to psychological techniques of revivalism or physical techniques of sacramental magic. (Dr. Douglass’ intellectual approach cannot work.) However, if the question, as that question, never gets to be asked—if the matter is mentioned, if at all, as a moment of reflection in an ongoing process of life, it is possible to avoid the imputation of being damned. This non-asking can happen in two ways. First, if certain life behavior is necessary, no questions are asked. (We shall return to this first alternative.) However, secondly, if a man’s developing needs and purposes do indeed keep meeting with real opportunities and duties, no “final” questions are asked. You do not need to finish the task, and neither are you free to leave it off. The opportunities need not be such as to satisfy a human and make one happy—tht would be paradise; the duties must not be such that he must succeed in performing them—that would be hell; if he is earnest, if there are simply possible ways for his activity and achievement, so that he knows the World is a World for him, it is sufficient. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
This condition of meeting the World is called being in a state of grace. In such a case the questions that are really asked are practical and specific to the task in hand. The question, “How am I justified? what is the meaning of my life?” is answered by naming the enterprise that one is engaged in, and by the fact that it is going on. As Kafka said, “The fact of our living is in itself inexhaustible in its proof of faith.” (By analogy, if a young couple has had a good dinner without external or internal interruptions, they do not feel guilty for indulging and are fortified against criticism. The behavior justifies itself. However, if the dinner had worked out badly, they are disappointed, resentful of one another, and vulnerable to being made guilty by others for eating such rich food.) The sense that life is going on and the confidence that the World will continue to support the next step of it, is called Faith. It is hard to grow up without Faith. For then one is subject to these nagging unanswerable questions: Am I worthless? How can I prove myself? What chance is there for me? Did I ever have a chance? (These will be recognized as “questions of a juvenile delinquent to his soul.”) Children, if we observe then, seem normally to be abounding in simple faith. They rush headlong and there is ground underfoot. They ask for information and are told. They cry for something and get it or are refused, but they are not disregarded. They go exploring and see something interesting. It is the evil genius of our society to blight, more or less disastrously, this faith of its young as they grow up; for our society does not, for most, continue to provide enough worth-while opportunities and relevant duties, and soon it ceases to take them seriously as existing. Desperately, then, people may try to fill the void of worthlessness-and-abandonment by seeking money or status, or by busy work, or by self-proving exploits, both to silence critics and to silence own doubts. They substitute role playing, conforming, and belonging for the grace of meeting objective opportunity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
However, there is no justification in such “works,” for they are not really the man’s own works, nor God’s providence for him. As the theologians have said, Real works are the natural products of faith taking its next step. Or alternately, people may spurn the false roles that are available and try for formless mystical experiences. This seems to be the aim of the Beat Generation, which is a kind of brotherhood of Quietism plus stimulants. Or alternatively, again, where the despair of abandonment is acute, as with many juveniles, they rush fatalistically to punishment, to have it over with and be received back. Finding a new ethics or esthetics, as Dr. Douglass asks, will not put us in a state of grace. Existence is not given meaning by importing into it a revelation from outside. The meaning is there, in more closely contacting the actual situation, the only situation that there is, whatever it is. As our situation is, closely contacting it would surely result in plenty of trouble and perhaps in terrible social conflicts, terrible opportunities and duties, during which we might learn something and at the end of which we might know something, even a new ethics; for it is in such conflicts that new ethics are discovered. However, it is just these conflicts that we do not observe happening. Everybody talks nice. At most there is some unruliness and dumb protest, and some withdrawal. So urging the juveniles to go to church is not serious, for how will the church give them faith? What opportunity will it open? Often, celibacy is an unbidden state, imposed by circumstances—a lack of available partners, for instance, as in modern China with its skewed gender ratio, or in apartheid-bound South African, where rigid work and travel permits could confine one marriage partner to the white city, the other to a black township. The American Civil War, which killed a generation of young men, also doomed their sisters to spinsterhood as maiden aunts burdensome family charges, and underpaid schoolmarms. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
In societies with strict social and moral standards, financial constraints may also necessitate celibacy. In Victorian England, middle-class spinsters were expected to abstain from pleasures of the flesh until marriage, and most brides sashayed chastely up the aisle. However, they often took an inordinately long time to do so because before the final vows were exchanged, the bridegroom was supposed to accumulate enough money to buy a proper house in an approved neighborhood: “Virtue is good, but a house in Belgravia is better,” as the aphorism went. As the young men waited out their long courtships and engagements, they practiced frugality but not always celibacy; thanks to the license the double standard permitted English males, the percentage of women of the evening in England was higher than in anywhere else in Europe. In the twentieth century, the Great Depression squeezed more than pockets and stomachs as it pushed millions into unemployment and underemployment. This relentless poverty forced the postponement of thousands of marriages, and it convinced the unmarries to remain celibate or face the unmentionable—another mouth to feed when their own were flapping with unsated hunger. Country folks who lacked access to reliable birth control or who had religious or moral concerns about it simply waited it out. Social values may produce the same effect. In Asian societies that bar young women from marrying before their older sisters are suitably disposed of, unwelcome premarital celibacy may be extended indefinitely by the impossibility of marrying off a homely, disabled, or disagreeable sibling. In India, even if they were widowed as children and were forced into lifelong celibacy, Hindu widows could not remarry. Even today, this has changed only slightly. In some societies, lack of dowries has also doomed women to celibacy, and as we have seen, medieval convents expanded their numbers and their coffers by accepting dowries far too modest for a mortal husband. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Other times, celibacy is directly coerced. A man or a woman is tossed into prison, where pleasures of the flesh is forbidden Until this century, European domestic servitude entailed celibacy for life. In England, some male servants could marry, but women could not because employers refused to inconveniences themselves by dealing with the pregnancies and babies their domestics’ marriages would produce. The countries of Carlisle aggressively monitored her female servants, instructing her head housemaid to tattle on any underlings not regularly washing their monthly-napkins which proved they were not having a baby. Many women lived out their lives in chaste service, fending off advances of their domineering employers. Bachelorhood or celibacy was also mandated for certain trades and professions. Apprentices could not marry even when they became journeymen, but had to wait for years until they were masters. Often their delayed marriages followed either resentful chastity or cheap solicitation. In the Middle Ages, male serfs were often lifetime bachelors. Educators on all levels faced a traditional ban on marriage—celibacy or your job was a common choice. Quite unlike brahmacharya, the orthodox learning tool for Indian students and scholars, celibacy was often inflicted on reluctant Western academics. Until 1882, when the requirement was relaxed, Oxford and Cambridge dons accepted their positions on condition of celibate bachelorhood. Some observed it cynically, in the breach, keeping mistresses or frequenting women of the evening, but many dons were conscientious men who lived in scholarly celibacy in the comfortable, well-catered, and companionable digs of their ivory towers. Until the twentieth century, throughout Europe and North America, female teachers faced the same stricture from rigid, misogynist, educational bureaucracies that cringed at the thought of women with child being active in pleasures of the flesh while forming tender young minds. Instances of coerced or de facto celibacy are legion, and those mentioned above represent a tiny sampling. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Nonetheless, any kind of celibacy unwillingly embraced is substantively different from committed celibacy. The hormonal young women pledged to chastity because it will guarantee her a suitable marriage or the athlete striving for greatness in the next competition is motivated in ways the coerced or happenstance celibate is not. A look at five cases of such unwilling celibacy confirms this. A special conference was held in November, 1831, at Hiram, Ohio. At this time it was decided to print the revelations which the church had received through the prophet Joseph Smith. Up to this time the revelations of Joseph had received from the Lord had been written on paper by hand. The priesthood in preaching could quote them only from memory. Now that W.W. Phelps had a printing shop in Independence, it was thought the revelation could now be printed so all could read them. Joseph met with a group of elders to get the material ready for the new book of revelations, which Oliver Cowdery was to take to Independence for printing. The preface to the Doctrine and Covenants was given at this time, and it was placed in the beginning of the book and numbered, “One.” In this preface, given November 1, 1831, the Lord said: “Hearken, O ye people of my church….Hearken ye people from afar, and ye that are upon the islands of the sea, listen together. The voice of the Lord is unto all humans, and there is none to escape, and the voice of warning shall be unto all people, by the mouths of my disciples, whom I have chosen in these last days, for I the Lord have commanded them. Wherefore I the Lord, knowing the calamity which should come upon the inhabitants of the Earth, called upon my servant Joseph Smith, Jr., and spake unto him from Heaven, and gave him commandments, and also gave commandments to others, that they should proclaim these things unto the World; and all this that it might be fulfilled, which was written by the prophets; that faith also might increase in the Earth; that mine everlasting covenant might be established; that the fullness of my gospel might be proclaimed unto the ends of the World, and before kings and rulers.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The Lord proclaimed that He had given Joseph Smith, Jr., the power to translate the Book of Mormon, and had given his latter-day disciples power to lay the foundation of this church—“To bring it forth out of obscurity, and out of darkness, the only true living church upon the face of the whole Earth, with which I the Lord am well pleased, speaking unto the church collectively and not individually. For I the Lord can not look upon sin with the least degree of allowance; nevertheless, one that repents and does the commandments of the Lord shall be forgiven. And one that repents not, from one shall be taken even the light which one has received, for my Spirit shall not always strive with humans, saith the Lord of Hosts. O inhabitants of the Earth, I, the Lord, am willing to make these things known unto all flesh, for I am not respecter of persons, and will that all humans shall know that the day speedily cometh when peace shall be taken from the Earth, and the Devil shall have power over his own dominion. And also the Lord shall have power over his saints, and shall reign in their midst. Search these commandments, for they are true and faithful, and the prophecies and promises which are in them shall all be fulfilled. And though the Heavens and the Earth pass away, my word shall not pass away. For behold, and lo, the Lord is God, and the Spirit beareth record, and the record is true, and the truth abideth for ever and ever. Amen.” As the elders were preparing the revelations for publication, some of them objected to the language of some of the revelations and wanted Joseph to change them. Because of this the Lord gave a revelation in which he said: “I, the Lord, give unto you a testimony of the truth of these commandments.” Then the Lord suggested that they choose the wisest man among them to try to write one which would compare with any of the revelations which had been given through Joseph. William E. McLellin made an effort to imitate one of the revelations, and all the elders realized that the best he could write was far inferior to the revelations. This renewed the faith of these man in truth of the revelations the Lord had given to his church through his prophet, Joseph Smith. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Another revelation given at this time contained instructions for parents concerning their children. The Lord, Jesus Christ, said: “Inasmuch as parents have children in Zion, or in any of her stakes which are organized, that teach them not to understand the doctrine of repentance; faith in Christ the Son of the Living God; and of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of the hands when eight years old, the sin be upon the head of the parents. For this shall be a law…and their children shall be baptized for the remission of their sins when eight years old, and receive the laying on the hands. And they shall also teach their children to pray, and to walk uprightly before the Lord.” One Angel enlightens another. To make this clear, we must observe that intellectual light is nothing else than a manifestation of truth. All that is made manifest is light. Hence, to enlighten means nothing else but to communicate to others the manifestation of the known truth. “To me the least of all the saints is given this grace to enlighten all humans, that they may see what is the dispensation of the mystery which hath been hidden from eternity in God,” reports Ephesians 3.8. Therefore one Angel is said to enlightened another by manifesting the truth which one knows oneself. Theologians plainly show that the orders of the Heavenly beings are taught Divine science by the higher minds. Now since two things concur in the intellectual operation, as we have said, namely, the intellectual power, and the likeness of the thing understood; in both of these one Angel can notify to another the known truth to another. First, by strengthening one’s intellectual power; for just as the power of an imperfect body is strengthened by the neighbourhood in corporeal things. Secondly, one angel manifests the truth to another as regards the likeness of the thing understood. For the superior Angel receives the knowledge of truth by a kind of universal conception, to receive which the inferior Angel’s intellect is not sufficiently powerful, for it is natural to one to receive truth in a more particular manner. Therefore the superior Angel distinguishes, in a way, the truth which one conceives universally, so that it can be gasped by the inferior Angel; and thus one proposes it to one’s knowledge. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Thus it is with us that the teacher, in order to adapt oneself to others, divides into many points the knowledge which one possesses in the universal. Every intellectual substance with provident power divides and multiples the uniform knowledge bestowed on it by one nearer to God, so as to lead its inferiors upwards by analogy. All Angels see the Essence of God immediately, and in this respect one does not teach another. It Is of this truth that the prophet speaks; wherefor one adds: “They shall teach no more every man his brother, saying: ‘Know the Lord’: for all shall know Me, from the least of them even to the greatest.” However, all the types of the Divine works, which are known in God as their cause, God knows in Himself, because he comprehends Himself; but of others who see God, each one knows the more types, the more perfectly one sees God. Hence a superior Angel knows more about the types of the Divine works than an inferior Angel, and concerning these the former enlightens the latter; and as to this, the Angels are enlightened by the types of existing things. An Angel does not enlighten another by giving one the light of nature, grace, or glory; but by strengthening one’s natural light, and by manifesting to one the truth concerning the state of nature, of grace, and of glory, as explained above. The rational mind is formed immediately by God, either as the image from the exemplar, forasmuch as it is made to the image of God alone; or as the subject by the ultimate perfecting form: for the created mind is always considered to be uniform, except it adhere to the first disposition to this ultimate form. Within the circles of our lives, we dance the circles of the year and undergo a moderate discipline for this purpose. This is a time for the more advanced quester who seek to attain the highest possible standard and who is willing to pay in self-denial and self-training the corresponding price. Prayer teaches us what to aspire for. So often we do now know what to cling to. Prayer implants in us the ideals we ought to cherish. Prayer is no panacea, no substitute for action. It is, rather, like a beam thrown from a flashlight before us into the darkness. It is in this light that we who grope, stumble and climb, discover where we stand, what surrounds us, and the course which we should choose. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
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Altering the Maps of the Past and Our Various Relationships
Success on any major scale requires one to accept responsibility. When we were made in the image of God, we were given a mind, but we are not equal to God. No human will make a great leader who wants to do it all oneself or to get all the credit for doing it. The moment Adam ate, sin and death came on the human race. His cells were being destroyed faster than they can be replaced, his nature became a sin nature, and it took him nearly one thousand years to die. His soul gave up its eternal life when he ate. It is not because of what you are I do that we are born sinners. We have inherited sin because of our first father, Adam. However, we have been given free choice. Therefore, we are responsible for our behavior and can choose to be good. We are controlled by the Holy Spirit to the measure that we yield ourselves to God, and He empowers us to resist Satan effectively. In addition, God has outfitted us with a full panoply of armor by which we can both defend ourselves from the attacks of the forces of evil and take the offensive against them. The apostle Paul, using the figure of a warrior prepared for battle. “Wherefore, take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand, therefore, having your loins girded about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith, with which ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,” reports Ephesians 6.13-17. Paul exhorts us to have our “loins girded about with truth.” This belt refers to our sincerity, our honesty. If one is hypocritical and dishonest, one will not successfully resist and overcome evil influence of Satan and his armies. Remember the devil is the father of lies. The child of God must not merely say that he desires victory over sin, but must truly long for it. One is to hate sin and manifest genuine earnestness. One’s vows and public statements must always be sincerely spoken, for the devil has no difficulty in defeating the hypocritical and half-hearted. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The breastplate of righteousness represents the believer’s way of living. The Christian who desires to ward off the attacks of Satan and evil spirits must consciously choose a life of obedience, moral rectitude, and devout holiness. How is this life that pleases God to be attained? Largely by a humble determination to obey the exhortations of the Scriptures. The obedient believer’s life is characterized by righteousness, and one’s testimony is effective to the winning of the lost and the crippling of Satan’s power. The devil trembles at the sight of a truly Godly person. The Christian also is to have one’s “feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. This means that one is to bear God’s good news. One is to be a witness to others of the peace and joy that came to one when one placed one’s trust in Christ. The believer who does not bear a testimony loses spiritual keenness and becomes vulnerable to Satan’s attacks. The “shield of faith” speaks of strong belief nourished through our daily prayer, Christian Bible study, and spiritual activity. True faith accepts God’s forgiveness with thankfulness, and exercises implicit trust in every time of trial and temptation. Without this confidence in the Lord we would be spiritual weaklings, but with it we are the victors. John said, “and this is the victory that overcometh the World, even our faith,” reports 1 John 5.4. the “helmet of Salvation” describes the believer’s knowledge of one’s redemption. God’s child should rejoice in the assurance of a real, present, and personal salvation. One should remind oneself daily that one has been redeemed, that one has passed from death to life, and that one is no longer under condemnation. The devil cannot effectively tempt a Christian who is actively living a joyful Christian life. The child of God also must wield a weapon of offense: the sword of the spirit, the Word of God. Through the use of the Scriptures, one can resist Satan’s onslaughts successfully. Child of God, you are on the winning side. You have become “a partaker of the divine nature,” reports 2 Peter 1.4. Through the new birth, and your body has become the “temple of the Holy Spirit,” reports 1 Corinthians 6.19. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Virginity, Chastity, Celibacy—the holy trinity at the core of many cultures. God has given you all you need for a happy and victorious Christian life now. He has explicitly declared that the power of the devil already has been broken,” reports Hebrews 2.14-15, and that someday you will be delivered from the presence of sin and the possibility of temptation. Remember, “greater is one that is in you, than one that is in the World,” reports 1 John 4.4. Chastity belts are deplorable, but they can be unlocked or hacked off, and the woman imprisoned inside them healed and perhaps restored. In many countries, female chastity represents the family’s honor, and women even suspected of having contaminated themselves are several punished. The apostle John, speaking of God’s eternal city, assures us, “And there shall in no way enter into it anything that defileth, neither one that worketh abomination, or maketh a lie,” reports Revelation 21.27. What a wonderful prospect. In ancient times, many of the devices used to keep women chaste were often times doomed women to unimaginable pain, permanent loss of independence, and unnatural confinement. As chastity in women dominated the social agenda, women’s circulation, flesh, and health was sacrificed, and some of the faced a slow death. Still, even in modern times, chastity remains a cultural imperative, but one that requires enforcement through indoctrination and other social pressures. Remember, one of two destinations awaits you—Heaven or Hell. To ignore Jesus Christ is to make impossible your entrance into Heaven. To receive Him as a Savior is to guarantee a safe and successful journey into everlasting bliss. Jesus Christ Himself declared, “I am the door; by me if any human enter in, one shall be saved,” reports John 10.9. Why not bow your head in prayer right now and settle this matter of salvation? Here is a suggested prayer you might offer: “Lord Jesus, I know I am a sinner and can never save myself. I realize that my own evil nature and the power of Satan and his forces are too much for me to handle in my own strength. I believe that You died for me and that You arose again from the dead. I am now receiving You as my Savior, my Lord, my only hope of salvation. Amen.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
If you prayed this and really meant it, you are now a child of God. Your life will change, as you receive strength to do the will of God. The Christian Bible assures you, “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved,” reports Romans 10.13. Abstinence—voluntary restraint—is celibacy’s simplest manifestation, and it practiced Worldwide for a multitude of reasons. The most common is as a surefire and free method of contraception, which is the only kind of contraception the Catholic church approves of. Abstinence may also have political roots, as was the case in the Voluntary Motherhood Movement, whose adherents wished to control their husband’s access to their body by agreeing to pleasures of the flesh only for procreation. The Catholic Church believes in celibacy because humanmade contraception is consider sinful due to the fact that the male vital force is redirected into a latex or poly urethane sleeve that is wrapped around the male organ or diaphragms of killed by foam or chemical washes and that is no better than Onan’s sinful casting his seed upon the ground. There are many cultures, like the Dani of Irian Jaya, Indonesia, for example, who do not appear unhappy or stressed about lengthy periods of celibacy. Most intriguingly, Dani society does not preach abstinence or have sanctions in place to punish transgression. Apparently the culture simply does not focus on pleasures of the flesh, either to encourage or discourage it. People like the Cheyenne people of North American plains and they Dani people clearly understood between-child celibacy as their people’s form of birth control. Both cultures would wait a few years after marriage to have a child, and then up to a decade of no activities involving pleasures of the flesh before they had their second child. This was also their people’s way to give the first child a chance. As a Cheyenne named Angel put it, “If I were to have had too many children, I’d be whipping first one, then the other.” Because the Cheyenne hated any punishment, they considered it wiser to let the first child grow up before there were others. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The reason women were considered taboo in some cultures like the Sambia of the New Guinea Eastern Highlands is not only because they considered women’s fluids contaminating, but also because the male vital force is essential to manhood, and it is equally crucial for women, who need to draw it up inside themselves for strength, mother’s milk, and to create babies. This means that, for men, pleasures of the flesh are as much a debilitating drain as a pleasure. Celibacy is an excellent practice for an environment or an economic situation, that cannot sustain much population increase. However, in many cultures, children are in many ways their families’ chief assets, and parents strive to produce as many as possible. Even when they are quite small, children make useful economic contributions to their households. More importantly, in culture without government and retirement pensions, children are their parents’ main security against unforeseen financial or medical crises and to ensure a comfortable old age. When they marry, they extend and reinforce connections between their birth and in-law families. Children are crucial in maintaining the intergenerational links that underpin many social systems. However, there are also many compelling reasons for wanting to ensure that a sufficiently long period elapses between births. Infant and child mortality is closely related to inadequate nutrition and maternal debility, which are in turn related to too little time between births. Child spacing, therefore, has developed as the great if unarticulated foal of these societies. Postpartum abstinence, in conjunction with lengthy terms of feeding a baby mother’s milk, is one of the prime instruments to achieve birth spacing that will keep massive child mortality in check, improve survivors’ health, and—as a byproduct—increase parents’ fertility. Through celibacy, married couples are able to better nurture and protect their planned children. This also prevents such diseases as kwashiorkor, which turns its little victims’ hair reddish and bulges out the bellies on their skinny, protein-deprived bodies. For generation is the process of the divine person into the divine nature, and passive spiration is the process of the subsisting love. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
“Mission” and “giving” have only a temporal significance in God; but “generation” and “spiration” are exclusively eternal; where as “procession” and “giving,” in God, have both an eternal and a temporal significance: for the Son may proceed eternally as God; but temporally, by becoming a man, according to His visible mission, or likewise by dwelling in man according to His invisible mission. Joseph, Oliver, and Sidney Rigdon were on a mission. They reached Kirtland in August, about three weeks after leaving Independence. Many things happened on their journey to strengthen their faith in the Lord’s work and to help them to see that Satan was blinding people so they could not see the truth. Joseph was concerned about the “Land of Zion” and prayed for more information about the gathering of the Saints to Zion and the purchase of land. The word of the Lord came to him that many people were seeking signs that they might have faith: Faith cometh not by signs, but signs follow those that believe. Yea, signs come by faith, not by the will of men, nor as they please, but by the will of God. Yea, signs come by faith, unto mighty works, for without faith no human pleaseth God. Wherefore, I, the Lord, am not pleased with those among you, who have sought after signs and wonders for faith, and not for the good of humans unto my glory.” God called upon those who had sinned to repent lest they fall. He promised that those who were faithful and did His will should overcome their temptations and receive an inheritance on the Earth when Jesus comes. The Lord said that those who were to gather to Zion should not go in haste, which would cause confusion and trouble. They should purchase the lands from those who owned them. Then the Saints would have a just claim upon the land and others would not be angry, for Satan was stirring them up to anger against God’s people. The Saints were admonished: The land of Zion shall not be obtained but by purchase, or by blood, otherwise there is none inheritance for you. An if by purchase, behold, you are blessed; and if by blood, as you are forbidden to shed blood, lo, your enemies are upon you, and ye shall be courage from city to city, and from synagogue to synagogue, and but few shall stand to receive an inheritance.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Men were called upon to repent of their wickedness, even of that wickedness which was only in their hearts. In September, 1831, at Kirtland, a revelation was given to the elders of the church encouraging them to forgive one another that they might work together in unity. The Lord’s instructions at this time were: “I, the Lord, forgiveth sins unto those who confess their sins before me, and ask forgiveness. Wherefore I say unto you, that ye ought to forgive one another, for one that forgiveth not one’s brother one’s trespasses, standeth condemned before the Lord, for there remaineth in one the greater sin. I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all humans.” God revealed the duties of certain men. Some were to go to Zion and others were to remain in Kirtland. All Satins were told to use their money for the purchase of land: “Behold, now it is called to-day…and verily it is a day of sacrifice, and a day for the tithing of my people. Behold, it is said in my laws, or forbidden, to get in debt to thine enemies. Be not weary in well-doing, for ye are laying the foundation of a great work. And out of small things proceedeth that which is great. Behold, the Lord requireth the heart and a willing mind; and the willing and obedient shall eat the good of the land of Zion in these days. And the rebellious shall be cut off out of the land of Zion, and shall be sent away, and shall not inherit the land. Behold, I say unto you that Zion shall flourish, and the glory of the Lord shall be upon her, and she shall be an ensign unto the people, and there shall come unto her out of every nation under Heaven.” In a revelation given in October, 1831, which Joseph Smith has called a “Revelation on Prayer,” the Lord said: “Hearken, and lo, a voice as of one sent down from on high, yea, whose voice is unto humans, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Yea, a voice crying, Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Pray unto the Lord; call upon His holy name; make known His wonderful works among the people, call upon the Lord, that His kingdom may go forth upon the Earth; that the inhabitants thereof may receive it, and be prepared for the days to come, in which the Son of Man shall come down in Heaven…to meet the kingdom of God which is set on the Earth. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
“Wherefore, may the kingdom of God go forth, that the kingdom of Heaven may come, that thou, O God, may be glorified in Heaven, so on Earth. For thine is the honor, power, and glory, for ever and ever. Amen.” In another revelation given at about this time the Lord said to the elders: “Lay your hands upon the sick and they shall recover. Be patient in affliction. Ask and ye shall receive. Knock and it shall be opened unto you. Seek not to be cumbered. Forsake all unrighteousness. Keep these sayings for they are true and faithful, and thou shalt magnify thine office, and push many people to Zion, with songs of everlasting joy upon their heads. Continue in these things, even unto the end, and you shall have a crown of eternal life at the right hand of my Father.” If they were to establish Zion on Earth in the latter days, these revelations indicated that the Lord had set up very high standards of righteousness for His people. Many had been attracted to the church by signs and miracles. To some it was disappointing to learn that faith, humility, patience, and tribulation were requirements which preceded blessings. Some of the members rebelled and left the church when they realized the high standard of excellency that was expected of them. Of these, some expressed their rebellion in retaliation, and tried to overthrow the work of the Lord. If, as we believe, it be true that history moves in cycles, the World is not entering a new cycle. The ancient Chinese culture featured this theory of collective fortunes moving through a series of phases, whilst a similar doctrine has long been held in India. We well remember one evening many years ago listening at riverside village near Gaya, where Buddha attained Nirvana, to one of those melancholy Hindu melodies whose monotonous repetition of the same low wailing notes depresses most Westerners. We complained about this to our cultured companion. He was an extremely old man who sat twice a day in the yogi posture of intertwined ankles—so pleasing to behold, so difficult to perform—with his gaze fixed into space and the fading sunlight playing in quivering undulating waves around his figure. The sacred cord of the twice-born, the white triple thread of the Brahmin, hung around his neck. He did not answer for a full two minutes, for he had been wedded by long habit to silence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Then, without turning his head, he said slowly: “My son, among our people it is otherwise. We are not, like the Westerners, afraid of truth’s sadness, while welcoming its joy. We know that the scenes of this World come and pass like a dream of the night. And this is true of all the events and fortunes of a people’s life also—more especially now that we live in the Iron Age, which is ruled by frequent death and covered by spiritual darkness. You know that we measure the World’s history in great epochs, each divided into four successive lesser epochs and each endlessly departing and returning on itself like a wheel. Do not blame us, then, if our minds fall quickly into despondency and if our music reflects this sadness. We accept it resignedly, and through such resignation find contentment. We know that karma is always active and we try to accommodate ourselves to it. Once I brooded for long over the strange prophecies to be found in an ancient Sanskrit book, a Purana. In it I found this passage: ‘When the Earth is bound by iron chains (are they not railways?), when men speak to each other across immense spaces (is this not your telephone without wires?), and when materialism rules supreme (has history shown a less spiritual age than ours?), in that time there will incarnate Kalki, the Slayer of Men, who (it is written symbolically) will carry a flaming sword in his hand.’” The negative and undesirable traits of character will tend to reproduce themselves in undesirable and inharmonious forms of experience. The rule of casting out all negative thoughts, and keeping them out, is an absolute one. There are no exceptions and no deviations. Such negatives as hate, irritability, and fault-finding make poison in the body and neuroses in the mind. They irritate the nerves, disturb the proper movement of the blood, distort the internal secretions, and destructively affect the chemical composition of tissue cells. Nor is this the end. They provoke like emotions in other people with whom we are constantly thrown in contact. As if they were echoes of our own making, we then have to suffer the effects. Thus the discords inside oneself throw up disturbances outside oneself. One’s anger provokes the other person’s anger, for instance. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Negative emotions and memories hold accumulations of worthless, even self-harming materials, useless debris that serve only to hinger progress. Fierce intense hate blinds the eyes of reason, hurts the hater, and creates delusion. Whoever hold fiercely to one’s hatreds not only can never enter the kingdom of Heaven, but will certainly never enter the kingdom of truth. The human who is when one hates will one day be tutored by having to experience the results of one’s own destructive feelings. One who slanders others attracts slander to oneself. If these negative traits are too strong, they may not only hinder the appearance of “the flash” but also the progress in meditation. This is one of the reasons why the medieval mystical authorities laid down a ruling that cleansing of the heart, purification of the mind, must precede or at least accompany the practice of meditation. That they often carried this process too far and enjoined a rigid extreme asceticism does not invalidate the excellence of their ruling. Arrogance and pride not only prepare the way for a fall, as history so often tells us, but also makes a human stick more stubbornly to one’s deviation from the correct way. “Then I will thrust you down with those who descend into the pit (the place of the dead) to the people of olden times, and I will make you [Tyre] to dwell in the lower World like the places that were desolate of old, with those who go down to the pit, that you be not inhabited or shed forth you glory and renown in the land of the living. I will make you a terror [bring you to a dreadful end] and you shall be no more. Though you be sought, yet you shall never be found again, says the Lord,” reports Ezekiel 26.20-21. Conceive that the humanmade environment is now out of human scale. Business, government, and real property have closed up all the space there is. There is no behavior unregulated by the firm or the police. Unless the entire economic machine is operating, it is impossible to produce and buy bread. Public speech quite disregards human facts. There is a rigid caste system in which every one has a slot and the upper group stands for nothing culturally. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The university has become merely a training ground for technicians and applied-anthropologists. Gender is divorced from manly independence and achievement. The FBI has a file card of all the lies and truths about everybody. And so forth. If we sum up these imagined conditions, there would arise a formidable question: It is possible, being a human being, to exist? Is it possible, having a human nature, to grow up? There would be a kind of metaphysical crisis. Or put it another way. These conditions are absurd, they do not make sense; and yet millions, who to all appearances are human beings, behave as though they were the normal course of things. For instance, we encourage economic lunacy by watching TV; we gossip about the new BMWs, and how they will make our cities more livable with all their new technology; we attend conventions, listen to public spokesmen, and smile a lot and shake hands. A man is put into doubt about his own sanity. Do they have the right of it, that there is nothing absurd? Then what kind of animal is oneself? Automatically one begins to use their words and think their thoughts, although one knows that they are absurd. One feel depersonalized. It then becomes necessary to stop short and make a choice: Either/Or. Either one drifts with their absurd system of ideas, believing that this is the human community. Or one dissent totally from their system of ideas and stands as a lonely human being. (But luckily one notices that others are in the same crisis and making the same choice.) The picture may be a bit of an exaggeration. In important ways the American system is not inhuman but human-all-too-human. The tone of dependency, for instance, is not servile but, like the diet of hamburgers and malted milk, a regression to childhood. The Americans can make fun of themselves. To top managers and the president are not calculating monsters, but sometimes ignorant and willful human beings. Sympathy with suffering and the feeling for social justice are quite genuine in our country. We are empirical and experimental. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Although the official spokesmen and the mass media present an impenetrable front, the speakers are confused persons and quickly betray it under personal questioning. For all the foolishness we are bombarded with, the Americans are not foolish and ghoulish; we have a saving sense built in, just like other peoples. And there are carelessly swept corners full of Long-haired Professors, Hipster Generations, Winos, and other assorted fry who are officially conceded to exist. This does not add up to a metaphysical crisis. It is not even hard to see the economic and psychological causes of many of the existing absurdities and to think up expedients. However, the difficulties are arduous; to persist as a human does require unusual moral character, intellect, or animal spirits. For many young people, however, the difficulties of growing up have been so great that they do think that they are faced with critical choice: Either/Or. They have this picture of themselves and of the World. And then unfortunately, whichever way they choose tends to create in fact the very metaphysical crisis that they have imagined. If they choose to conform to the organized system, reaping its rewards, they do so with a crash, working at it, marrying it. Raising their standard of living, and feeling cynical about what they are doing. If they choose totally to dissent, they do not work at changing the institutions as radical youth used to, but they stop washing their faces, take to drugs, and become punch-drunk or slap-happy. Either way they lose the objective changeable World. They have early resigned. People with borderline personality disorder display great instability, including major shifts in mood, an unstable self-image, and impulsivity. These characteristics combine to make their relationships very unstable as well. Some of Ellen Farber’s difficulties are typical: “Ellen Farber, a 21-year-old, single insurance company executive, came to a psychiatric emergency room of a university hospital with complaints of depression and the thought of driving her car off a cliff…Ms. Farber appeared to be in considerable distress. She reported a 6-month period of increasingly persistent dysphoria and lack of energy and pleasure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Feeling as if she were “made of lead,” Ms. Farber had recently been spending 15-20 hours a day in her bed. She also reported daily episodes of binge eating, when she would consumer “anything I can find,” including entire chocolate cakes of boxes of cookies. She reported problems with intermittent binge eating since adolescence, but these had recently increased in frequency. She attributed her increasing symptoms to financial difficulties. Ms. Farber had been fired from her job two weeks before coming to the emergency room. She claimed it was because she “owed a small amount of money.” When asked to be more specific, she reported owning $150,000 to her former employers and another $100,000 to various local banks. From age 20 to 23, she had used her employer’s credit cards to finance weekly “buying binges,” accumulating the $150,000 debt. [To relieve feelings of distress,] every few days she would impulsively buy expensive jewelry, watches, or multiple pairs of the same shoes. In addition to lifelong feelings of emptiness, Ms. Farber described chronic uncertainty about what she wanted to do in life and with whom she wanted to be friends. She had many brief, intense relationships with both men and women, but her quick temper led to frequent arguments and even physical fights. Although she had always thought of her childhood as happy and carefree, when she became depressed, she began to recall [being abused verbally by an employer]. Like Ellen Farber, people with borderline personality disorder swing in and out of very depressive, anxious, and irritable states that last anywhere from a few hours to a few days or more. Their emotions seem to be always in conflict with the World around them. They are prone to bouts of anger, which sometimes result in physical aggression and violence. Just as often, however, they direct their impulsive anger inward and inflict bodily harm on themselves. Many seen troubled by deep feelings of emptiness. Only 23 percent of adults in the United States of America reported openly expressing their anger. Around 39 percent say that they hide or contain their anger, and 23 percent walk away to try to collect themselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Contrary to the notion that “letting off steam” reduces anger, angry subject in one study acted much more aggressively after hitting a punching bad than did angry subject who first sat quietly for a while. Many of the patients who come to mental health emergency rooms are individuals with borderline personality disorder who have intentionally hurt themselves. Their impulsive, self-destructive activities may range from alcohol and substance abuse to delinquency, unsafe pleasures of the flesh, reckless driving, and cutting themselves. Suicidal threats and actions are also common. Studies suggest that 70 percent of the people with this disorder attempt suicide at least once in their lives; around 6 to 9 percent actually commit suicide. Many, like Ellen, try to hurt themselves as a way of dealing with their chronic feeling of emptiness, boredom, and identity confusion. A common pattern is for people with the disorder to enter clinical treatment by the way of the emergency room, after a suicide attempt or episode of self-mutilation. People with borderline personality disorder frequently form intense, conflict-ridden relationships in which their feelings are not necessarily shared by the other person. They often violate the boundaries of relationships. Thinking in dichotomous (black-and-white) terms, they quickly become furious when their expectations are not met; yet they remain very attached to the relationships, paralyzed by a fear of being left along. Sometimes they cut themselves or carry out other self-destructive acts to prevent partners from leaving. Around 1.5 percent of the general population are thought to suffer from borderline personality disorder. The course of the disorder varies from person to person. In the most common pattern, the instability and risk of suicide reach a peak during young adulthood and then gradually with advancing age. Borderline personality disorder usually starts in childhood from having an unstable household, divorce of parents, death, multiple patent substitutes, or trauma. In fact, some theorists believe that the disorder may be an extended form of posttraumatic stress disorder, triggered by early horrors. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Some features of borderline personality disorder have also been linked to biological abnormalities. Sufferers who are particularly impulsive, as demonstrated by a suicide attempt or aggression against others, apparently have lower brain serotonin activity. People with the disorder also experience abnormalities in sleep that are similar to those of depressed person. In accord with these biological findings, close relatives of those with borderline personality disorder are five times more likely than the general population to have the disorder. Some sociocultural theorists suggest that cases of borderline personality disorder are particularly likely to emerge in cultures that change rapidly. As a culture loses its stability, they argue, it inevitably leaves many of its members with problems of identity, a sense of emptiness, heightened anxiety, and fears of abandonment. Family units may come apart, leaving people with little sense of belonging. Change of this kind in society today may explain growing reports of the disorder. Yet, there is some optimism. It appears that psychotherapy can eventually lead to some degree of improvement with borderline personality disorder. It is not easy, however, for a therapist to strike a balance between empathizing with the patient’s dependency and anger and challenging one’s way of thinking. Furthermore, when such a person does make progress in treatment, termination is sometimes difficult because of the patient’s remaining problems with relationships and abandonment. Psychodynamic therapy has been somewhat effective when it focuses on the patient’s central relationship disturbance, poor sense of self, and pervasive loneliness and emptiness. During the past few decades, this treatment has often been combined with cognitive-behavioral interventions designed to help people recognize and address the perspectives of others. For example, the therapist may model alternative ways of interpreting and reacting to situations and also arrange for clients to receive social skills training. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
A few communications and sociology class dealing with “Marriage and the Family” may help. In addition with a psychology class in “Human Sexuality.” One will learn how to speak to others and do detailed reports. Learn gender differences and the dynamics of the family and what is and is not acceptable. And one will also learn about gender roles and how to care for babies, which will help one understand them better and that should make life a little easier in a household that has to deal with child. This combination treatment, called dialectical behavioral therapy, has received growing research support and is now considered the treatment of choice in many clinical circles. Group therapy has also been of help to some people with borderline personality disorder. It offers them an opportunity to form close attachments to a number of persons rather than focusing all their emotions and hopes on just one or two “chosen” relationships. Although, if you look at the overall picture, mental health problems are not as rampant as people think, for 26 percent of Americans ages 18 and older suffers from one, but there seems to be a pretty fine line between raising a psychopath and a well-adjusted adult. Finally, antidepressant, antibipolar, antianxiety, and antipsychotic drugs have helped some individuals to calm their emotional and aggressive storms. Given the high risk of suicide attempts by these patients, however, their use of drugs on an outpatient basis is controversial. Some individuals have benefited from a combination of drug therapy and psychotherapy. In one study of persons who admitted to regularly cutting, burning, or otherwise mutilating themselves, the individual said that they performed such acts to see whether they were still alive or real; to quiet negative feelings such as anger, fear, or guilt; to block painful memories; or to cry out for help. The compromise with evil leads in the end to confusion and weakness, a gradual decline of standards, a wavering fealty to opportunism, and a fatal contradiction of principles. If a negative emotion is strong enough, it may not only color one’s reasoning faculty, but even preclude its use altogether. It is hard for a human who is filled with bitterness about a situation in which one is involved to be strictly objective toward it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
We are weakened every time we give harbourage to snarling thoughts about other people and whimpering ones about ourselves. The negative person too frequently expresses criticism, disapproval, or anger. This contributes to one’s own bad health. When the lower passions of violence, aggression, and greed are more developed than reason, they enslave reason and put it to their own selfish service. Excessive greed and unscrupulous ambition easily distort the straight shapes of rational truth and put plausible disguises on ancient errors. The defect in all such thinking is that it has not been pushed far enough. It stops too short and too soon. It stops working when confronted by ethical considerations and it will not go on to reckon with the existence of retributive karma. The defeat and failure of its wrong-doers illustrates the eventual defeat and failure which always overtake wrong-doing in the end. In World affairs, new strategies are needed because new economic realities no longer necessarily align with old borders and existing power relationships. In many parts of the World there are “region-states,” some brilliant people consider them “engines of prosperity.” In China, the centralized Communist government, whether deliberately or not,” is reorganizing itself along corporate lines. Like many corporations, China is moving most decision-making to the business unit level—semi-autonomous, self-governing economic region-states that compete fiercely against each other for capital, technology, and human resources. Dalian, China, along with a dozen other regions in China, has become a de facto regional-state, setting its own economic agenda. While still part of China and, in theory, subject to the rule of Beijing, it is largely autonomous. The reality is that it ties with Beijing are weaker than those with business centers throughout the World. Many emerging economic zones spill across existing nation-state boundaries. Thus parts of Texas and southern California are merging with stretches of northern Mexico into two big bi-national economic regions, each of which could, in the decades to come, develop its own distinctive bi-national culture—and cross-border political structure as well. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Elsewhere, Jussi Jauhiainen, professor of geography at the University of Helsinki, describes a region that embraces Helsinkl in Finland and spills over into Tallinn in Estonia; another that exists on both sides of the border between Finland and Russian Karelia; and a third that includes Narva in Estonia and Ivangorod in Russia. The United Nations has proposed developing a portion of the Tumen River region, which is a river that is over 521 kilometre long, bordering Russia, China, and North Korea in Northeast Asia. There are move being made towards regional cooperation. The development is aimed at turning the Tumen River delta region into a hub for international transport—between Japan and South Korea on one side and Northeast China, Russia and Mongolia (and via rail way ultimately Europe) on the other- and also around the vast natural resource reserves in Mongolia, Russia, China and North Korea. Ice-free ports are also a matter of special interest, as Northeast China lacks access to the coastline by a mere 12 kilometers and functioning links by train, ship, and roads would significantly lower transportation costs. In December of 1991, the DPRK government designated the Rajin-Sonbong area adjacent to the mouth of the Tumen River as a free economic and trade zone, in an attempt to introduce a market economy to the country. This is a special economic zone where various preferential measures have been introduced in order to try to attract foreign capital; this area is said to have been selected in line with the policy of the former leader of the DPRK. After UNDP announced its support for the development of the Tumen River area at the Northeast Asia, the UNDP presented its Vision for the Development of the Tumen River Area. This was a colossal vision for undertaking infrastructure development over 20 years using $30 billion, in order to turn the region into the Hong Kong of the Northeast Asia. The Tumen River Economic Development Area liking the large triangular area (10,000 km^2) of Yanji, Chongjin and Vladivostok be established in order to support the TREZ. This area is expected to become a Pacific powerhouse. Here we are again altering the maps of the past and our various relationships to the deep fundamental of space. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The acceleration of change implies, however, that the new maps will be increasingly temporary, always ready for on-the-ground reversals or relocation. For little is permanent in the revolutionary wealth system. Inevitably in every life there comes a time of waiting. In the fields the grain is ripe but not yet harvested. We have worked hard to bring things to fruition, but reward is not yet certain. The days shorten. We remember that to harvest we must sacrifice the warmth and light of summer and pass into autumn. This is the time of harvest, of thanksgiving and of leavetaking and gathered. The end of a cycle has come. We enter our resting season. It is our quiet time. We do not speak, because the voices are within us. It is our quiet time. We do not walk, because the Earth is all within us. It is our quiet time. Gain control of the mind, to lessen and quieten the activity of thinking, to bring a settled calm into the entire consciousness, and to soothe and pacify the emotions, the primary means used to establish a rhythm by breathing at a measured rate. Why do people sigh agitatedly or catch their breath when hearing unexpected news about a relative’s death? Is this not a sign that breath is the brother of thoughts? Because breathing then becomes converted temporarily from an unconscious into a conscious process, and mentally also the calm strength, the renewal of poise which you need most of the time. This is so supposed to attune one with high spiritual aspirations. It gives a momentum to the optimistic and ennobling forces of the whole being. The state of one’s breathing shows also the state of one’s feelings, one’s mind, and even one’s will. The relaxed tension-free life brings with it a loss of nervousness, and this in turn a loss of the desire for deviant behaviour. This World is more frequently subject to the power of humans than the love of God. Its power is revealed when humans are able to exercise defiance in the face of adversity. Our task is to act, not only to enjoy; to change, not only to accept; to segment, not only to discover the glory of God. If not our compassion and ability to help, what is it that makes us worthy of life. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
We do not exist for our own sake. If not the love it confers, life would be preposterous. Love cleanses the emotional nature and purifies the nervous system. Love and faith in God will bring a tingling sensation of Divine Life to every cell in the body. By faithful concentration we eventually learn to focus the mind and its power on any desired line of thought and hold it there, free of distinction. This enables us to rightfully seek a solution for every problem, and bit by bit opens up for us a greater and more fascinating spiritual horizon. Faith is a dynamic, personal act, flowing between the heart of humans and the love of God. The human of faith will know when to consent and when to defy. It is faith from which we draw the sweetness of life, the taste of the sacred, the joy of the imperishably dear. It is faith that offers us a share in eternity. Faith is the insight that life is not a self-maintaining, private affair, not a chaos of whims and instincts, but an aspiration, a way, not a refuge. Faith is real only when it is not one-sided but reciprocal. If God can rely on humans, humans can rely on God by the symmetric property of congruence. We may trust in Him because He trusts in us. Our trustworthiness for God is the measure of the integrity of our faith. We cannot make God visible to us, but we can make ourselves visible to Him. So we open out thoughts to Him. To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain the sense of the mystery that animates all beings. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live. It is gratefulness which makes the soul great. As a tree torn from the soil, as a river separated from its source, the human soul wanes when detached from what is greater than itself. Without the ideal, the real turns chaotic; without the universal, the individual becomes accidental. Unless we aspire to the utmost, we shrink to inferiority. Prayer is our attachment to the utmost. Without God in sight, we are like the scattered rungs of a broken ladder. “Can anyone hide oneself in secret places so that I cannot see one? says the Lord. Do not I fill Heaven and Earth? says the Lord,” reports Jeremiah 23.24. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness, and generosity hidden in the soul by God. The human mind is fascinating. A young officer working on a ship wrote that he would awaken during the night and discover himself under an undesirable physical and mental condition. He seemed to be clearly in a mesmerized condition, caused by someone or something giving the powerful posthypnotic suggestion to wake up and obey. The remedy is to use the same technique in reverse. That is, practise auto-hypnosis, give the self-suggestion that on waking up there will be full conscious and full rejection of the negative idea. If one must hate something, let one hate hatred itself. The storms of violent passion are to be resisted as the smoothness of inner peace is to be invited. To keep one’s temper in a single provocative situation may be easy, but to keep it consistently equable is a real feat. Life is a conflict. One must not let these negative feelings take up lodgement within in one longer than a single moment. All humankind must awake from its materialistic apathy and cast out something of its selfishness. It is called upon to renounce its violence and meannesses, its intolerance, unkindnesses, and injustices. It must either emerge from its animal brutality or else suffer itself to be extinguished by it. It must come out from the shadows of ignorance, selfishness, and materialism. Only then will it find the sunshine of a larger life that awaits it. It is not always one oneself who acts in a particular way at a particular time. Impulses from lower sources or outside contacts may be strong intuitions from higher levels or outside sources may influence one to wise choices which bless one’s future. We must not hate those who are born of the same divine essence as ourselves but we may hate the sins they perpetrate and the evil they radiate. The seeker has to contend not only with limiting environments but also with internal enemies. Apathy delays one, depression obstructs one, and loneliness frustrates one. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The more one becomes sensitive, intuitive, responsive to the spirit, the more one is unfolding exceptional passivity. However, this puts one in peril, for one feels the negative presence too. Hence the more one must restrict one’s contacts until one’s strength is above them. It is prudent to escape from a situation where there is much pressure to commit a foolish action or to make a foolish decision leading to calamitous results—and not continue to stay in it until the danger materializes. One whose presence is felt to be odious, whose personality is regarded as distasteful, is better left alone. One should never allow the actions or words of ignorant human to arouse in one reactions of anger, envy, or resentment. The years are too few and there is too much to be done—both on oneself and for oneself—to waste them in negative, resentful thought and decaying, neurotic emotion. When one comes to understand its importance, one will begin to exercise some vigilance over one’s thoughts. Resist beginnings—that is the most practical way to deal with negatives. The destructive thoughts of fear and self-doubt which whine at your door, whine at the door of every human. However, you can make them powerless to hurt you. For—there is n chance, no destiny, no fate can circumvent, can hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul! If the negative thought persists then one has to wrench oneself away from it with the assent and use of all one’s being—feeling, reason, intuition. One’s own attitude towards events holds the power to make them good or bad, whatever their nature of itself may be. Those who are unable to think correctly about this tragic World situation must be pardoned, but those who refuse to think correctly about it do not deserve pardon. The counsel of Jesus to “resist not evil” does not apply to other men’s acts but to our own thoughts. We are to turn aside from a negative thought-habit by the simple method of substituting the opposite and the beneficial one. We need not to spend our strength resisting the thought of misery, for example. We are to substitute hope for misery, whenever the latter appears. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Wrong-doing will be avoided not because it is punished by the law of recompose even when it is not punished by the law of society, but because of the strong inner conviction that right-doing is its own reward, its own satisfaction. The beautiful is allied to the good. If we cultivate beautiful feelings, evil ones begin to get dissolved. One will not risk rebuffs by expressing one’s views and describing one’s experienced to the uncomprehending of the unsympathetic. It I cowardice to refuse to face the fact that one has made a mistake and to continue following the same course because it is to stop it and return to the right road. The easier way is too often the worse way, leading to trouble for one’s self and others. There is a limit to the extent of concessions to prejudice; we must not beyond it. Beware of those whose mind is vindictive and whose speech is venomous. If they are born of emotional prejudice or passionate bias, it is of little use to meet irrational arguments with rational statements. The ancient saying that where goodwill exists agreement will not be hard to find, still remains true. The crowds which delighted in the gladiator shows of ancient Rome and, to a lesser extent, those which delighted in the bullfights of modern Spain, do not see to understand how bestial they allow themselves to become at such times. If one is to be distinguished from a member of the savage species, the true human being, the fully evolved human, must have the quality of pity in oneself. Do not attempt to fight evil with evil. Overcome it by calling on a higher power to bring out the good in you wherewith to meet it. In this way you obey Jesus’ counsel, “Resist not evil.” Synesis (fourth century): “This would be the most extreme of ills—not to be conscious of the presence of evil. For this is the condition of those who no longer try to rise…for this reason repentance is elevating means…[but] both deeds and words [must] lend a helping hand.” A philosopher may not ignore the negative side of one’s or another’s life: one has to deal with it because circumstances force one, like everyone else to do so. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, one’s way will be different, because one will use all one’s faculties and capacities: intellectual, practical, and intuitive. One will keep calm and not let passion or negative emotion carry one away. However, all that done, one hands over the results to the higher power (which includes destiny). One’s mind must stay in That which transcends negativity, sin, evil, even if one must grapple with them. Philosophy will not disregard the bad in others, and the sin in ourselves, but having seen them clearly it does not react negatively in useless condemnation. Instead, it reacts constructively in trying to realize the meaning of evil, the consequence of sin, and then proceeds to cultivate the opposite quality, the good of that particular evil—as honesty where there is dishonesty and so on. If practical dealings are involved, we may regret the existence of these faults in others, but we may not refuse to recognize them. Amid all the pessimistic reflections which the state of the World so easily induces in the thinking human, one may yet be buoyed up by the hope which the eternal verities must again and again give one, that is, the hope that the end of it will be immeasurably better. The existentialist view—so popular with so many young people today—that we begin with oblivion and end with annihilation, that what comes between is either meaningless or mysterious, with no solutions to problems, no answers to questions, is a view which the tragedy and evil and catastrophe of our times tempt us to accept. However, religion and philosophy release us from this despair. In such critical times as these even some faith in the existence of a higher power, and some aspiration towards serving it, has protective value. Trust, not tension: trust in the higher power producing serenity rather than tension; because of the pressures of life this is a great need today. However dark or desperate World history may seem at times, we must always remember no one can disrupt the divine World-Idea, or spoil its manifestation, or prevent its glorious outcome. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Fear of the power and cunning of these evil opponents causes them to rely on obvious but ordinary human forces and weapons for protection. They forget the divine forces they could, and should in this crisis, call on—and neglect the superhuman and extraordinary. To express a half-amused contempt for the intelligence of our time is not at all the same thing as to make a jaundiced indictment of it. To witness the magnificent parade of a civilization of almost unredeemed triviality is less likely to arouse bitterness in the soul and more likely to give it a good half-hour’s amusement. On the one hand, carried away by the idealistic enthusiasm and millennial promises of merely emotionalist cults, some believe that a spiritual teaching has only to be propagated and it will spread triumphantly everywhere. On the other hand, confronted by the formidable spectacle of a whole World plunged in ignorance, conscious that the ordinary individual can do so little to uplift it, others drift into bewildered defeatism and actually do nothing at all. However, this second attitude, although much more sensible and much more justifiable than its opposite one, is not quite philosophical. According to the old classical fable, we had to look for truth in the bottom of a well; today we have to look for it in the bottom of a bitter disillusionment. In the dismal World conditions of today it is a paramount necessity to obtain some glimpse, however meagre, of the divine plan which is working out for all our lives. Only in this way can we co-operate with it understandingly and adequately. Instead of relying on flight into the unknow and uncertain, it is better to rely on God. In the first case one may be making a false escape and duping oneself, but in the second case one opens the way for true guidance in the matter. With peace in the mind and harmony in the feelings, both completed by knowledge of the universal presence of divinity—who could harbour evil thoughts, hatreds, or destructive plans? #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Every evil person who crosses our path provides an opportunity, in the injury one attempts to do us, to keep ourselves from being provoked into retaliation, anger, or resentment. If we succeed in overcoming our own feelings, we mount upward a step. In a negative situation, where negative criticism and negative emotions are rampant, other persons may try to involve one in it, or at least get one to support their attitude and endorse their criticism. However, a feeling may come over one preventing one from doing so. If so, one should obey and remain silent. With time the rightness of this course will be confirmed. One the injunction to return good for evil, the question arises, with what then will you return go? Return good for good, but justice for evil. Is this not wiser counsel? Does not the other punish goodness to an extremist position, rendering it almost ridiculous by condoning bad conduct? Inner and outer difficulties are often related. What appears to be an ugly state of affairs may well be a definite attack of certain evil forces using interested human instruments. In such a situation, the individual should never practise nonresistence in any way, but, on the contrary, should fight them off as hard a one can. At the same time, one must remember that weakness in self-control can give these evil forces an opening which they might not have had otherwise. If one wishes to emerge victorious in the struggle, one must be on one’s guard. If one does not throw off this condition, one, oneself, unwittingly erects a barrier though which the divine help sent one finds it difficult to penetrate. Although the temptation to seek release as such a time through, for example, the easy way of drink is understandable, one must nevertheless remember the duty one owes to one’s spiritual life, to one’s personal interest on the relative plane, and to others. Although the student must forgive those who mistreat one, one need not think tht forgiveness implies one has to associate with such people thereafter. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Whenever the thought of them, or their abuse, comes into one’s mind one must exert one’s willpower to drive it out, and immediately direct one’s thoughts toward God, or toward any inspired individual in whom one had faith. Only the actualized Christian is entitled to dismiss evil and to deny its existence: all others must look it in the face, understand it, and overcome it by slow gradations. It is better to keep out of the way of evil humans, especially when they are in power, until or unless we are driven by the necessity of circumstance of the inward voice of duty to oppose ourselves to them. It is always a certainty that the practice of active goodwill directed toward those who regard one harshly will benefit one’s own development, while it is always a possibility that this practice may dissolve the harsh feeling against one. It is all gain and no loss. This is one part of the case for Jesus’ advice to return good for evil. It is a technique of this evil power to paralyse its intended victims by frightening them. If we give way to fear, we give assistance to its effort. It cannot be beaten without open defiance and ready valour. One must remember that one will meet with those individuals who are themselves the bearers of antagonistic forces, instruments of darkness—sometimes consciously, most unconsciously, people used by evil forces. So far as possible one must avoid such people. Certainly never enter into intimate associations with them, whether the relation be business or personal. If one does one will find that sooner or later some of their unfortunate behaviour will be returned by Universal Law and tumble on one and one with have to suffer with the afflicted individual. These people make talk as believers in spiritual things—indeed, they often belong to some cult or other. However, they do not understand truth or live it. They cannot help one and one is not strong enough to carry them. So leave them alone. And that is not always easy, because often they are people of a kind that force themselves into one’s life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Sometimes one can know them by this hallmark, by this aggressive way which they try to entangle another individual. It may even be necessary at times to deal with such people with a firm hand, even mercilessly and relentlessly. If so, do not hesitate, but do it without any personal feeling of any kind. The American landscape has been badly corrupted. European writers no longer even notice the natural wonder of it, they are so put off by the ugliness and conformity of the towns. However, worse than the ugliness and conformity is the neglect that baffles pride of place. Our poets try to move themselves by nostalgically repeating the names of towns: “Biloxi and Natchez, Pascagoula and Opelousas”—but beware of paying a visit. The Americans disesteem public goods, and improving the landscape is a big expense. Historically, the neglect of appearance and plan of our scores of thousands of villages and small towns, especially in the Middle West and South—the diner, the Woolworth’s, and two filling stations—can be analogized to the neglect of the present-day less affluent. In the tide of expansion, appearance was disregarded as not essential; later, the matter would be mopped up. However, the neglect rigidifies, it is a hard core not easy to change. Instead, the present tendency is to impose on the countryside a new corporation style altogether, in the form of shopping centers (=national chain supermarkets) on the highway. This works out disastrously for the communities, for these “centers” are not centers of villages, and there cease to be villages at all, simply scattered family houses. This is the end of a long process of disruption, for in any case the industry is gone, then men work in plants thirty miles away. It is possible to travel many miles even in New England and not see a single activity a man could make a living at, except automobile agencies and filling stations; not even a food store. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The schools too are large and centralized. The families tend to move away frequently, but even while they are put, they are driving around. This does not make much community to grow up in. In more primitive societies, a chief community activity is working together, thatching a roof, net fishing. However, with us, precisely this co-operative labour, for instance the work in a factory, is removed from its community setting ad emptied, by the relations of production, of any community spirit. Places that have no shape have no face-to-face functioning, for the shape is the functioning community. The loveliness of so many hamlets in Europe is that they have shape and are built of local materials by local craft. Perhaps the people had to cluster to attend early masses. In Ireland, where they farm out the back door, the rows of thatched houses line both sides of a little street. In France, where men go off to their farms, there may be a square. In our own early New England villages, where congregational and political spirit was strong, there was a common green with public buildings, though the families lived scattered on the farms they worked. There was the shape of a community, with its economy, its crafts, and its ideas. The advantage of growing up in such a community in one’s early years is evident. It is not family supervision, on which the physicians of juvenile delinquency are now laying such stress; quite the contrary! it is that the family does not have to bear the burden of teaching the culture. In a community, everybody knows the child face to face. There is an easy grading of overlapping ages, right up to the adults who are going about their business in a going concern, and not paying too much attention to children. A good city neighbourhood works in the same way. From this point of view, the swarm of kids in a city housing project form a better community than present-day country boys or the kids on Park Avenue. Therefore they have more local patriotism. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The bother with this community chain, however, is that it terminates abruptly before it reaches the adults, who belong to a different World; so the kids are a gang and the local community spirit turns into loyalty to a Code; it does not eventuate in anything socially cohesive and culturally worthwhile. And such a gang in prone to be delinquent because, as we shall see, in such conditions it is the forbidden tht best cements loyalty. Politically, a delinquent gang is not lawless and not in the state of nature. Balked in its growth, the local loyalty turns on itself and simple reinvents the feud-code of Alfred the Great, marking out safe territories and making provision for special classes of revenge. On this view, if one teenage gang, pursuing its vendetta, falls on another and murders a kid, it would not be our business to interfere in the law of that differently constituted society. Also, like Danes or Vikings of Alfred’s time, they regard our larger society merely as a field of sports and plunder; they have not yet reinvented International Law. However, we, of course, cannot view it so, for we live in an advanced state of politics and law: they are members of our community. We are not children but more experienced and somewhat wiser, and therefore responsible, so we cannot simply annihilate them like pirates (they are small in size, few in numbers, and armed with primitive weapons); and we cannot let them hurt themselves. (I think it is wise sometimes to regard disaffected groups as if there were plausibly these two viewpoints, rival patriotisms. It is better humanity and it might make better law. The advantage is that it takes the disaffected seriously as disaffected, rather than merely pathological; it keeps in the foreground the question of allegiance. We must deserve allegiance.) However, they are children. Let us consider rather the peculiar patriotic problem of an older disaffected group, the Hipster young men, for then we can see that it is a patriotic problem. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Here too, I think, there has often been a strong community influence of growing up together. For instance, fellows who went to Black Mountain College, which was oriented to community and creative arts—a powerful, and powerfully disaffecting, combination—are pillars of Hipster society. Other fellows were buddies in the armed services. However, it was, as Hispters their community spirit is strong. They barge in to sleep, they share property, they share a culture. Now think of this community, disaffected from America, as engaged in a pathetic quest for some other big patriotism, an adult peer group. We saw how, appointing themselves outcast, they affirm the accidental symbol of other marginalized groups: African American, Puerto Rican, the less affluent, and others. However, this is pretty thin gruel for intellectual young men, many of whom have been to college. On the other hand, they are unable to make the jump to the great international humanists community because, simply, they do not know anything, neither literature nor politics. (I once taught at Black Mountain College, and to my astonishment I found that the students had never read the Christian Bible, Milton, Dryden, Gibbon, etcetera, etcetera, nor did they feel—as a lack—that such things existed. However, they knew odd facts about Mayan hieroglyphics which their teacher had been interested in.) What then? Since it is necessary for grown fellow to have some major allegiance or other, they have latched on to the late Japanese masters of Zen Buddhism. (This is a late effect of the early-century discovery of Japan by Fenollosa, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Misses Lowell and Ayscough, and Ezra Pound, suddenly reinforced by the postwar occupation under General MacArthur.) Now, as we shall see, Zen is not irrelevant to those young men’s needs, for it is a theology and style of immediate experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
However, the pathos is that Zen was the flower of an intensely loyal feudal system that fed, protected, and honoured its masters, and to which the Zen masters in turn had fealty. For example, it is said that the haiku was invented by a poet as a public service when one was suicidally despondent because one’s Emperor had died. However, Zen without farmers and servants is an airy business; and the young men, as we have seen, are betrayed into dubious devices to keep body and soul together, nor do they have a flag to salute. Community approaches have worked to resolve many problems. In looking at mental health, the broadest approach for the treatment of schizophrenia is the community approach. In 1963, partly in response to the terrible conditions in public mental institutions, the U.S. government ordered that patients be released and treated in the community. Congress passed the Community Mental Health Act, which stipulated that patients with psychological disorders were to receive a range of mental health services—outpatient therapy, inpatient treatment, emergency care, preventative care, and aftercare—in their communities rather than being transported to institutions far from home. The act was aimed at a variety of psychological disorders, but patients with schizophrenia, especially those who had been institutionalized for years, were affected most. Other countries around the World put similar sociocultural treatment programs into action shortly thereafter. Thus began four decades of deinstitutionalization, an exodus of hundred of thousands of patients with schizophrenia and other long-term mental disorders from state institutions into the community. On a given day in 1955 close to 600,000 patients were living in state institutions; today only around 60,000 patients reside in those setting. The unfortunate result is that mental health lost most of its funding and a lot of people with mental illnesses have to where to go, but jail or to live on the street. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Clinicians have learned that patients recovering from schizophrenia can profit greatly from community programs. However, the actual quality of community care for many of these people has been inadequate through the United States of America. The result is a “revolving door” syndrome: the few patients, who are lucky enough to be treated, have been released to the community, readmitted to an institution within mothers, released a second time, admitted yet again, and so on, over and over. A lot of people who want mental health care are not able to access this precious resource. In fact, 10.3 percent (over 4.7 million) of adults with a mental illness remain uninsured. And, 56 percent of patients want access to a mental health care facility. As COVID-19 continues to rage, Americans are experiencing anxiety and depression. More than 42 percent of U.S. adults reported symptoms, up 11 percent in the previous years. Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has some type of mental health condition. Spending on mental health treatment and social services has reached over $250 billion, which is up approximately 60 percent since 2009. This cost includes spending on things like therapy and prescription medications as well as stays in psychiatric or substance abuse rehabilitation facilities. However, it does not take into account indirect costs, such as lower workforce participation rates and decreased productivity. In fact, depression alone is estimated to account for $44 billion in loses to workplace productivity. And access to care can be prohibitively expensive—even more so than physical health costs. An hour-long traditional therapy session can range from $65 to $250 for those without insurance. A patient with major depression can spend an average of $10,836 a year on health costs. Meanwhile, a person with diabetes taking insulin can spend $48,000 to manage their condition. On a national level, research shows that the United States of America is likely to continue to experience a shortage of mental health professional through 2025. If you are looking for excellent health and wellness coverage, consider becoming a Kaiser Permanente member. You do not need a referral for mental health and addiction care services. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Other ways to help keep health and wellness in check is celibacy. However, there is the double standard that is a Worldwide phenomenon that has many layers of meaning. The first is that one and one is not always two, because the woman or man of the evening is a criminal but their client is a “john,” an also because women are expected to be virginal at marriage and chaste afterward, and some men are expected to be chaste before a relationship and after, and during the marriage and relationship, but one’s husband is not bound by the same constraints. The double standard implies, in other words, that chastity is primarily and woman’s and small percent of men’s domain. Nonetheless, only women are typically judged more harshly than all men whose conduct is identical. Even today, the discrimination is thunderously obvious, preached from pulpits and parliaments and specifically mandated in the law. The double standard is nefarious not only because it embodies egregious gender inequality but because it condoned solicitation as an acceptable outlet for unchaste men. Though it condemns people of “the evening” as social scum and consigns them to lives of degradation and danger and disease, it sanctions their profession. The reason is obvious: without solicitation, lascivious people might seduce rather than marry the virgins of their own social class. It is particularly chilling that the members of many churches and other organizations in positions of authority support the double standard and, albeit reluctantly, swallows the equation that no men or women of the evening equals no chastity. Laws essentially force women to abide by a higher standard of regard in the matters of chastity than men. They also denounce solicitation but at the same time partially exonerate it as the safety valve that kept virgins pure. It is unsurprising, then, that the double standard matured as a code of conduct in pleasures of the flesh that demand female chastity and at the same time approve, or at least tolerate, the dominant group of mostly men, and their carnality expressed in the use of other humans as toys, though this meant sacrificing certain women and sometimes other to unchaste, unrestrained men and a small fraction of women. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Furthermore, not all men honour their obligations to marry their child’s mother. And when men who came from a higher social echelon seduced a working-class girl, they almost never honoured that class’s code. Domestics and shop girls in particular were the pray of privileged men, but being with child destitute these women rather than pushing them into marriage with the baby’s father. However, often times, after these men who have money start to become older and nearing retirement, they will then leave their wives for young women of other ethnic backgrounds and of lower social standings because these women tend to be considered more exotic and attractive. The women will marry for older man for security and to escape labour. However, in a few cases, it is real love. In society, another problem is many people seem to scarcely be able to comprehend what chastity means, or to regard it as a virtue. Among the middle and upper classes, chastity’s double standard wreaked havoc on social decency. Some of these moral puritanical, which even frown on premarital male activities involving pleasures of the flesh, young women are coached to trap husbands without surrendering beforehand even a taste of the delights to come. Men are, in some cases, are frustrated at this implacable wall of chastity and take it as a challenge. They play games. In large numbers, they form unholy crusades to seduce young virgins. This upper-class deviance was depicted on shows like the original on Gossip Girl. “Resist, resist!” the virgins’ elders urge them. “Just say a resounding ‘No’ to your pleading, inveigling, deceiving young suitors.” After all, as the old adage went, “Who would keep a cow of their own that can have a quart of milk for a penny?” However, at the same time, ladies, and a small percentage of men, forgive them for trying to ruin you. This double standard of conduct involving pleasures of the flesh is necessary, because unlike you, the dominant class of men and a small percentage of dominant women, by nature have an urgent, irrepressible need. Brothels used to be officially licensed. Unchaste people play a crucial role in upholding their societies’ notions about chastity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Now, nowhere is a failure to achieve perfect synchronization more lamented than in the bedroom—unless it is when the U.S. Federal Reserve or the Bank of Japan rises or lowers interest rates and get the timing wrong. Timing, as any comedian can tell us, is everything. However, we are, for the most part unwittingly, changing our links to time, and that is no joke. As interested as investors and economists may be about exact timing in finance, they re remarkably uniformed about the role of synchronization—and, even more so de-synchronization—in the creation of wealth and poverty. Yet understanding these can give us a wholly new way of thinking about wealth creation. Some degree of synchronization has been needed ever since hunters and gatherers began working in groups. Historian William McNeill argues that mass rhythmic activities have been used throughout history to promote synchrony, which in turn improved economic productivity. Tribal dancing, he suggests, strengthened teamwork and made hunting more efficient. For thousands of years fishermen have chanted in unison as they hauled in their nets, the musical beats indicating when to pull and when to breathe. Agrarian economies also reflected seasonal change. According to anthropologist John Omohundro, writing about the Philippine island of Panay, “Through the dry season…and into the rainy season…businessmen are in their slowest season. All aspects of the distribution system slow down. By September or October the rice crop begins to arrive in town…Because the wealth of the province is regulated by agrarian cycles, city business activity rises and falls the these cycles.” Economic anthropologist Willem Wolters adds: “Purely local banks have never been viable in the semi-arid tropics because of the seasonality and synchronic timing.” Early industrial economics operated under completely different temporal conditions. Assembly-line work required a different rhythm. Thus, the factory whistle and the time clock were invented to coordinate work schedules. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
By contrast, today, as we will see, business activities are speeding toward real time. In addition, the uses of time are becoming increasingly personalized and irregular, if not erratic. More different tasks need to be integrated, and the acceleration effect truncates the time available for each task. All this makes synchronization harder to achieve. And that is only the beginning. If we look deeper, we find that every economy throbs and vibrates with unnoticed rhythms. We may buy a newspaper daily, pick up soap or milk at the supermarket weekly, gas up the car every ten days or so, cash a paycheck every two weeks and pay credit card bills monthly. We might call a broker sporadically according to what is happening in the stock market, buy a movie ticket or a book on a whim a few times a year, pay taxes quarterly or annually, go to the dentist when a toothache strikes and purchase a gift for a relative who is getting married in June. These and countless other transactions create rhythms that flow through banks, markets and lives. With the very first slap on our infant behind, every one of us becomes part of this ongoing economic music. Even our biorhythms are affected (and in turn influence) the marvelously complex, orchestrated process that pulse around us as people work—making things, providing services, managing others, caring for one another, financing companies or processing data and information into knowledge. At every moment, some tempos speed up, others slow down. New melodies and harmonies are introduced, then fade out. There are choruses, counterpoints and crescendos. Beyond these, throughout the entire society and economy, there is a generalized pulse of life that is itself the average, as it were, of all its subordinate tempos. The “economic music” never stops. The result is not patternless chaos because, within every wealth system, various components or subsystems are continually adapting their speeds, phases and periodicities to one another. In biology this process is called “entertainment.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Neurons, it turns out, do not work alone. They form temporary teams—much as businesses increasingly do today. In the words of Science magazine, “Neurons frequently fall into step with one another, forming ensembles that play the same tune, as it were, firing in relative synchrony for brief periods, before some neurons drop out of synch, perhaps to join another ensemble.” Firing in sync, moreover, apparently predisposes the neurons to “joint processing” at high levels of the system. Today’s breakup of monolithic corporations into congeries of short-lived project team, alliances, partnerships and joint ventures parallels these ephemeral “ensembles” in the neural system. One way the World could survive in joy is if the whole World worships God. We hear you, fellow-creatures. We know we are wrecking the World and we are afraid. What we have unleased has such momentum now, we do not know how to turn it around. Do not leave us alone, we need your help. You need us too for your own survival. Are there power there you can share with us? In the Service of the Heart, nothing is further from the truth than the widespread notion that to pray is synonymous with to beg, to request, or to supplicate. To be sure, to pray means to call upon God to help us. However, we need Him not only when we are physically in danger. We need Him also when we are spiritually in danger. To pray means to seek God’s help, “to keep our tongue from evil,” “to purify our hearts,” “to put into our hearts to understand, to learn and to fulfill in love, the words of the Christian Bible,” and thus to keep us unswervingly loyal to truth, goodness, and beauty. To pray is to feel and to give expression to a deep sense of gratitude. No intelligent, healthy, normal human being should take for granted, or accept without conscious, grateful acknowledgement the innumerable blessings which God in His infinite love bestows upon one daily—blessings of parents and loved one, of friends and country, of health and understanding. To pray is to express renewed allegiance to the moral and ethical principles which we accept as the guides of our personal lives, and which we recognize as the indispensable foundation stones for a decent human society. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Life is Very Short When You Look Back and Realize How Long You Spent Not Living Your Dreams
One of the interesting things that has happened in extant genetic codes is the discoveries that have to do with the degeneracy of the genetic code—the existence of several different sequences of bases in the messenger RNA molecule that can cause the same amino acid segment to be incorporated in the protein under construction. For example, the evidence strongly suggests that the amino acid arginine can be evoked by any one of three messenger RNA triplets CGC, AGA, and UCG. The related inference also appears to be correct: that three different types of transfer RNA molecule, each capable of carrying the amino acid arginine, correspond to these three messenger RNA triplets. Such degeneracy in the code is compatible with the fact that 4 X 4 X 4, or 64, different messenger or transfer RNA triplet combinations can be made of the 4 bases of the nucleic acid molecule, whereas only 20 amino acids must be specified by the various combinations. The evidence to this point suggests that every one of the 64 possible combinations may ultimately be found to be “meaningful” in the sense of specifying one or another of the 20 amino acid constituents of the end-product protein molecules. It should be noted that this kind of degeneracy does not lead to ambiguity in the genetic code. To be sure, it means that messenger RNA molecules with different base sequences can govern the production of the same kind of protein. And the existence of such alternative “words” within the genetic language suggests that different species of organisms may employ somewhat different dialects in the nuclear books of instruction with which they control their cellular chemistry. Nevertheless, the code could still be universal in the sense that a given messenger RNA molecule, if capable at all of operating the genetic mechanisms of different types of foreign organisms, would always produce the same kind of protein molecules. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Not only did Bonner’s successful crossbreeding of the genetic mechanisms of pea plants and E. coli cell-free extracts in experiments with synthetic messenger RNA has provided further confirming evidence. While much less work has been done with mammalian than with bacterial components, it has at least been established that the messenger RNA triplets that evoke specific amino acids in the finally fabricated protein molecules are the same for mammalian as for bacterial systems in the case of the half-dozen kinds of messenger nucleic acid that have been tested. In general, while making allowance for some degree of variation from species to species in the details of the genetic mechanisms, biochemists today are confident that the genetic code has essentially been “broken”—that they are on the point of being able to line up every possible messenger RNA triplet with a particular amino acid in the resulting protein molecule. However, the specific sequence of amino acid segments in the manufactured protein molecules determine their catalytic properties and therefore controls the specific set of chemical reactions that take place in the cell. Therefore, the solution of the genetic code in this way implies the ultimate ability of the scientist to “read” the molecules of messenger RNA (or the nuclear DNA which produces them) and thereby learn the properties of the cell whose metabolism they control—whether the cell is to have the properties of pea plant or intestinal bacillus, for example. Inasmuch as the higher organisms, including humans, are believed to employ the same system of genetic control (plus a few complications yet to be treated), the implications of this work are that one day the biochemists are now able to determine the colour of eyes and shape of the nose of a yet-to-be-developed human individual by analysis of the structure of the nucleic acid molecules in the cells of the embryo! #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Before we move on to some of the additional complexities that characterize the structure and metabolism of higher organisms, we should make sure that we understand how the discussion how all of this information contributes to our basic thesis as to the purely physical origins of life. The experimental evidence reported here can only strengthen our faith in the soundness of our nonvitalistic philosophy; for strong support for the thesis of the fundamentally physical nature of the life processes is provided by the success of the biochemists in extracting from living cells the pertinent nucleic acid/enzyme apparatus and in stimulating it to perform its architectural functions by means of the addition of nucleic acid from other organisms. Ans the successful employment of human-made chemicals for this purpose even verges on the dramatic in its demonstration of the workability of our physical explanations. Not even the evidence for the similarity of the principal features of the genetic mechanisms in all forms of life is particularly disturbing. To be sure, this might at first glance appear to be more reconcilable with the vitalistic view of the supernatural purposiveness of life than with the materialistic view that everything has happened as the result of the blindly probabilistic physical laws of the Universe. However, there is really no great problem in imagining evolutionary developments that could have led to a considerable degree of ultimate standardization in the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms. And such evidence of variety as the degeneracy of the genetic code, with the accompanying implication of divergence from species to species in some of the details of the genetic mechanism, seems comfortably consistent with our views of the normal consequences of the evolutionary process. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
As we address ourselves to some of the further complexities that characterize modern higher organisms, we shall find that our considerations will continue to be intimately involved with the genetic mechanisms that have occupied so much of our attention to this point. We shall not be able to escape being enormously impressed by their overriding power and importance in the phenomena of life. While evolution is clearly the great technique employed by nature for developing its biological novelties, we shall find it easy to conclude that the genetic mechanisms may constitute the most ingenious and important invention yet achieved by the use of that technique. Now, looking ahead. Did you know that your DNA determines your reaction to caffeine? Caffeine is widely consumed in foods and beverages and is also used for a variety of medical purposes. Despite its widespread use, relatively little is understood regarding how genetics affects consumption, acute response, or the long-term effects of caffeine. Twin studies find the heritability of caffeine-related traits to range between 0.36 and 0.58. Analysis of poly-substance use shows that predisposition to caffeine use is highly specific to caffeine itself and shares little common disposition to use of other substances. Genome association studies link variations in adenosine and dopamine receptors to caffeine-induced anxiety and sleep disturbances. Polymorphism in the metabolic enzyme cytochrome P-450 is associated with risk of myocardial infraction in caffeine users. Modeling based on twin studies reveals that genetics plays a role in individual variability in caffeine consumption and in the direct effects of caffeine. Both pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic polymorphisms have been linked to variation in response to caffeine. These studies may help guide future research in the role of genetics in modulating the acute and chronic effects of caffeine. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Caffeine is the World’s most widely used stimulant. Nearly 90 percent of adults in the United States of America alone consume an estimated 30 million pounds of this psychoactive substance annually. It is the most consumed psychoactive substance in the World. Seventy-five percent of this caffeine is taken in the form of coffee (from the coffee bean); the rest is consumed in tea (from the tea leaf), cola (from the kola nut), chocolate (from the cocoa bean), and numerous prescription and over-the-counter medications, such as Excedrin. Caffeine’s popularity Worldwide can be attributed to its ability to promote wakefulness, enhance mood and cognition, and produce stimulatory effects. It is used clinically to treat premature neonatal apnea and as an analgesic adjuvant. Around 99 percent of ingested caffeine is absorbed by the body and reaches its peak concentration with an hour. It acts as a stimulant of the central nervous system, again producing a release of the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine in the brain. Thus it increases arousal, mild euphoria, alertness, enhanced cognitive performance and motor activity and reduces fatigue. It also disrupts the performance of motor tasks and may interfere with sleep. Finally, it increases the rate of breathing and gastric acid secretions in the stomach. More than two to three cups of brewed coffee (250 milligrams of caffeine) can produce caffeine intoxication, which may include such symptoms as restlessness, nervousness, anxiety, stomach disturbances, twitching, and increased heart rate. Grand mal seizures and fatal respiratory failure or circulatory failure can occur at doses greater than 10 grams of caffeine (about 100 cups of coffee), but there is a decreased risk in neurodegenerative disorders. Many people who suddenly stop or cutback on their usual intake of caffeine experience withdrawal symptoms—even some individuals whose regular consumption is low (two and a half cups of coffee daily or seven cans of cola). #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
It is likely that several factors contribute to individual differences in responses to caffeine, including demographic and environmental factors such as age, other drug use, circadian factors, and sleep hygiene. One important source of variability that has received some attention in the recent year is genetic predisposition. There is growing evidence that individual differences in caffeine response or caffeine consumption are related to genetic factors. Genetic factors may influence responses to caffeine directly, by altering acute or chronic reactions to the drug, or indirectly, by affecting other psychological or physiological processes that are related to the drug effect, such as sensitivity to anxiety, rewarding and reinforcing effects of substances in general, or related personality traits. Finally, genes can also alter the body’s adaptive responses to long-term caffeine use. The biological mechanisms of these possible sources of variation likely involve interactions at multiple sites. One study had adult subjects consume their usual caffeine-filled drinks and foods for two days, then abstain from such foods for two days while taking actual caffeine pills. More subjects experienced headaches (52 percent), depression (11 percent), anxiety (8 percent), and fatigue (8 percent) during the two-day placebo period then during the caffeine periods. In addition, subjects reported using more unauthorized medications (13 percent) and performed experimental tasks more slowly during the placebo period than during the caffeine periods. Genetic contribution to caffeine consumption changes through different stages in life. It appears that genetic contribution becomes more pronounced throughout adolescence and then stabilized during adulthood. Researchers found that genetics influence individual sensitivity to caffeine toxicity, tolerance, and withdrawal in female twins. On average the woman reported slightly higher level of caffeine-induced insomnia and greater sleep disturbances in general health than men. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Epidemiological studies indicate that smokers drink more coffee than nonsmokers, but it is not clear whether these associations are related to genetic factors or to drug interactions, social conditioning, or other variables. One approach to solving this question is to correlate the use of caffeine to other drugs and using the common pathway model and mapping the genetic contribution to a common joint use factor and substance-specific factors. Using this technique, researchers found that the heritability for coffee use overlapped with that of nicotine and alcohol, though 0.72 of the total heritability was specific to caffeine, which was considerably higher than that for nicotine and alcohol. Investigators often assess caffeine’s impact by measuring coffee consumption, yet coffee also contains other chemicals that may be dangerous to one’s health. Thus, although some studies hint at links between caffeine and cancer (particularly pancreatic cancer), the evidence is not conclusive. Similarly, studies demonstrating correlations between caffeine and heart rhythm irregularities (arrhythmias) or high cholesterol levels are not fully reliable. Caffeine does, however, appear to cause at least a slight increase in blood pressure over time in regular users and a larger but short-lived increase during the first few days of consumption by new users. As public awareness of these possible health risks has increased, caffeine consumption has declined. Around half of Americans now drink coffee daily, whereas 80 percent did so in 1983. Heavier caffeine users appear to be more influenced by genetics than lighter caffeine users. People who tend to consume more alcohol also tend to drink more coffee. Genetic association studies have been used to identify specific genes that are responsible for the heritable components of these caffeine-related traits. Caffeine and its metabolites belong to the methylxanthine class, which are structurally similar to cyclic nucleotides, and interact with cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterases. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Caffeine is absorbed rapidly and completely from the gastrointestinal tract. It is metabolized by cytochrome P-450 enzymes, which represent the rate-limiting step for plasma clearance, and its elimination follows first-order kinetics. P-450 1A2, which is coded for by gene CYP1A2, is the primary isoenzyme responsible for the demethylation of caffeine into dimethylxanthine metabolites paraxanthine, theobromine, and theophylline. Each of these metabolites is subjected to further demethylation into monimethylxanthines. Variation in the CYP1A2 activity, both within and between individuals, represents a major source of variability in pharmaco-kinetics of caffeine. The clearance of caffeine can vary to up to 40-fold within and between individuals. Notable exogeneous factors that affect clearance include numerous drugs, medications, and smoking status, as well as caffeine itself. Endogenous factors include pregnancy, ethnicity, and genetics. Asian and African populations, for instance, appear to metabolize caffeine at slower rate than Caucasians. Genetic variations in a number of neurotransmitter functions could influence responses to caffeine. Because 10 grams of caffeine can be fatal, the substance is classified as a medical poison. The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we will miss it, but that it is too low and we will reach it. A leader is someone who has the capacity to create a compelling vision that takes people to a new place. In 1783 Washington sent a circular letter to the States, describing the situation of the new nations as he saw it. “We have equal occasion to felicitate ourselves,” he said, “on the lot which Providence has assigned to us, whether we view it in a natural, a political, or moral point of light.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
He pointed to the natural resources of the new nation, its independence and freedom, the Age of Reason during which it had come of age, an age of “the free cultivation of letters, the unbounded extension of commerce, the progressive refinement of manners, the growing liberality of sentiment, and above all the pure and benign light of Revelation….if these citizens,” he concluded, “should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be certainly their own. Such is our situation and such are our prospects.” It is hard to read these sentences without agitation and tears, for they are simply true and simply patriotic. In the next generations, almost to our own times, patriotic rhetoric did not cease to sound, more pompously and falsely, but never without a core of truth. There was always something special in the American destiny to be proud of. In 1825 it was the broad democracy. In 1850 it was the magnificent spread and settlement from coast to coast. In 1875, the material progress, the cable and the Pacific railroad, the building of modern industrialism. In 1900, America was the melting pot, the asylum of the poor and the oppressed. In our century, the patriotic rhetoric began to be unbelievable—not by accident, for foreign wars (1898 and 1917) are incompatible with reasonable rhetoric. In recent decades there has been almost a surcease of such speech. Even references to the American Way, free enterprise, high production, and the economy of abundance have finally died out, because they call up the idea of tail fins and TV commercials. Highbrow journalists mention the American Way with scorn. Our case is astounding. For the first time in recorded history, the mention of country, community, place has lost its power to animate. Nobody but a scoundrel even tries it. Our rejection of false patriotism is, of course, itself a badge of honour. However, the positive loss is tragic and I cannot resign myself to it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
A man has only one life and if during it he has no great environment, no community, he has been irreparably robbed of a human right. This loss is damaging especially in growing up, for it deprives outgoing growth, which begins with weaning from Mother and walking out of the house, of the chance of entering upon a great and honourable scene to develop in. Culture is, first of all, city and patriotic culture. Patriotism is the culture, we come with a fatal emptiness to the humane culture of science, art, humanity and God; and this emptiness results in the best people not turning back, like Plato’s philosopher who has emerged from the cave, to serve their country. Many of the best Americans have a strong philanthropic and local community zeal, yet it would seem odd for somebody nowadays to put himself to a big and hard task just to serve his country, to make her better, and be proud of that. Young people aspire mightily to appearances on television and other kinds of notoriety, but I doubt that many now thing of being honoured by a statue in the park and winning “immortal” fame, the fame of big culture. Let me make the same point by analyzing a remarkable proposition of Otto Jespersen, the grammarian. He shows that, contrary to expectation, a child does not learn his mother tongue at home from his mother and immediate family, he does not pick up their accent. The accent, vocabulary, syntax, and styles that form his speech are learned from his first peer groups, outside the home. Jespersen does not explain it, but the psychology seems evident. Speech occurs at the stage of the developing of the “I,” it is a forming of the image of the self, it is a self-appointment to one’s ideal and putting on its uniform. Changes occur as we appoint ourselves to one peer group after another. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
At certain stage a lad appoints himself or commits himself to a band of friends and puts on its jargon, jacket, tattoo, and masculine ring on the fourth finger of the left hand. If he is insecure and disturbed, this conformity is a cowering protection and the band is a delinquent gang, but in every case it is also, we see by the blazon, an achievement. And one way in which the Governor of California does not take the juveniles seriously, when he speaks of giving them a sense of belonging, is that he does not offer an ideal that promises equal manliness. He has none to offer. It is tragic when there is no great adult peer group to meet growth. Consider the case of an artist, my own case. To have simple and sounding language, rather than merely the lovely colloquialism of Sherwood Anderson or William Carlos Williams, it is necessary to believe in the great national culture of one’s people. Our popular culture does not warrant the belief, even to make the sacrifice that Virgil made when he sadly gave up his best vision because strife-torn Rome needed a national poet. True, an artist can then jump to the international and universal, for a mankind and God do not let him down (mankind is the fellow on one’s own block), but this is at the loss of pomp and glitter, of the glancing present. Without a patriotic peer group, it is impossible to have the brilliance of Handel, the material grandeur of Venice. With us the style of the big bright sensation belongs to cheap musical dramas on Broadway. Now, an analogy to the “triumphant conscience,” as developed by Luther personally as well as theologically, appeared in the enthusiastic philosophy of Giordano Bruno. The moral conscience is overcome by the “heroic affect” toward the Universe and the surrender to its infinity and inexhaustible creativity. Participation in the creativity of life universal liberates the moral conscience, the bad as well as the good. Humans, standing in the center of being, are bound to transform life as it is into higher life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
These living souls take upon themselves the tragic consequences, connected with the destructive side of finite creativity, and must not try to escape them for the sake of a good moral conscience. While in Bruno the transmoral conscience is based on a mystical naturalism, Nietzsche’s transmoralism is a consequence of his dramatic-tragic naturalism. Nietzsche belongs to those empiricists who have tried to analyze the genesis of moral conscience in such a way that its autonomy is destroyed—Hobbes and Helvetius, on the ground of a materialistic metaphysics; Mandeville and Bentham, on the ground of a utilitarian psychology; Dr. Darwin and Dr. Freud, on the ground of an evolutionary naturalism—all have denied any objective validity to the voice of conscience, according to their rejection of any universal natural (rational) law. Nietzsche carried these ideas further, as the title and the content of Genealogy of Morals shows. He says, “The bad conscience is a sickness, but it is a sickness as pregnancy is one.” It is a creative sickness. Humankind had to be domesticated, and this has been done by its conquerors and ruling classes. It was in the interest of these classes to suppress by sever punishments the natural instincts of aggressiveness, will to power, destruction, cruelty, revolution. They succeeded in suppressing these trends. However, they did not succeed in eradicating them. So the aggressive instincts became internalized and transformed into self-destructive tendencies. Humans have turned against themselves in self-punishment; they are separated from their innocent terrestrial past from which they had derived strength, joy, and creativity. However, humans cannot prevent their instincts from remaining alive. They require permanent acts of suppression, the result of which is the bad conscience, a great thing in human evolution, an ugly thing if compared with humanities real aim. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Nietzsche described this aim in terms which remind one of Luther’s descriptions of the transmoral conscience: “Once in a stronger period than our morbid, desperate present, one must appear, the man of the great love and the great contempt, the creative spirit who does now allow his driving strength to be turned to a transcendent World.” Nietzsche call him the man “who is strong through wars and victories, who needs conquest, adventure, danger, even pain.” The man is “beyond good and evil” in the moral sense. At the same time, he is good in the metaphysical (or mystical) sense that he is in unity with life universal. He has a transmoral conscience, not on the basis of a paradoxical unity with God (such as Luther has), but on the basis of an enthusiastic unity with life in its creative and destructive power. Recent “existential” philosophy has developed a doctrine of transmoral conscience that follows the general lines of Luther, Bruno, and Nietzsche. Heidegger, the main representative of existential philosophy, says, “The call of conscience has the character of the demand that humans in their finitude actualize their genuine potentialities, and this means an appeal to become guilty.” Conscience summons us to ourselves, calling us back from the talk of the market and the conventional behaviour of the masses. It has no special demands; it speaks to us in the “mode of silence.” It tells us only to act and to become guilty by acting, for every action is unscrupulous. One who acts experiences the call of conscience and, at the same time, has the experience of contradicting one’s conscience, of being guilty. “Existence as such is guilty.” Only self-deception can give a good moral conscience, since it is impossible not to act and since every action implies guilt. We must act, and the attitude in which we can act is “resoluteness.” Resoluteness transcends the moral conscience, its arguments and prohibitions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The good, transmoral conscience consists in the acceptance of the bad, moral conscience,which is unavoidable whenever decisions are made and acts are performed. The way from Luther’s to Heidegger’s idea of a transmoral conscience was a dangerous one. “Transmoral” can mean the re-establishment of morality from a point below morality. The empiricists from Hobbes to Dr. Freud have analyzed moral conscience, but they have not destroyed it. Either they were dependent in their concrete ethics on Anglo-Saxon common sense; or they identified utility with the social conventions of a well-established bourgeoisie; or they cultivated a high sense of conscientiousness, in scientific honesty as well as in the fulfillment of duties; or they did not dare, unconsciously or consciously, to draw the radical moral consequences of their dissolution of the conscience. In Nietzsche and Heidegger none of these inhibitions is left. However, it is not without some justification that these names are connected with the antimoral movements of fascism or national socialism. Even Luther has been linked with them, as have Machiavelli and Bruno. This raises the questions: is the idea of a transmoral conscience tenable? Or is it so dangerous that it cannot be maintained? However, if the idea must be dismissed, religion as well as analytic psychotherapy would also have to be dismissed. For in both of them, the moral conscience is transcendent—in religion by the acceptance of the divine grace that breaks through the realm of law and creates a joyful conscience, and in-depth psychology by the acceptance of one’s own conflicts when looking at them and suffering under their ugliness without an attempt to suppress them and to hide them from oneself. Indeed, it is impossible not to transcend the moral conscience because it is impossible to unite a sensitive and good conscience. Those who have a sensitive conscience cannot escape the question of the transmoral conscience. The moral conscience drives beyond the sphere in which it is valid to the sphere from which it must receive its conditional validity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The celibacy movement was rather interesting. The “silent strike,” with its contingent of proud spinsters, generated an inevitable backlash. This came in the form of gender discrimination. Scientists started to expressed the biological differences been men and women. Havelock Ellis said that, “women’s special sphere is the bearing and the rearing of children, with the care of human life in the home. Man’s primary sphere remains the exploration of life outside the home, in industry and inventions and the cultivation of the arts.” With this observation of the status quo cloaked in scientific garb, Ellis proceeded to extrapolate conclusions. One was the ideal the relations involving pleasures of the flesh would be between male dominance and female submissiveness. Another was that the ideal female, a paragon of Motherhood, was very definitely not a spinster, a word that in Ellis’s writings elaborated on the nasty connotations our century has inherited from his. Like so many Motherhood aficionados, Ellis claimed and was credited with a feminist agenda: surely praising the wonderful work of mothers must be women-positive. In Ellis’s case, this seemed irrefutable, for he also preached the novel idea that women should, indeed must, enjoy pleasures of the flesh. No more lying rigid, clenching fists, and teeth, enduring bimonthly intimate invasion by obliterating it with thoughts of England and the empire. (Ironically, Ellis himself had earlier lost an adored lover because he failed to reach a “proud status” during romantic interlude. His predilection in pleasures of the flesh was to observe the other species using the water closet, which stemmed from his unforgettable boyhood experience of watching his mother relieve herself of fluid in the garden.) #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Ellis’s espousal of the great Motherhood or, in Germany, Mutterschutz, movement particularly explains his enormous influence. From the 1800s onward, fewer children were born but infant mortality soared. Physical exams revealed the poor condition of many schoolchildren, and military recruits were rejected at a high rate for a plethora of disabilities. Something was wrong—at least, these authorities now knew something was wrong—and the solution seemed to be a nation of Super Moms who would reverse the physical decline. In Ellis’s words, these women would undertake the “regeneration of the race” and the “evolution of a supermankind.” Women, too bought into the Motherhood ideal. Some felt it validated the roles they had chosen or that had been chose for them. Others were persuaded that this form of biology was scientific truth and so believed the conclusions its thinkers so convincingly reported. These conclusions clashed with feminist beliefs, particularly the silent strike, the voluntary spinsters’ movement in which women took control of their lives by refusing to surrender their rights to husbands. Censuring spinster became the keynote of antifeminist attacks. One Motherhood proponent, herself a woman, decried spinsters with an analogy to a beehive, in which infertile workers were like “surplus woman” who refused or had no opportunity to marry. Since the workers bee’s poisoned sting required the egg laying tube, spinsters who relinquished “the power of life” would, by definition, gain possession of “the stinging weapon of death.” Another male antifeminist spoke in alarmist terms of eventual civil war between wives and spinsters, “the waste products of our female population.” In Modern Woman and How to Manager Her, another male writer called spinsters “man-condemning, man-hating…women who are ‘independent of men,’ a motely host, pathetic in their defiance of the first principle of Nature, but of no serious account in the biological sense.” He even proposed polygamy as a solution to “spinsterhood, and the right to live one’s life—the supreme consummation of a large number of revolutionary British women.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
In later years, charges of women who lonely loved other women and frigidity, both caused or worsened by spinsterhood, bolstered the attacks on single, independent women. Given that British women outnumbered men by 2 million, this was heavy artillery indeed. The women were acknowledged—negatively—as the prime movers behind reforms for all species, human and animal. The “fanaticism and crankiness” of these dangerous virgins, charged virulent antifeminist Charlotte Haldane, impelled them to espouse “freak science, freak religions, and freak philanthropy,” and to embrace wholeheartedly such contemptible crusades as antivisection, the bane of England’s scientific advancement, dogs’ homes and cats’ homes, missionary endeavors, and “‘Kill-joy’ propaganda.” Furthermore, “enough is known [about the psychological effects of permanent virginity],” Haldane opined, “to make us aware that in entrusted responsibility towards individuals and the State to elderly virgins we may be acting unwisely.” Women and loved other women, styled “intermediate women,” were even more problematic. They should be allowed only inferior jobs because as educators or nurses or doctors, “intermediate women may do an enormous amount of harm.” In the manipulative hands of the “anatomy biologists” and their unlikely Motherhood allies, the celibacy that women seeking independence had once embraced with such delight and firm purpose was now portrayed as sullied and suspicious, a witch’s mantel for freaky madwomen or a masquerade for reviled women who love women. Society still demanded virgin brides, but their virginity was their supreme offering to a husband who would maneuver them through the rest of their life. Aging girls—women—who failed to contract a marriage were pitied, but self-styled spinsters with agendas, no matter how noble and important, were condemned in vitriolic terms, their brand of feminism repudiated as antisocial and unworthy of any regard but the most evil eye. Their celibacy had become as loathsome as its object: women’s independence and personal fulfillment. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
With so many people in the World today whose outlook is negative, whose emotions are twisted and thinking is warped, it is more needful to stand firm in one’s own spot of optimistic thinking that ever. Whoever doubts the truth of this message, thereby deprives oneself of its benefits. However, this is equally true of the believer who fears its truth. If the future holds distress and suffering, blows and disasters, it is to be met with courage sought and asked from the higher self. According to our faith, it will be given us. It is not a question of what we like or prefer to believe. It is a question of accepting quietly, or else defying vainly, the chose of events and the trend of destiny. If catastrophe and obliteration threaten humanity and if the individual is hopeless when confronted by them, it is logical to conclude that although humanity might not be able to save itself, the individual can save oneself from these disasters if one believes that inner salvation is at least a possibility where outer salvation is not. Yes, you and I can save ourselves from within even when we cannot save ourselves from without. That at least is a better lot than the one of the humans who can save oneself neither from within nor from without and puts one’s faith in political action alone. For politics is merely a system of human bargaining actuated by self-seeking. It can invoke the assistance of no higher power because it does not rise higher than this self-seeking interest itself. However, the individual is free to life oneself above this sordid plane and therefore one is in a position to invite the attention and assistance of higher powers. One who consciously inhabits reality will live independent of the mutations of fate, the catastrophes of history, and the crises of an epoch in dissolution. Even in crisis of war, where danger or even death is lurking, philosophy reveals its immense practicability. For the philosopher can meet them with the utter calmness, effective capacity, and resolute heroism with which one’s studies, reflection, disciplines, and ideals have formed one’s character. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Amid the surging tides of postwar chaos, one sets the example and shows the value of philosophic principles by standing firm as a rock. Just as one kept cool in the very midst of global conflagration, so one now keeps clear-sighted amid the gloom of its dusty aftermath. In the very midst of World confusion, one becomes a little oasis of strength and peace, wisdom and certitude, calm and holiness. If one has to live in a chaotic disordered environment, the sad heritage of war, one still lives one’s own constructive ordered pattern of existence. The very example of such a human keeping steady and balanced thus silently helps some others who are bewildered or aimless. Now, when considering American capitalism, there are a few things we should keep in mind. According to Adam Smith, “Labour was the first, price, the original purchase—money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the World was originally purchased.” It many come as a surprise that, until field of labour was replaced by factory work, few of our ancestors ever held a job. This surely was not because they were rich. Most were wretchedly poor. They did not hold jobs because the “job,” in today’s sense of formally committed work in return for stipulated pay, had not yet been invented. Like the steam engine and other industrial innovations, jobs and wage labour became widespread only during the last three centuries. Work itself was transferred from outdoors to indoors, or schedules set no longer by sunrise and sunset but by the punch clock. Most payments came in the form of wages based on hours worked. Indeed, these arrangements essentially define the term job. However, the job is only one way of packaging work. And as the latest, knowledge-based wealth systems unfold, we are moving toward a future in which, as we will see, more people “work” but fewer hold “jobs.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
It will drastically alter labour relations, human resources departments, legislation and the overall labour market how the offices of employment are conducted in the future. It is bad news for trade unions as we know them. The deep fundamental of work is changing more profoundly than at any time since the industrial revolution. Division of labour, like work itself, traces back to hunting and gathering, when the division was mainly based on gender. However, here, too, we are approaching a turning point. Ever hear of a “metallurgy and failure analysis litigation consultant” or a “post-harvest horticulturalist”? Neither have most of us. (The latter is the superspecialist who determine such things as how many microscopic holes are needed to admit oxygen into the plastic bag that holds vegetables in the supermarket.) Adam Smith in 1776 called the division of labour the source of “the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour.” And this has been true ever since. However, the more refined and specialized tasks become, the harder and more expensive it becomes to integrate them—especially in an innovation-driven competitive economy. At some point, the costs of integration may exceed the value of such superspecialization. Moreover, narrowly focused specialists may be good at incremental innovation. However, breakthrough innovation is often the product of temporary teams whose members cross disciplinary boundaries—at a time when breakthroughs in every field are, in fact, blurring those very boundaries. And this is not just a matter for scientists and researchers. The new wealth system demands a complete shake-up in the way increasingly temporary skill sets are organized for increasingly temporary purposes throughout the economy. Nothing is more deeply fundamental to the creation of wealthy. Now only are work and the division of labour changing, but income distribution itself—the “who gets what?”—may be heading, over the long term, toward truly revolutionary change. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
The temple of the animals has fallen into disrepair. The pad of feet has faded. The panthers flee the shadows of the day. Tired, I recall the animals of last year: the altars of the bear, tribunals of the ape, solitudes of elephantine gloom, rare zebra-stripped retreats, prophecies of dog, sanctuaries of the pygmy deer. Were there rituals I had forgotten? Animal calls to which those animal voices replied, called and called until that jungle stirred. Were there voices that I heard? Love was the very animal made his lair, slept out his winter in my heart. Did he seek my hear or ever sleep there? I have seen the animals depart, forgotten their voices, or barely remembered—like that last speech when the company goes or the beloved face that the heart knows, forgets and knows—I have heard the dying footsteps of fall. The sound has faded, but lingers here. Ah, bitterly I recall animals of last year. Thine, O Lord, is the greatness and the power, and the glory and the victory and the majesty; all that is in the Heaven and in the Earth is Thine; Thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and Thou art exalted above all. Both riches and honour come from Thee, and Thou rulest over all; in Thy hand is power and might, and in Thy hand it is to make great, and to give strength unto all. Therefore, our God, we thank Thee, and praise Thy glorious name. O give thanks unto the Lord who alone doeth great wonders; His lovingkindness endureth forever. Sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving; sing praise upon the harp unto our God; He covereth the Heavens with clouds, He prepareth rain for the Earth, and maketh the mountains to be green with grass. He maketh your borders peaceful, He giveth you the fat of the wheat in plenty. He is good to the Earth, and watereth her with His rivers that are full of water. He maketh the Earth soft with showers, and blesseth the growth thereof. He crowneth the year with His goodness, and showereth the Earth with rich bounty. #RandolpHarris 21 of 21
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Whatever Person Posses this Book, Lucifer Promises to Carry Out One’s Plans
The latter part of the nineteenth century was an anguished and tortured period. Gentility was a terrible strain. Beneath the appearance of stiff propriety there ran currents of anger and aggression frightful in their intensity. Some indication of the dark, baleful aspect of the lives of our great-grandparent went untold. Black and white magic. Contemporary forms of magic are being studied carefully by parapsychologists. (Parapsychology is the study of apparently supernatural phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions, and related forms of ESP.) Researcher in this field who operate from a completely naturalistic standpoint deny the existence of a personal devil or evil spirits. They may speak of two vital forces in the Universe, however, one working upward in an evolutionary manner, and the other counteracting these ascending steps. These investigators of psychic phenomena do not make any effort to explain the origin of these invisible powers, and simply declare that some people have special psychic gifts which give them access to these forces. They may even say that some religious practitioners appear to have superhuman power, and refer to their work as white magic. They may also acknowledge that some individuals can mysteriously bring harm to their enemies, and this evil use of power they call black magic. The majority of these parapsychologist insist, however, that they do not believe in a personal God or the devil, and simply affirm that at the present time we do not fully understand some of these esoteric powers in this Universe. The Christian student of occultic activity has a distinct advantage over the naturalist, for one accepts the reality of a personal God and an invisible World of angels and evil spirits. This does not mean that one rejects a scientific approach to the problems that are encountered. One must avoid the temptation to declare dogmatically that every unexplainable occurrence is the result of supernatural activity—either by God or the forces of evil. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Some manifestations that now puzzle us may in the future be understood within the framework of the natural. The fact remains, however, that Satan is a real personality, and that a multitude of evil spirits have joined him in opposition to God and His people. The Christian Bible records numerous instances which clearly reveal their activity, and we have good reason to believe that some of the unexplainable phenomena in evidence today are the works of these demonic beings. Practitioners of black magic usually declare openly that they are serving the devil. Many of them say that have made a pact with Satan, and some have indicated their allegiance to him by signing a document with their own blood. Missionaries have reported that acts with the devil are not at all unknown among many primitive peoples. Reputable followers of Jesus Christ are convinced that these religious leaders actually can bring illness or death to people through ritualistic incantations. Black magic is practiced extensively today in many parts of Germany, France, and Switzerland, as well as in primitive cultures. Dr. Kurt Koch cites numerous instances of conjurers casting spells which have brought about the death of animals and even humans. He also tells us of amazing healings, but points out that when a person is cured of a physical disease by such a practitioner, one usually suffers such severe mental depression that the new condition is worse than the old. As one reads the examples of black magic—cattle being milked dry in a mysterious manner, the sudden unexplainable death of animals, healings followed by terrible psychic disturbances, and the appearance of frightful apparitions—he finds his credulity stretched almost to the breaking point. If one has not witnessed such occurrences, one is likely to dismiss these reports as untrustworthy. However, serious scholars who have investigated these accounts do not deny the reality of such phenomena. They may not believe them to be the work of Satan or evil spirits, but they admit that many of them cannot be explained at the present time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Professor Adolph Koberle, from the University of Tubingen, in the introduction to Christian Counseling and Occultist, says: Readers who approached this study with a purely rationalistic bent will experience spiritual difficulty in following the author in many areas because we have here a report of cases and experiences which seems to conflict with all sound human intelligence. However, perhaps such persons can be brought to listen, since research first tries the immanent solution of the problems and only where this is proved to fail does one break out and propose the added dimension, the dimension of the eternal. Even though research may evoke contradictions here and there—from medics and pastors, from parapsychologists and psychotherapists—yet the questions that are here posed cannot be evaded by any person who concerns oneself in a genuine and responsible manner with a fruitful diagnosis and a helpful therapy. Clearly sane, scholarly, and since humans have examined the apparently superhuman powers evidenced in black magic and other forms of occultism, and made every effort to find naturalistic explanations, before finally concluding that Satan and evil spirits are actually at work. Black magic as a specific form of witchcraft has its own literature. The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses are the primary source, and are well known in Europe. They constitute one volume, and are alleged to have been written by Moses himself. Strangely enough, they maintain that this great national leader was a servant of Satan, and set fourth detailed instructions for establishing a mystical relationship with the devil. This research tells readers how they can gain power through black magic over all the people they will encounter both in this World and the next. It makes this solemn assertion: “To whatever person possesses this book at any given time, Lucifer makes promise to carry out one’s commands, but only as long as one possess this book.” Dr. Koch comments on the strange and sinister nature of this writing by saying, “In the many cases which the pastor-counselors have come to know, there is no possessor of The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses who have no psychic complication.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
White magic is declared by its practitioners to be in direct opposition to black magic. Whereas black magic includes an open allegiance with the powers of darkness, in white magic the name of God is invoked, and Biblical phrases are utilized. Most people who practice it, however, have no understanding of the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. Some possibly are endowed with an unexplainable psychic power, and their desire to use it was not totally selfish at the beginning. However, many find very soon that they become enslaved to a yearning for self-exaltation. The Radio Bible Class has received letters from a number of people for a time had engaged in a “healing ministry” of this kind, but who abandoned it because it led to a gradual departure from God. Although some cult leaders and those endowed people, they are using the name of God and Christ in a manner that violates the Lord’s will. The danger of mistaking an enigmatic psychic power for the gift of the Lord must be recognized. Dr. Kurt Koch points out that Dr. Henry Drummond, fellow-worker of D.L. Moody, possessed psychic ability which enabled him to have mental power over person who were miles away. While working with Moody, Drummond found that he could hypnotically influence the large crows who had gathered, but concluded that to use this power would be a hindrance to the activity of the Holy Spirit. One prayed that the Lord would take this psychic gift away from him, and his prayer was answered. Had Dr. Drummond decided to exercise this ability, he would soon have established a Worldwide reputation as a great healer. However, his accomplishments would not have honoured the Lord, and real blessings would not have resulted from his ministry. In Biblical faith, trust is placed solely in the Lord Jesus Christ. In white magic it is deflected to someone else (the human agent) or to something else (one’s own faith, etcetera). In the Biblical prayer of faith, the praying person subjects oneself to the will of God. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
In white magic, the help of God is demanded under the assumption that exercising such power is in accordance with God’s will. Also in white magic the Christian markings are mere decorations that camouflage the magical means of knowledge for power. Certain influences, as we might call them, can be termed elementary forms of magic. Firstly, we have an example of the criminal use of hypnosis. A girl reported in a counselling session that a doctor who she had consulted had hypnotized her. While hypnotized he had seduced her. The doctor had done the same to her girl friend. It was later discovered that he has also done this with other girls. When these stories leaked out, the doctor left the town and settled elsewhere. The girl said that for a long time after this incident she had not been able to read her Christian Bible. She had felt a strong aversion towards religion, and evil thoughts had always come to her mind when praying. Another example, a doctor at a hospital had indecently assaulted women and girls under hypnosis. Once the ward sister caught him in the act. To cover up his scandalous behaviour, he used to question the patients about their sexual relationships and included their answers in their case histories. He thus tried to protect himself in the event of anything being discovered. A respectable gurl who was engaged to a Christian young man became pregnant at the hospital. Following this her fiancé left her. The girl herself denied all knowledge of having an intimate relationship with anyone. The doctor had lain with her when she had been hypnotized. The assistant matron and the ward sister had finally reported the doctor. However, the result was that they themselves were dismissed by the medical superintendent. The doctor in question stayed. Other nurses, who also had incriminating evidence against him, were forced to keep quiet now because of the fear of dismissal. After a few years, though, when the situation became too hot for the doctor, he left and went abroad. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Scientific advocates of hypnosis believe that a man could not be forced to do anything under hypnosis that he would not be prepared to do when conscious. They are of the opinion that crimes are not possible under hypnosis. However, not all the experts share this opinion. Moreover, in my counselling work I have met many cases in which crimes have taken place under hypnosis. From the point of view of the Scriptures it is understandable that an innocent girl can be molested this way. Jesus Christ said that out of the heart come evil thoughts and so on. Evil lies dormant even in the most moral of people. Normally these instinctive reactions are held in check by one’s consciousness, which is moulded by education, religious training and is affected by one’s disposition. Under hypnosis however, this regulator is switched off. Instinctive impulses can arise unhindered from the subconscious, and can be exploited by unscrupulous and uninhibited people. Besides this, some take no account of the fact that magical hypnosis exists in addition to the normal type of hypnosis, and that this can have far deeper effects. Magical hypnosis can often be recognized by the fact that afterwards the patient is no longer able to pray or to keep one’s faith. Here are some actual examples. A Christian girl went to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist used magical hypnosis far more often than he did ordinary hypnosis. I have occasionally come across such doctors in areas where magic is commonly practised. In reply to the girl’s question, the doctor admitted that he had not received his gift from God. He went on to tell the girl that he had wanted to conduct suggestive experiments on her. After the treatment, the girl lost her faith and could no longer pray. She suffered from doubts and other serious difficulties in believing. I think a lot of people who have had good lives, and then are abused and tortured over a long period of time have these same problems. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
When they restart reading the Christian Bible, it may make them upset and angry and they do not know why, but they keep going and praying hoping to overcome their situation. They know that God is there and guiding them, but they have just been able to sustain, not yet overcome the situation. So they keep forcing themselves to pray and thank God so they can rebuild their faith, and it can really take a lifetime, especially when the situation has been going on for decades. Abusers just kind of rob some people of faith and joy. And year after year, they keep praying it is over, and it never is, so it makes it hard for them to trust anyone, including God. So they have to keep reminding of his words and praying and seeking mental health treatments so they can live, and they pray they will still have some youth left, if the situation is ever resolved. Another example is a man, in his spare time a minister dabbled in magic. He experimented in various areas and learned card-laying, how to use a pendulum, magic charming and magical hypnosis. Since he had no suitable people to experiment on, he used his wife for the purpose. As his magical abilities increased, so too did his own and his wife’s dislike for the Christian Bible and prayer. This dislike developed into a strong resistance, and as time went on psychic disturbances appeared in the wife. She exhibited a serious anxiety hysteria and always had to lock the door of whichever room she happened to be in. There also was once a businessman who had the strange ability of being able to influence his customers hypnotically or magically, causing them to accept the business offers that he makes to them. In this way, his yearly income exceeds $75,000.00. He rejects Christianity altogether. A woman allowed a masseur to hypnotize her. Before the treatment she had regularly read her Christian Bible, prayed and attended the local church services. Afterwards when she tried to pray, she felt a compulsion to blaspheme and to curse. She then lost her faith. These effects indicate that the masseur had used magical hypnosis. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Plato derived the etymology of the word “demon” (Greek, daimon) from an adjective meaning “intelligent” or “knowing.” If this derivation is correct, it suggests that intelligence was considered a prominent characteristic of demons. If demons are fallen angels, this would be expected. As Satan’s vast wisdom became vitiated when he sinned (Ezekiel 28.12, 17), the great wisdom that characterizes angels in general (2 Samuel 14.20) must also have been corrupted in his followers. This is undoubtedly why demons use their great but perverted knowledge so relentlessly in an effort to frustrate God’s purpose. Humans who consult professional mediums and use other methods of divination to obtain knowledge of the future seem to imply a degree of confidence in the intelligence of evil spirits. The superior knowledge demons possess is not a holy or saving knowledge. Demons “believe” but only to “tremble” (James 2.19). They are confirmed in depravity and never seek forgiveness. As preeminently unclean spirits, they never long for purity. They confess Jesus Christ is Lord, but they do not trust Christ or submit to him. Although they recognize his authority (Mark 1.24; 5:6, 7). They cleverly withhold knowledge of his incarnation and completed redemption (1 John 4:1-6), corruption sound doctrine (1 Timothy 4.1-3), discern between those who have God’s seal and those who do not (Revelation 9.4), and know full well their own tragic destiny and inevitable doom (Matthew 8.29). Their superhuman intellect is accomplished by superphysical strength. The psalmist celebrates this angelic characteristic: “Bless the Lord, ye His angels, that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of His word,” reports Psalm 103.20. The Apostle Peter also speaks of the “power and might” of angelic spirits (2 Peter 2.11). Our Lord Himself indirectly referred to demonic strength (Matthew 12.29). #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Perverted power and strength are thus conscious attributes of fallen angels. This titanic energy is displayed in the supernatural strength demons can impart to the human body when they enter it and possess it. The Gadarene demoniac who was dominated by a “legion” of demons (Mark 5.9) could not be bound even with chains. “Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetter broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him,” reports Mark 5.4. The great strength of this demoniac was due to the vast number of demons who possessed him. “A legion” in Roman military history consisted of three-to-six-thousand-foot soldiers, and three to seven hundred cavalries. The term “legion” was not only the name of the possessed human but probably also served to indicate the phenomenal strength of the demoniac. The demons were so powerful that when the Lord ordered them to enter a herd of two thousand swine, they cased the entire herd to rush violently down a hill into the sea (Mark 5.13). No wonder the demon-possessed human was disturbed physically, mentally, and emotionally. However, the superphysical strength of demons is not limited to the physical energy they impart to their victim. Their power is broad enough to cause occult oppression of mind and body. They can produce physical disabilities and sickness unrelated to organic disorders and which medicine or natural therapy cannot alleviate. Perhaps the most terrible power of demons is to derange the mind by upsetting the nervous system. In this way they can afflict the body with a psychosomatic disease. Demons are aware of the close relationship between physical and mental health. By jangling the nerves and the emotions, they can cause mental Instability (Luke 8.26-36), producing suicidal mania (Mark 9.22). Their purpose is to drive their occult-enslaved victim to self-destruction. “I’m tired of his bleary-eyed tootling—I have warned him to lie down and nap. So now that I have told him to stop it, I will give him a sharp little rap.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Dealing with necromancers who claim to contact the dead. The writer of 1 Samuel 19.9-10 describes in incident in which King Saul tried to impale David on his javelin. His attack is attributed to an “evil spirit from the Lord.” This indicates that God allowed a demon spirit to enter Saul and possess him. The kingdom of evil spirits is within God’s control, though not acting on his direction. God allows spirit activity, just as he allows evil men to prosper, within the boundaries of his ultimate plan for humans. God’s sovereign control over the realm of evil spirits is further illuminated in 1 Kings 22:18-23. “And the king od Israel said to Jehoshaphat, Did I not tell you that he would not prophesy good concerning me, but evil? And Micaiah said, Therefore hear the word of the Lord; I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the hosts of Heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left; and the Lord said, Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead? And one said one thing, and another said another. Then a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord, saying, I will entice him. And the Lord said to him, By what means? And he said, I will go forth, and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he said, You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go forth and do so. Now therefore, behold, the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the Lord has spoken evil concerning you.” From this passage, too, it is clear that God overrules the World of evil spirits and permits them to do their work when it accords with His sovereign will and purpose. A unique incident involving spirits of the dead is recorded in 1 Samuel 28. King Saul had banished mediums and wizards out of the land as commanded by God (v.3). When confronted by the philistine army he was fearful and sought guidance from the Lord. When no guidance came, he told his servants to seek out a medium who could give him counsel (vv. 5-7). Having found one at Endor, Saul went to her in disguise. She feared a trap because of Saul’s decree against mediums, but Saul promised her protection and asked her to bring forth the spirit of dead Samuel (vv. 8-11). #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The medium screamed in fear when she saw Samuel himself—apparently she was used to communicating only with evil spirits. This is the only account in the Old Testament of God’s permitting a departed person’s spirit to return to Earth. This was not by the lower of the medium, however; in fact, she was not prepared for it at all. Samuel told the piteous kin it was no use: God would take the kingdom from Saul and give it to David (vv. 15-17), and the Philistine army would rout Saul’s army (v.19). 1 Chronicles 10.13 provides the epitaph to the tragic story: “So Saul died for his unfaithfulness; he was unfaithful to the Lord in that he did not keep the command of the Lord, and also consulted a medium, seeking guidance.” Saul’s case is a chilling warning from Scripture against consulting with mediums or trying to communicate with departed souls; the judgment of God is upon it. A case of supposed witchcraft occurred in Cork, Ireland in the year 1685-1686, the account of which is contained in a latter from Christopher Crofts to Sir John Perceval (the third Baronet, and father of the first Earl of Egmont) written on the fifteenth of March in that year. Though the natator professes his disbelief in such superstitions, yet there seems to have been an unconscious feeling in his mind that his strict administration of the law was the means of bringing the affliction on his child. He says: My poor boy Jack to all appearances lay dying; he had a convulsion for eight or nine hours. His mother and several others are of opinion he is bewitched, and by the old woman, the mother of Nell Welsh, who is reputed a bad woman; and the child was playing by her that day she was upon her examination, and was taken ill presently after she was committed to Bridewell. However, I have not faith to believe it was anything but the hand of God. I have committed the girl to Bridewell, where she shall stay some time.” At one period in their history that peculiar people, known amongst themselves as the Society of Friends, and by their opponents as Quakers, appear to have been most troublesome, and to have caused a good deal of annoyance to other religious bodies. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Not unnaturally their enemies credited any wild tales which were related about them to their detriment, especially when they had referenced to their doctrine of the influence of the Spirit. Dr. More, in his continuation to Glanvill’s book, has in the sixth Relation an account of man, near Cambridge in England, who was possessed by an evil spirit which led him to do the most extraordinary things in its attempts to covert him to Quakerism. In the Life of Mr. Alexander Peden, late Minister of the Gospel at New Glenluce in Galloway, who died in 1686, there is an account of a Quakers’ meeting in this country which the Devil appeared in most blasphemous parody of the Holy Ghost. As Mr. Peden was travelling one time by himself in Ireland, “the night came on, and a dark mist, which obliged him to go into a house belonging to a Quaker. Mr. Peden said, ‘I must beg the favour of the roof of your house all night.’ The Quaker said, ‘Thou art a stranger, thou art very welcome and shalt be kindly entertained, but I cannot wait upon thee, for I am going to the meeting.’ Mr. Peden said, ‘I will go along with you.’ The Quaker said, ‘Thou may, if thou please, but thou must not trouble us.’ He said, ‘I will be civil.’ When they came to the meeting, as their ordinary is, they sat for some time silent, some with their faces to the wall, and others covered. There being a void in the loft above them there came down the appearance of a raven, and sat upon one man’s head, who started up immediately, and spoke with such vehemence that the froth flew from his mouth; it went to a second, and he did the same; and to a third, who did as the former two. Mr. Peden sitting near to his landlord said, ‘Do you not see that? Ye will not deny it afterwards?’ When they dismissed, going home Mr. Peden said to him, ‘I always thought there was devilry among you, but never thought that he did appear visibly among you till now that I have seen it.’ The poor man fell a-weeping, and said, ‘I perceive that God hath sent you to my house, and put it into your heart to go along with me, and permitted the Devil to appear visibly among us this night. I never saw the like before. Let me have the help of your prayers.’ After this he became a singular Christian.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Mr. Peden was also somewhat of a prophet, and his specialty appears to have been the prognostication of unpleasant events, at all events to persons in Ireland. Two instances will suffice. When in a gentleman’s house in Co. Antrim he foretold that a maid-servant was enceinte, that she would murder the child, and would be punished. “Which accordingly came to pass, and she was burnt at Craig Fergus.” On another occasion two messengers were sent to inform the Lord-Lieutenant that Presbyterian ministers in Ireland should affirm that they had nothing to do with the rebellion at Bothwell Bridge. Mr. Peden said they were on the Devil’s errand, but God would arrest them by the gate. Accordingly one was stricken with sickness, while the other fell from his horse and broke his leg. In another cause of the supernatural, during the late 1800s, the Santa Clara Valley, in California presented sweeping vistas of rural open space. It was a serene setting for Mrs. Winchester to begin her building project, which she did with steadfast determination. She immediately hired carpenters to work in shifts around the clock. By the turn of the century the eight-room house had grown into a nine-story mansion! The estate eventually grew to about 730 acres of farmland (according to documents), which included orchards of apricots, plums, and walnut trees to supplement Mrs. Winchester’s income. Her dried plums, which turned into prunes were very popular. Some people believe that prune juice is what kept Mrs. Winchester’s screen so wrinkle free, gave it a natural growth, and made her look so young, as it flushes toxins out of the body (word of caution, make sure to use it in moderation and start in the morning with a few ounces, and do not go anywhere for 24 hours until you see how it work with your system). Nonetheless, Mrs. Winchester also owned homes in Atherton, Los Altos, and Palo Alto. The combination of her wealth and her eccentric building of this beautiful mansion gave rise to many rumors in the local community. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Jeremiah Haralson was waiting for a tour of Mrs. Winchester’s beautiful mansion, and he had been waiting an hour to have tea with her—he was really impressed with the mansion as it seemed to twinkle. It was really a rural setting and very pretty. The estate had a lot of thick green foliage and beautiful flowers and what seemed to be miles of green lawns. So he waited for her. It was August 1894, and the chill of an unusually evening entered into his bones. The construction workers passed him with a surely response to his “Good Night.” Many of the servants went by him like ghosts with soft voices; and it was nearly midnight, and she still had not come. He then heard a ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. The bell in the belfry high in the gables began to toll. Jeremiah shrugged his shoulders and turned towards the gates that lead to the main road. He looked back, but there was still no sign of movement about the mansion, so sign of life, no lights even in the windows. He paused by the gate, wondering. Then he noticed that the front doors were open—wide open—and the porch lamp shone a little way into the foyer. There was something about this that did not please him—that scared him a little, indeed. The house had a gloomy and deserted air. It was obviously impossible that it harboured a rich widow. The must be away on business. In which case—Jeremiah walked up the path, tower the stairs to the front porch, and listened. Yet, still no sign of life. He passed into the foyer. There as no light anywhere. Where was everybody, and why were the beautiful jeweled front doors open. There was no one in the front parlour, nor the drawing room, the dining room and the study were equally empty. Everyone was out, evidently. However, the unpleasant sense that he was, perhaps, not the first casual visitor to walk through that open door impelled him to look through the house before he went anyway and closed it after him. So he went upstairs, and at the door of the first bedroom, Jeremiah turned on the gasolier, as he had done in the siting rooms. Even as he did so, he felt that he was not alone. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Jeremiah was prepared to see something, but for what he saw he was not prepared. For what he saw lay on the bed, in a white loose gown—and it was Mrs. Winchester, and her throat was cut from ear to ear. He did not know what happened then, nor how he got downstairs and into the street; but he got out somehow, and the policeman found him in a fit, under the lamp-post at the crossroads of the road. He could not speak when they picked him up, and he passed the night in the police cells, because the policeman had seen plenty of drunken men before, but never one in a fit like Jeremiah Haralson. The next morning he was well, though still very pale and shaky. However, the tale he told the magistrate was convincing, and they sent a couple of constables with him to her house. There was no crowd about it as he had fancied there would be, and the curtains were open. As Jeremiah stood, dazed, in the front of the doors, they opened, she Mrs. Winchester came out. Jeremiah held on to the upside-down posts on the front porch for support. “See, my boy! Mrs. Winchester is just fine as can be,” said the constable, who found him hiding before one of the posts. “I told you, you were drunk, but you would know best!” When Jeremiah was alone with Mrs. Winchester, he told her how he had come into the rambling mansion, and had found the front doors open and the lights out, and how he had seen something—in even trying to hint at which he turned sick and broke down and had to have a little Vin Mariani given to him. “Oh, heavens, boy,” Mrs. Winchester said, “I dare say the house was dark, for we were all at St. Joseph’s Cathedral with Daisy, and no doubt the door was open, for the maids will run out if they are left. However, you could not have been in any of the bedrooms on the second floor, because I have my staff lock them when I am away, and my dear sweet boy, they key was in my pocket. I dressed in a hurry and I left my odds and ends laying about.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
“I know,” Jeremiah said; “I saw a gold scarf on the chair, and some gold gloves, and a lot of hairpins and ribbons, and a prayerbook, and a lace handkerchief on the dressing table. Why, I even noticed the almanack on the mantlepiece—16 January 1895. At least it could not be that because this is 16 August 1894. And yet it was. Your almanack is at 16 January 1895, is it not?” “No, of course it is not,” said Mrs. Winchester, smiling rather anxiously; “but all the other things were just as you say. You must have had a nightmare, of a vision, or something.” Jeremiah was a very ordinary, commonplace, City young man, and he did not believe in visions, but he never rested day or night still he got away from the Winchester mansion. Now the curious and quite inexplicable part of this when Mrs. Winchester came down to breakfast on the morning of 17 January 1895, she found Jeremiah looking like death, with the Oakland Tribune in his hand. He caught hers—he could not speak, and pointed to the paper. And there she read that on the night of the 17th a young lady had been found with her throat cut from ear to ear, in a second story bedroom of that Beautiful, but Bizarre Winchester Mansion. Although demons reveal various degrees of wickedness (Matthew 12.45), they all are depraved. This aspect of their character appears in the terrible things they do to their victims. The Christian Bible often refers to them as spiritually and morally “unclean” (Matthew 10.1; Mark 1.27; 3.11; Luke 4.36; Acts 8.7; Revelation 16.13). People who deal in the occult are sometimes found to be vulnerable to Satan and demonic powers. Sometimes these “unclean spirits” take possession of vulnerable people. The character of demons reveals what they can do to their victims. Invisible, extremely intelligent, strong, and totally depraved personalities can do a great deal of harm to the vulnerable person. Since the supernatural exists and does interact with the natural World, the truly scientific investigator must take this into consideration. Prayer and faith can heal the mind and the body supernaturally, just as medicine and rest can do it naturally. By the same token, unbelief and sin can harm body and mind as a result of demonic bondage. (However, many mental and emotional illnesses are, of course, due to natural causes, such as overwork, tension, fatigue, malnutrition, organic disease, etcetera. Such disorders can be treated effectively by a physician, neurologist, psychologist, or psychiatrist. Demonic spirits may have little or nothing to do with such disorders of the mind. The causes are purely natural and may be corrected by purely natural means. This is not surprising since the Creator has placed the creation and His creatures under the normal operation of the laws of cause and effect.) #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
Beautiful day to stroll the gardens which will turn into a beautiful night to roam around the Winchester Mystery House ☀️🌜Flashlight Tours Tonight!
A few tickets still available!
🎟️ Link https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
And there is More Evidence—He Bills Me from His Firm at 2 A.M. for Overtime
Education is not just teaching students to memorizes things, and filling their brains with information, but teachings others, very abstractly, how to think and become successful. One does not want to teach them what to think, but show them the architecture of how to critically think and form ideas that are rational. Teaching them to have informed opinions so they do not just repeat things they heard on the evening news. You want a student to be able to explain their opinion. For example, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, was more of a democrat then republican. Looking at his policies and how he balanced how he balanced the budget, made it clear that he was not a true republican. A few things about him that were characteristic of a democrat, were his bipartisan agreement to reduce California’s greenhouse gas emission through legislation in 2006, but then he is also the same person who made the Hummer, a gas guzzling vehicle street legal. So, one can see he was clearly conflicted, but like a democrat, they never have a clear idea of what they are doing. Hence President Joe Biden, “There is no national plan for COVID.” Furthermore, the way Schwarzenegger balanced the budget when California was facing a $20 billion shortage by selling 11 state properties, including the Elihu M. Harris building in downtown Oakland, California and the Ronald Reagan building in Los Angeles, California and also several others seemed to be a move a republican would make. Yet, he leased them back from the new owners, which seemed not to be cost effective, more of a political move, and also a decision that actually would cost taxpayers more money because these nationally important, historically buildings would appreciate over the years. That move seemed to be more democratic. Furthermore, Schwarzenegger also gave away historic paintings from the Hearst Castle, which were purchased by its owner William Randolph Harris. These moves of giving away assets, and the wasteful spending, and the energy bill made Schwarzenegger are more characteristic of a democrat than a republican. Maybe we need a republic and not a democracy to balance America? #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Republicans tend to like to use fossil fuels because they want to keep these historical companies alive, not lay off workers, and make use of technology we have already perfected. They are also more businesses minded and like to first, make money, reduce regulations, and then make improvements to their polices when there is money in the bank to avoid a shock to the system. Therefore, if you want to get a republican in the governor’s office in California, try buying a Cultural hero to win the election and pass you policies. Otherwise, we are likely to have another democrat in office because they are importing voters for they do not think they can win without rigging elections. When presenting an argument and coming from a defensive stance, where you threaten people who ask questions and make statements about things that seem illegal or irrational, you will fail every time you start an argument with “They said.” First of all who are “they” and why to they have authority to say anything? Generally, those are the types of speeches that people who have not gone to college make. Now back to the topic at hand, we have not made a convincing case for the hypothesis that the genetic mechanisms are truly universal. More evidence is needed. And there is more evidence. It came, between 1961 and 1963, out of the Laboratories of the National Institutes of Health and the California Institute of Technology. In that interval Marshall W. Nirenberg and J. Heinrich Matthaei, government research scientists at Bethesda, Maryland, and James Bonner and coworkers, at Pasadena, California, made some remarkable discoveries. Their findings are directly pertinent to our quest for evidence of the universality of the genetic mechanisms. Both groups of investigators employed the lowliest of instruments in their important work—the Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacillus, a form of bacteria that thrives in the intestines of humans and other vertebrates. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Most E. coli are harmless and actually are a part of a healthy human intestinal tract. However, some E. coli are pathogenic, meaning they can cause illness, either diarrhea or illness outside of the intestinal tract. The type of E. coli that can cause diarrhea can be transmitted through contaminated water or food, or through contact with animals or persons. Bovine food products and fresh produce contaminated with bovine waste are the most common sources for disease outbreaks in the United States of America. E. coli is a Gram-negative, rod-shaped, facultative anaerobic bacterium. This microorganism was first described by Theodor Escherich in 1885. As stated above, most E. coli strains harmlessly colonize the gastrointestinal tract of humans and animals as a normal flora. However, there are some strains that have evolved into pathogenic E. coli by acquiring virulence factors through plasmids, transposons, bacteriophages, and/or pathogenicity islands. This pathogenic E. coli can be categorized based on serogroups, pathogenicity mechanisms, clinical symptoms, or virulence factors. Among them, enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) is defined as pathogenic E. coli strains that produce Shiga toxins (Stxs) and cause hemorrhagic colitis (HC) and the life-threatening sequelae hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) in humans. (HUS is pretty serious. It is considered a syndrome because it may have different causes. HUS occurs after a severe bowel infection with certain toxic strains of the bacteria E. coli. It may also occur in response to certain medicines, but this is even more rare. HUS results in the destruction of blood platelets (cell involved in clotting. A low red blood cell count (anemia). Kidney failure due to damage to the tiny blood vessels of the kidneys. Other organs, such as the brain or heart, may also be affected by damage to very small blood vessels). Several serotypes in EHEC are frequently associated with human diseases such as O26:H11, O91:H21, O111:H8, O157:NM, and O157:H7. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
E.coli O157:H7 is the most frequently isolated serotype of EHEC from ill persons in the United States of America, Japan, and the United Kingdom. EHEC serotype O157:H7 was first recognized in 1982 as a human pathogen associated with outbreaks of bloody diarrhea in Oregon and Michigan, U.S.A. and is also linked to sporadic cases of HUS in 1983. Since then, many outbreaks associated with EHEC have been reported in the United States of America and E. coli O157:H7 has become one of the most important foodborne pathogens. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has estimated that E.coli O157:H7 infections cause 73,000 illnesses, 2,200 hospitalizations, and 60 deaths annually in the United States of America. The outbreak surveillance data from CDC reports the E. coli O157:H7 infections are decreasing after the peak in 1999. However, large outbreaks and sporadic cases continue to occur. The annual cost of illness due to E.coli O157:H7 infection was $405 million U.S.D., including lost productivity, medical care, and premature deaths. The high cost of illness requires additional efforts to control this pathogen. That is also why doctors say, “Stay away from the colon!” Researchers studied extracts from E. coli bacilli that contained microsomes, transfer RNA, energy-supplying phosphates, amino acids, and enzymes. When supplied with E. coli messenger RNA, such cell-free mixtures of essential ingredients were known to be capable of manufacturing proteins through the operation of the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms that we have been considering for the past several reports. Nirenberg and Matthaei discovered, however, that the addition of big-molecular RNA from a number of other species, including viruses, could also cause protein to be synthesized. The evidence that RNA molecules from one species could successfully act as messenger RNA in the protein-manufacturing mechanisms of an entirely unrelated species certainly added strength to the developing case for the universality of the genetic mechanisms. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
However, it also raised questions. For example, what kind of protein is produced when the big-molecular RNA from an exotic species is added to the E. coli system of components? Could it be protein characteristic of the species from which the big-molecular RNA is derived? A number of experiments were performed in search of an answer to this question. In some the results were indeterminate, but in 1963 a definite, and affirmative, answer was obtained by the Caltech group. They combined purified DNA from the nuclei of pea cells with systems of E. coli components similar to those employed by Nirenberg and Matthaei and found that a kind of protein was produced that was specific to the particular type of pea cell from which the DNA had been extracted. Their results, in fact, went somewhat beyond the point of establishing that messenger RNA from pea cells could operate the nucleic acid mechanisms of E. coli bacilli to produce pea-cell protein. In addition, their work showed that pea-cell DNA could be induced to manufacture messenger RNA by the action of the enzyme RNA-polymerase derived from bacteria. Here, finally, was an argument for the universality of the genetic mechanism that was completely convincing. For no one could suggest that there was any special evolutionary kindship between the pea plant and the Escherichia coli bacillus that might cast doubt on the significance of the results. Nevertheless, pea-cell DNA had been found capable of operating the molecular mechanisms of E. coli not just to manufacture protein molecules, but to manufacture the precise type of protein molecules normally fabricated in the cells of pea plants. The experiment had demonstrated the existence in the pea plant and in the E. coli bacillus not only of grossly similar mechanisms but of mechanisms employing an identical “genetic code”—that is, an identical set of relationships connecting the sequence of bases along the backbone of the molecule of DNA and its messenger RNA, the particular kind of transfer RNA molecule attracted to each position along that backbone, and the particular kind of amino acid carried by each kind of transfer molecule. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
This was not just evidence for the existence in all cells of generally similar nucleic acid/enzyme control mechanisms; it was evidence for the existence of an impressive degree of detailed identity among the mechanisms of different organisms. It would be misleading to leave the impression that serious consideration of the possibility of a single genetic code applicable to all cells originated with this work. From the discovery that protein manufacture is controlled by the messenger RNA/transfer RNA mechanisms there was much speculation about the kinds of code that might relate the sequence of bases along the messenger RNA molecule with the various kinds of transfer RNA in order to array the amino acid segments properly. Because it was the simplest assumption, the idea of only one such code for all cells was from the importance of the Nirenberg-Matthaei and Bonner discoveries, however, for theirs was the first convincing evidence that nature, as well as the biologists, had decided to make such a simplification. However, still another question was suggested to Nirenberg and Matthaei by their line of investigation: “If the addition of RNA from another organism to the nucleic acid/enzyme apparatus of the E. coli bacillus could stimulate the manufacture of protein products, what would happen if a synthetic RNA was added instead?” To be sure, the techniques available to Nirenberg and Matthaei caused their man-made product to fall far short of natural RNA in complexity of structure—they could not put nucleic acid molecules together with precisely known structure unless they contained, say, only one of the four bases. However, they reasoned, such simplicity might actually be an advantage in early attempts to study the details of the metabolic control processes. Therefore, they devised an experiment using the simplest possible kind of man-made RNA: polyuridylic acid, and RN with the monotonous base sequence UUUUUUUUUUUU…#RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The experiment worked: the addition of synthetic RNA to the E. coli extracts resulted in the appearance of protein! A significant question, again, was: “What kind of protein?” There was a considerable logical appeal in the answer, when it was finally provided by chemical analysis of the end product. For the protein—a chain composed of a single amino acid, monotonously repeated. The particular kind of amino acid that was pulled out of the solution (which contained abundant supplies of all 20 amino acids) and incorporated into the protein under the direction of the polyuridylic acid type of RNA turned out to be the amino acid phenylalanine. Here was indeed an exciting discovery, for it constituted nothing less than a start toward the actual deciphering of the genetic code. Evidently the base sequence UUUUUUUUUUUU…in the messenger RNA was translated by the genetic mechanisms into the amino acid sequence phenylalanine, phenylalanine, phenylalanine…in the resulting protein molecule. It the past, it was already mentioned that, by a combination of experiment and theory, workers in the field had concluded it to be likely that each molecule of transfer RN attaches to the messenger RNA by the conjugation of three pairs of bases. In terms of this hypothesis, and the known affinity of the U and A bases, the Nirenberg-Matthaei discovery was interpreted as implying that the particular kind of transfer RNA that carries the amino acid phenylalnine is characterized by a sequence of three unconjugated A bases at its hairpin bend. The Nirenberg-Matthaei technique was quickly extended. For example, messenger RNA composed solely of cytidylic acid was found to cause the manufacture of protein molecules consisting entirely of the amino acid proline. More sophisticated experiments were also devised that employed synthetic RNA molecules containing a small amount of one of the other nucleotides in addition to uridylic acid. (Techniques of synthesis permitted combining known proportions of the four nucleotides to form RNA, although the precise sequence of the nucleotides in the molecule remained unknow.) #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Such messenger RNA in the E. coli extracts resulted in the production of protein products including not only phenylalanine but also occasional “instructions” of other amino acids. By relating the frequency of occurrence of such other amino acids to the probabilities of occurrence in the RNA molecule of triplet combinations other than UUU, it was found possible to develop shrewd guesses as to many probable correspondences between specific messenger RNA triplet base sequences and specific resulting amino acids in the protein structure. And recently H. G. Khorana, of the University of Wisconsin, announced a technique whereby synthetic RNA molecules can be tailored to consist of a successive repetition along backbone of known triads—UAU UAU UAU UAU UAU, for example. By the use of such molecules of messenger RNA in combination with the usual E. coli extracts, work is being speeded on the development of a dictionary connecting the various possible base triplets in messenger RNA with the particular amino acids that they are responsible for in the finally assembled protein molecules. We will consider more of this exciting information on the next report. For now, it is time to move on to another subject. Milieu therapy and token economy programs helped to improve the gloomy outlook for patients with schizophrenia, but it was the discover of antipsychotic drugs in the 1950s that truly revolutionized treatment for this disorder. These drugs eliminate many of its symptoms and today are almost always a part of treatment. What is more, they have influenced the way clinicians now view schizophrenia. In the effectiveness of antipsychotic drugs, an early influential study found that after six weeks of treatment, 75 percent of patients with schizophrenia who had been given antipsychotic drugs were much improved, compared to only 25 percent of patients given placebos. In fact, close to half on those placebos worsened. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The discovery of antipsychotic medications dates back to the 1940s, when researchers developed the first antihistamine drugs to combat allergies. Although antihistamines also produced considerable tiredness and drowsiness, they quickly became popular, and many such drugs were developed. The French surgeon Henri Laborit soon discovered that one group of antihistamines, phenothiazines, could also be used to help clam patients about to undergo surgery. After experimenting with several phenothiazine antihistamines and becoming most impressed with one called chlorpromazine, Laborit reported, “It provokes not any loss of consciousness, not any change in the patient’s mentality but a slight tendency to sleep and above all ‘disinterest’ for all that goes on around him.” Dr. Laborit suspected that chlorpromazine might also have a calming effect on persons with severe psychological disorders. The psychiatrists Jean Delay and Pierre Deniker (1952) therefore tested the drug on six patients with psychotic symptoms and did indeed observe a sharp reduction in their symptoms. In 1954, chlorpromazine was approved for sale in the United States of America as an antipsychotic drug under the trade name Thorazine. Since the discovery of the phenothiazines, other kinds of antipsychotic drugs have been developed. The ones developed throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s are now referred to as “conventional” antipsychotic drugs in order to distinguish them from the “atypical” antipsychotics that have been developed in recent years. The conventional drugs are also known as neuroleptic drugs because they often produce undesired movements effects similar to the symptoms of neurological diseases. Among the best known conventional drugs are thioridazine (Mellaril), fluphenazine (Prolixin), trifluoperazine (Stelazine), and haloperidol (Haldol). Antipsychotic drugs reduce the symptoms of schizophrenia at least in part by blocking excessive activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine, particularly at the brain’s dopamine D-2 receptors. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
We have in America a mystique of “production” and a man engaged in “production” is highly esteemed. This attitude is entirely specious. Of five ways in which production can be increased: Expect in wartime we do not try to increase the labour supply; we do not try to encourage new enterprises; in most industries, we do not try for technological innovation. All the stress is laid on full employment, and efficient use of present capital. However, another factor of productivity that concerns us here: to increase the aptitude and skill of each lad. Indeed, as we have tried to show, rather than encouraged it is systematically retarded. It would not today be said, as it used to be, that Americans are born mechanics. Among the model heroes of the young we do not think of Edison, Burbank, Ford, Steinmetz, and so forth. It is anachronistic to mention their names. The juvenile literary and pictorial image of the inventor and scientist has correspondingly changed. Two generations ago it was a kindly bumbling old fool, unkempt but stubborn and brave, and with a light of divine truth in his eyes. A generation ago science began to be altogether strange and the scientist began to be a surgeon with rubber gloves or a cold manic with diabolic power in his eyes. However, this stereotype is forbidden today, for strategic reasons, and the scientist is now a young, neatly dressed, co-operative Organization Man holding up some apparatus that proves his role, but nothing in his eyes at all, at all. However, he is having fun. The claim of the organized system is that research and invention are in their nature increasingly corporative and anonymous, and this produces great results. That is debatable. I doubt that very much is corporatively invented which is not pretty directly dictated by managerial need and policy, whereas the essence of invention is to be hitherto-unthought-of—though, of course, there occurs the rich comedy of administrators anxiously waiting for mathematicians to turn up with something “useful,” and never knowing what goes on behind those spectacles. (I have a mathematician friend who bills his firm for overtime because he tends to think of things in bed about 2 A.M. and his attitude is that they can take it or leave it.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Certainly the following example is not untypical: A gifted food chemist puts in six months developing a formula; he is successful and the product is going to be pushed with a million-dollar campaign; it is, in his opinion, identical with———-Mayonnaise, the popular brand. (In this case the scientist suddenly decided to quit and to set himself up as an independent consultant, hoping that people would come in with real problems.) Proof on this kind of issue is difficult. On the one side, the corporations, having pre-empted much of the talent, point proudly to inventions made under their auspices, as if they might not have been made anyway. On the other side, their opponents argue from inventions-that-have-not-been-made, a peculiar metaphysical category, exempli gratia, “If all the capital and research had not gone into internal combustion engines, by now we should have much superior steam or electric cars.” It may be said definitely that research entailing million-dollar equipment and vast samplings of the populace cannot be carried on without corporative or state sponsorship; yet many would deny that this style of research, and expense of social wealth, is so fruitful as the old American shoestring operator of the seventeenth-century gentleman-philosopher with his dumb-bunny apparatus and towering intellect. We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least, hard-working thought they may be. Also, inventions made outside the organization are notoriously bought up and withheld or otherwise sabotaged by the organization. (To my conscience, this practice, of keeping basic new ideas in limbo until it is profitable to exploit them, is immoral and disruptive of the community of humankind far more than rigged quiz shows, but it comes from the same box, whose label is Intellect Bought.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
So we return to the President of Merck and Company, who hauled before a Senate investigation of charges that Merck and its semimonopolistic “competitors” were criminally overpricing drugs, warned the Senators that they might “upset the delicate balance we have been able to develop over the years between the quest for scientific knowledge on the other.”!! Quo usque tandem. The situation of a young fellow is ironical. If he has reached college age and has technical aptitude, the most desperate attempts are made to get him for this or that firm. They pay for his schooling and guarantee him a job. Meantime, the systematic behaviour of those firms has been to baffle aptitude in the young and to limit it where it has survived. It is in this context that we must listen to Dr. Conant’s recommendations for the high school: the selection of academically talented, the top 15 percent, to major in a program of mathematics and sciences. No effect is made to increase the pool of ability; and the public schools are, effectually, to be used as apprentice training grounds for the monopolies and the armed forces. Across the planet today, we find three markedly different wealth-making systems, crudely symbolized by the plow, the assembly line and the computer. The first thing we need to know is that much of what today passes for “fundamental” is not present in all of them. For example, while “a strong manufacturing sector” virtually defines the industrial wealth system, it was a vestigial in pre-industrial less affluent economies—and still is in many parts of the World. Again, while the Federal Reserve and central banks in general have played a key role throughout the industrial age, they did not exist as such in preindustrial societies, and they may not in the future. No less a worthy than the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, has suggested that they may disappear, since many of their functions will no longer be needed or will be carried out automatically by the electronic infrastructure. Among the many so-called fundamentals, in short, some are relevant only for societies at one stage of development and not another. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
By contrast, some fundamentals are so vital to wealth creation that they matter in all economies, at all stages of development, in all cultures and every civilization, past, or present. These are the deep fundamentals. “Wanted,” the noticed might have read, “Spiritual community for determinedly single, rebellious, and politically astute professional women.” The time and place: late-nineteenth-century England. The plays: the “silent strikers” described above, educated young women who opted for celibacy in protest against the double standard that clawed at them in every aspect of life—the law, the workplace, politics, overall society. In the 1880s, a generation of these woman matured to adulthood and set out on their personal journeys. One lively and ambitious group included writer/activist Beatrice Potter and novelists Margaret Harkness, Amy Levy, and Olive Schreiner. They choose to move out from under their fathers’ (overly patriarchal) roofs, but not into communal, single-sex residences such as those set up by an earlier wave of female teachers, nurses, and social workers. These young women were more adventurous and went off instead to live in their own lodgings. Compared to their comfortable childhood homes and neighbourhoods, these residences were extremely modest and deliberately chosen to be agreeably distant from those of their families. Central London was especially appealing, far away from prying, critical relatives. It permitted an ease and anonymity of movement. Best of all, so many like-minded women lived there that they formed, within the heart of the bustling metropolis, a community of kindred spirits whose mutual support was a continual reminder of what they wanted to achieve. None of this, however, made their lives easy. Independent or not, decent women did not wander about alone or eat alone. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Parts of London, as Virginia Woolf wrote in The Pargiters, were “as impassable, save with their mother, as any swamp alive with crocodiles.” And “to be seen alone in Piccadilly…was equivalent to walking up [residential] Abercorn Terrance in a dressing down carrying a sponge.” Despite these constraints, the determined young women set themselves up downtown and prepared to lead self-directed, satisfying, worthy, and celibate lives. These women differed from millions of others chaste working women supporting and discovering themselves in their own digs because their celibacy was a purely political stance. It has nothing to do with perceptions of morality, fear of pregnancy, or keeping pure until Prince Charming materialized with a proposal of marriage. Sometimes even the women were astonished that they had rejected bourgeois marriage and motherhood and had hammered out a notch for themselves in the real World of gritty, grimy London. As social worker Beatrice rhapsodized in her journal: “Who would have thought it,” [Maggie and I]…said constantly to one another, “when we two as schoolgirls stood on the moorland near Bournemouth…discussed our religious difficulties and gave vent to all out World-sorrow, and ended by prophesying we should in tend years be talking of cooks and baby linen…who would have thought of our real future?” Strengthen and deeply influenced by each other’s ideas and experiences, including Beatrice’s many stories about her needy clients, the woman produces an impressive body of work. All wrote about London’s less affluent, and all rejected the patronizing attitude of charitable middle-class women. Instead, they portrayed their subjects with empathic clarity. In her novel Out of Work, Maggie Harkness scarcely disguised her own tenements and melodramatically depicted the life of casual labourers down at the docks. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The proud celibate of women during these days sustained. They were too busy experiencing and working and enjoying life. This included romance—Beatrice, for example, dallied with (chastely, of course), then declined to marry, Radical politicians Joseph Chamberlain. No, their collective commitment to celibacy simply shored up their confidence and guarded them against succumbing to male dominance. Beatrice, who was intensely attracted to the much older, powerful, and prosperous Chamberlain, is an excellent case in point. Despite her feelings, she was frightened off because she recognized he was a dominant personality: “If the fates should unite us (against my will) all joy and lightheartedness will go from me. I shall be absorbed into the life of a man whose aims are not my aims; who will refuse me all freedom of thought in my intercourse with him; to whose career I shall have to subordinate all my life, mental and physical.” Yet despite its success, this spiritual community of celibate women was as vulnerable as other communes. The problem was not celibacy, its original glue, but ongoing life itself: money problems and professional achievement, emigration, and in the case of Amy Levy, profound, incurable melancholy. After nearly a decade, the women, parted ways, shutting the doors forever on their once tremendously productive celibate community. The community did not fail so much as wither away, a shriveled vine impervious to pollinating bees or restoring rainfall. In earlier times, it has borne profusely. Its luscious grapes had fermented into heady wines. They banished shyness and inspired ideas that, in their turn, gave birth to the prose and poetry that had been the community’s raison d’etre, tangible evidence that independent women could, in celibate community, create and succeed. Its heroines, however, faithful reflections of their now-dispersed authors, lived on in their fictional celibate communities, touching other women, moving some to stake their futures. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Everyone has a conscience, however there is much debate as to what it is. In his doctrine of conscience, Max Scheler opposes the popular conception of conscience as the “voice of God.” He calls this, as well as the quest for “freedom of conscience,” a principle of chaos. Instead of freedom of conscience, he demands subjection to authority as the only way of experiencing the intuitive evidence for moral principles. It is impossible to reach such evidence without personal experience, and it is impossible to have such an experience without acting under the guidance of an authority that is based on former experience. In this respect, ethical (we could say “existential”) experience is different from theoretical (id east, “detached”) experience. Although this completely fits the situation of the Catholic, it is not meant as the establishment of external authority. “All authority is concerned only with the good which is universally evident, never with that which is individually evident.” Ethical authority is based on general ethical evidence. However, does such general ethical evidence exist? Or is philosophical ethics bound to be either general and abstract or to be concrete and dependent on changing historical conditions? And if this is the alternative, can the problem of conscience be answered at all in terms of moral conscience? A conscience may be called “transmoral” if it judges not in obedience to a moral law, but according to its participation in a reality that transcends the sphere of moral commands. A transmoral conscience does not deny the moral realm, but is driven beyond it by the unbearable tensions of the sphere of law. It was Luther who derived a new concept of conscience from the experience of justification through faith; neither Paul nor Augustine did so. Luther’s experience grew out of the monastic scrutiny of conscience and the treat of the ultimate judgment, which he felt in its full depth and horror. Experience like these he called Anfechtungen, that is, “tempting attacks,” stemming from Satan as the tool of the divine wrath. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
These attacks are the most terrible thing a human being can experience. They create an incredible Angst (“dread”), a feeling of being enclosed in a narrow place from which there is no escape. (Angst, he rightly pointed out, is derived from angustiae, “narrows.”) “Thou drivest me from the surface of the Earth,” he cries to God in despair, even in hate. Luther describes this situation in many different ways. He compared the horrified conscience that tries to flee and cannot escape, with a goose that, pursued by the wolf, does not use its wings, as ordinarily, but its feet, and is caught. Or he tells us how the moving of dry leaves frightens him as the expression of the wrath of God. His conscience confirms the divine wrath and judgment. God say to him, “Thou canst not judge differently about thyself.” Such experiences are not dependent on special sins. The self, as such, is sinful before any act; it is separated from God, unwilling to love Him. If in this way bad conscience is deepened into a state of absolute despair, it can be conquered only by the acceptance of God’s self-sacrificing love as visible in the picture of Jesus Christ as the Christ. God, so to speak, subjects Himself to the consequences of His wrath, taking them upon himself, thus reestablishing unity with us. The sinner is accepted as just in spite of his sinfulness. The wrath of God does not frighten us any longer; a joyful conscience arises as much above the moral realm as the desperate conscience was below the moral realm as the moral realm. “Justification by grace,” in Luther’s sense, means the creation of a “transmoral” conscience. While God is the accuser in the Anfechtung and our heart tries to excuse itself, in the “justification” our heart accuses us and God defends us against ourselves. In psychological terms this means: insofar as we look at ourselves, we must experience a desperate conscience; insofar as we look at the power of a new creation beyond ourselves, we can attain a joyful conscience. Not because of our moral perfection, but in spite of our moral imperfection, we are fighting and triumphing on the side of God. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
As in Durer’s famous painting, “Knight, Death and the Devil,” the knight goes through the narrows in the attitude of victorious defiance of dread and temptation. There is not much that an individual can do in time of great general catastrophe, such as the mass horror of war. However, even then, the hope and faith of an existence higher than the present one is not without its value. At such times one must lean back, draw a deep breath, and remark as Abraham Lincoln did during the most morbid hours of the U.S Civil War: “This too will pass.” The coming of war brings its own anxieties. This is when one has to draw upon one’s spiritual knowledge to get the strength and courage to endure bravely special trials and tribulations. It is only at such times of crisis that all higher interest gets the chance to prove their solid worth, for without their inner support and some kind of understanding of what it all means, life becomes most inhumanly alarming. One may have found glimpses of inner peace from time to time and now one has to insert these into his external life and try to stretch them out through constant remembrance of the Real. Such frequent communion and intelligent remembrance can give one the strength to go on, the peace to put up with frustrations, doubts, and fears, and faith in what is still beyond one’s conscious knowledge, the satisfaction that the years are not being wasted. All other duties become better fulfilled when one fulfils this supreme duty of realizing the ever-present reality within the heart. Indeed they cannot be separated from it for through them Reality can express itself. It is not palatable to hold the thought that humanity is so bad, or else its rulers so misguided, that little or nothing can be done to save it. Yet if it happens to be a true thought, we ought to be so strong enough to accept it and acknowledge that there are times when such a defeatist outlook is justified and necessary. It does not usually pay to be pessimistic but that need not prevent our facing unpalatable facts. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The evil one has no opportunity to fight in the larger World outside, one has every opportunity to fight in the smaller World inside one’s own person. With destruction awaiting modern civilization, it is useless to look for a safer refuge than in finding the peace and strength of the Overself. For if we do that, we shall also be led by it to do what may be physically needful too. If the greater knowledge brings greater power, it also brings greater responsibility. The more one receives from the Overself’s grace, the more should one give to humanity’s need. Let others pray for the passenger pigeon, the dodo, the whooping crane, the Inuit: everyone must specialize. I will confine myself to a meditation upon the giant tortoises, withering finally on a remote island. I concentrate in subway stations, in parks, I cannot quite see them, they move to the peripheries of my eyes, but on the last day they will be there; already the event, like a wave travelling shapes vision: on the road where I stand they will materialize, plodding past me in a straggling line awkward without water, their small heads pondering from side to side, their useless armour sadder than thanks and history, in their closed gaze ocean and sunlight paralysed, lumbering up the steps, under the archways toward the square glass altars where the brittle gods are kept, the relics of what we have destroyed, our holy and obsolete symbols. “If My people, who are called by My name, shall humble themselves, pray, seek, crave, and require of necessity My face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from Heaven, forgive their sin, and heal this land,” reports II Chronicles 8.14. Beware lest you forget the Lord your God, and forsake His commandments. When you have eaten and are satisfied, and have built goodly houses, and dwelt therein, when your herds and your flocks increased, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all you have is multiped, beware lest your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God, and you say in your heart: “My own power, and the might of my hand has gotten me this wealth.” You shall remember the Lord you God, for it is He that hath given you the power to get wealth. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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In the Cup of Omens there is a Baptism into Black Magic!
In popular thinking, the term “magic” refers to the tricks of a sleight-of-hand artist, the optical illusions created by a clever trickster, or the cunning exhibition of seemingly supernatural powers by money-hungry charlatans. Undoubtedly many of the amazing demonstrations performed by such people have a completely naturalistic explanation, but honest scholars who have investigated occultic phenomena in many parts of the World agree that science at present is unable to account for some of the apparently supernatural events they have witnessed. The Bible also sets forth the view that not all magic is merely hocus-pocus. In the Biblical portrayal of magic, the Scriptures acknowledge that real superhuman power can be accomplished through sorcery, but clearly teach that the source of such manifestations is evil. The Egyptian magicians actually were able to change their rods into serpents by throwing them on the ground. Some say these rods were really snakes which had been hypnotized into becoming as rigid as a cane, but even so we must admit that no scientist today can explain how these men were able to perform this feat. They also were successful in changing water into blood, and in producing a miraculous multiplication of frogs, thus apparently duplicating what Moses and Aaron had done by God’s supernatural power. The Egyptian sorcerers undoubtedly believed their gods gave them the ability to perform these amazing exploits, and they viewed their encounter with Moses and Aaron as a contest to determine whether or not their gods were more powerful than God. The Bible implies that supernatural beings take advantage of the practices of heathenism to further enslave their adherents, but declares that these invisible agents are neither holy angels nor gods. It states that they are demons—spirit beings who rebelled against God and now are dedicated to Him. For this reason, Moses and Aaron convincingly demonstrated the superiority of God over these demonic forces. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
When Aaron’s rod became a serpent, it swallowed up those the Egyptians had cast to the ground. The greater power of God also was manifested when the pagan sorcerers were unable to remove the plague of frogs, but Moses simply prayed to the Lord, and “the frogs died out of the houses, out of the villages, and out of the fields,” reports Exodus 8.13. God’s servants then brought about the third plague, a changing of dust into lice, a judgment which made life almost unbearable for human and beast. This time the magicians of Egypt were unable to duplicate the miracle, not could they bring about the sudden death of the pests. They therefore humbly acknowledged, “This is the finger of God,” reports Exodus 8.19. In this manner, the Lord demonstrated His absolute superiority over the powers of evil which the Egyptians worshiped as gods. It does important for us to note again that the Bible does not indicate that the magicians were frauds. A careful study of this history of Egypt, Babylon, and other nations of antiquity reveals that heathen priests accomplished many unusual feats, and kept the people under subjection through what appeared to be supernatural abilities. In seeking to understand some of the mysterious phenomena of heathenism, we must bear in mind the declaration of the apostle Paul, “But I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons,” reports 1 Corinthians 10.20. The apostle was definitely saying that the worship of idols involved more than merely bowing down to lifeless images. Furthermore, the fact that the Bible repeatedly forbids sorcery, divination, and every other form of occultism is evidence that God links these practices with actual demonic power. We repeat, the death penalty would not have been the prescribed punishment for all mediums, fortunetellers, and sorcerers if they were only quacks guilty of deception for gain. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Critics of the Bible insist that its attitude toward some forms of witchcraft is inconsistent, and even sincere believers have been puzzled by several passages which appear to condone these practices. A careful examination of these instances, however, reveals that such critical assertions are unwarranted. Genesis 30: 14-18 records the story of Leah and Rachel bargaining for mandrakes, showing that they believed these so-called “love apples” increased a woman’s fertility. However, the fact that Jacob’s wives held to this ancient concept does not necessarily indicate that the Bible expresses approval. Then, too, modern investigation has shown that some primitive medicines, scorned by medics a generation or two ago, actually do possess qualities which make them valuable. At any rate, this passage of Scripture does not indicate that the Bible encouraged the use of magic. In another instance of apparent superstition, Jacob peeled the bark from saplings to give them a spotted appearance become he believed that they offspring of the cattle bred before them would then be speckled and spotted. This story is declared to be an indication that the writer of Genesis held to the notion that the colour of the unborn young would be affected by what the female animal saw at the time of impregnation. (See Genesis 30.37-43.) A careful study of the entire account reveals, however, the truth that God actually was controlling the breeding process through the laws of heredity, not by means of Jacob’s efforts. The angel of the Lord later told the patriarch that the male animals possessed genetic characteristics which brought about the birth of so many striped, speckled, and spotted animals. (See Genesis 31.11-12.) Therefore, we can assert with confidence that this passage of Scripture in no way encourages the use of magic. The statement of Joseph to his brothers about his silver cup also poses a problem for Bible students, because his words seem to indicate that he used it for purposes of divination. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
After the steward had hidden the cup in Benjamin’s sack of grain, Joseph told him what he was to do and say. The King James Version records Joseph’s instructions as follows, “Up, follow after them men; and when thou dost overtake them, say unto them, Wherefore have ye rewarded evil for good? Is not this it in which my Lord drinketh, and whereby indeed he divineth? Ye have done evil in so doing” (Genesis 44.4-5). Scholars today know that the heathen sorcerers of Joseph’s day often sprinkled small particles of gold or sliver into a cup of water, or poured a small amount of oil in it, and then “read” the resulting design in the cup of omens. While it is possible that Joseph fell into this sinful and heathenish practice, we doubt very much that he did, for he had one of the finest characters of all the men portrayed in the entire Old Testament. In addition, we can present good reason for our conviction that Joseph never really used the coup to find out about the unknown. In the first place, Joseph did not need such sources of information. God had spoken to him through dreams and other forms of revelation, and therefore Joseph did possess knowledge ordinarily hidden to humans. In that sense he was able to “divine.” His instruction to his steward may be translated, “Is it not from this cup that my Lord drinks, and concerning which he will assuredly divine?” In other words, Joseph made it clear that he possessed a power which would enable him to find out what happened to the cup. (We must remember that Joseph was play-acting in order to test his brothers. He wanted them to be puzzled by the knowledge he possessed, and did not want to disclose his real identity at this time. For this reason, he did not speak of obtaining information directly from God.) This interpretation of verse 5 fits well with the statement of Joseph recorded in verse 15, “What deed is this that ye have done? Know ye not that such a man as I can certainly divine?” #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
He let his brothers know that he was a special person with unusual powers of perception, but did not reveal the source of his ability. Later he told them about his faith in God. Therefore, the story of Joseph and the silver cup is certainly not an indication of Biblical approval of magic, and the likelihood exists that Joseph never practiced the heathen customs of his day. Certain elements of the Mosaic law sometimes are thought to be a form of magic. In Numbers 5, for example, we are told that if a man suspected his wife of unfaithfulness, he was to take her to the priest for trial. The woman would then drink a liquid potion to determine her guilt or innocence. If certain physical results became apparent immediately, she was deemed guilty. If not, she was innocent. On the surface this appears to be a superstitious practice, but when we remember that Israel lived under a theocracy and that God has ordained this test, we can believe He would in this manner declare infallibly the guilt or innocence of the person being tried. The Urim and Thummim as a means of revelation and the long hair of Samson as the secret of his strength are further examples of divinely ordered and controlled phenomena which cannot be compared to the magic of the heathen. Therefore, we can say assuredly that nothing in the Old Testament or the New can be properly interpreted as divine sanction of sorcery or magic. Shortly before the Exile, the prophet Ezekiel delivered a scorching denunciation of women who were using amulets and veils in a magic ritual to bring joy or sadness, blessing or cursing, even life or death to certain individuals. “Likewise, thou son of man, set thy face against the daughters of thy people, who prophesy out of their own heart, and prophesy thou against them, and say, Thus saith the Lord God: Woe to the women that sew amulets upon all wrists, and make kerchiefs for the head of every person of stature to hunt souls! Will ye hunt the souls of my people, and will ye save the souls alive that come unto you? And will ye pollute me among my people for handfuls of barley and for pieces of bread, to slay the souls that should not die, and to save the souls alive that should not live, by your lying to my people that hear you lies? #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
“Wherefore, thus saith the LORD GOD: Behold, I am against your amulets, with which ye there hunt the souls to make them fly; and I will tear them from your arms, and will let the souls go, even the souls that ye hunt to make them fly. Your kerchiefs also will I tear, and deliver my people out of your hand, and they shall be no more in your hand, and they shall be no more in your hand to be hunted; and ye shall know that I am the LORD. Because with lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad, who I have not made sad; and strengthened the hands of the wicked, that he should not return from his wicked way, by promising him life; therefore, ye shall see no more vanity, nor divine divinations; for I will deliver my people out of your hand; and ye shall know that I am the LORD,” reports Ezekiel 13.17-23. Exactly what these women did is not easy to ascertain. Some Bible students have conjectured that they performed a rite in which they symbolically bound up the soul of a person so that the individual would gradually waste away and die. Then, for a fee they would bring about his release. Other scholars think that Ezekiel describes features of “sympathetic magic,” whereby the sorceress fastened something around her own wrists or enshrouded her own head to place a curse upon a specific individual. In either case, the practice of these women appeared to have consequences so serious as to warrant divine condemnation and a prophetic declaration that God would deliver His people from their grasp. The Old Testament acknowledges the existence of real magic, and consistently condemns it in every form. Furthermore, the rites and ceremonies prescribed for Israel were not equivalent to the practices of the heathen, but were instructions that came directly from God and over which He would exercise control. At the very threshold of human history stands God’s command, “Fill the Earth and subdue it,” reports Genesis 1.28. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The task and right of man was the peaceful conquest of the Earth’s powers in accordance with the will of God. In opposition to this command Satan, the great master of confusion came and put forward his arch-temptation, “You will be like God knowing good and evil,” reports Genesis 3.5. Magic is the very antithesis of the commandment of God as it reveals a hunger for knowledge and a desire for power in opposition to the will of God. When faced with this temptation humankind was at the crossroads. The decision has to be made. Either voluntary subordination to the will of God or rebellion against His statues and His ordinances caused by a greed for power and a desire for knowledge. The decision still faces us today. We either conform to God’s revealed way of salvation or we carry on the rebellion, trying to rule the created World in unforgivable opposition to God. Magic is thus at its roots a rebellion, and it has been so from the beginning. It is the climax of man’s revolt against God. Any talk of harmless forces of nature and neutral applications is criminal in the light of this scriptural fact. On the surface, parapsychology (the science of extrasensory experience) still recognizes something of the double nature of magic. The differentiation is made between Psi-Gamma phenomena and Psi-Kappa phenomena. (Gamma representing gignoskein, to perceive; kappa representing kinein, to move). Here we have again the two basic elements of magic: knowledge and power through supernatural means. Through a great deal of pastoral work, I have noticed four ways in which magical powers can originate. These are through heredity, subscription of oneself to the devil, occult experiments and occult transference. The evidence drawn from many actual case histories goes to prove that magical abilities can be passed on by means of heredity. Often mediumistic powers can be traced back over three or four generations in one family. There are two possibilities here, one being that it is a matter of the genes and the other that it is a matter of succession. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
By this we mean the custom of a person on one’s deathbed actually bestowing the magical abilities upon the eldest son or daughter in order to die peacefully. Often tragic scenes occur when the children do not want to have these abilities passed on to them. A person may cry out for weeks on his deathbed for someone to relieve him of his magical powers. Sometimes a distant relative or an outsider is willing to accept the succession. The reason for this may differ from case to case, be it pity, curiosity or maybe lust for power. The death of some magicians can drag on over a period of weeks till the office of “succession” has been settled. This is not an apostolic but a diabolic succession. Magical powers on the other hand may originate through subscription to the devil. One can see in this the counterpart to baptism. To every event recorded in the Bible, there seems to be a demonic parallel to it in the field of magic. Subscription to the devil accounts for some of the most terrible and formidable cases met with by Christian workers. For example, in Paris there is an occult church with the name or title, “We Worship the Prince of this World.” This church has sister congregations in Basle and berne, and a few decades ago one was opened in Rome. In order to become a member of this church, one has to subscribe oneself to the devil. This is a baptism into black magic! For years a man in Toggenburg, Switzerland, had a flourishing practice as a nature healer and charmer. He could even sure come people who the doctors had given up as hopeless. He had healed the blind, the lame, cases of advanced cancer, tuberculosis, leukemia, multiple sclerosis, scleroderma and other serious diseases. On one occasion however, the man’s own personal need came to the surface. He said, “I can help others, but for myself there is no help, no not in all eternity!” In his youth the man had subscribed himself to the devil. It was since that time that he had obtained his unearthly healing ability. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Another way in which magical powers may develop is through experimenting with occultism. A Swiss factory worker grew tired of his job. Since he had often heard that occult healers and mesmerizers made a lot of money, he bought some magic charms, underwent various devil ceremonies and then began healing experiments. His magic healing ability developed rapidly and ultimately his income surpassed his previous earnings many times over. The next example will illustrate all three factors together, that is, the factors of heredity, subscription and experimenting in occultism. A young woman told me this story. Here great-grandmother had subscribed herself to the devil with her own blood. She had practiced black magic and had healed both animals and people. On her deathbed she had suffered terribly as is often the cause with magic conjurers. The daughter, that is the grandmother of my storyteller, took over the magic powers of her mother. The magic literature of her mother also passed into her hands. Later the apparition of the great-grandmother was seen by the relatives. The grandmother however, continued to practice magic. During nights of the full moon, she would charm diseases. She was also in the habit of using a key suspended over a Bible as a pendulum, and she could also successfully stop people from bleeding. If she ever attempted to read the Bible, she found it quite a trial. As she grew older, she began to see black figures in her home, and finally when she died it was again an unpleasant time. Her ghost was also seen after her departure. The story went on that the young woman’s mother had then taken over the magical literature and practices. She too had become a well-known healer, but her fate had been the same as her predecessors’. The fourth member in this terrible line of succession was not the young woman. As a small child, her mother had cast spells over her. Shortly after this, she had become clairvoyant and had also begun to see black figures in the house. Her brother and sister had suffered from depression and she herself had has serious psychic and nervous disturbances which had led her to seek the help of a minister. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Occult transference is the fourth source of magical powers. A young man told me that he had once had three black magicians lay their hands on his head and murmur some magic charms over him. He had afterwards possessed magic abilities which astonished even the family doctor. The doctor had investigated his powers and had to acknowledge that they were genuine. The laying on of the hands of the magicians would again be a counterpart to the scriptural laying on of hands. Another example, a young man saw someone searching for water with a pendulum. He was asked if he would like to have a go, but the pendulum did not react in his hand. When the dowser took hold of his hands, though, the pendulum had at once reacted. Later when he had tried to repent the experiment by himself, he was again successful, and he discovered that he now had the ability to search for water with both a rod or a pendulum. Yet the young man felt a change in his Christian life. Previously he had been regular in his reading of the Bible and in prayer. After this transference of pendulum ability, however, his love for the Word of God and for prayer declined. Spirits are not normally subject to human visibility or other sensory perception. God’s universe operates undeviatingly in accordance with the purpose for which He created it. The all-wise and all-powerful Creator is not permitting Satan and demons to throw his ordered Universe into confusion by violating the laws he has established. Nor is He permitting His own people to do so through haphazard miracles. Though not ignoring the laws of nature, God’s Word also recognizes the possible transcendence of natural law in divine miracle both in good supernaturalism (Exodus 14.19-31; 17: 5-7; Joshua 3.16-17; 6.20; John 2.9; 11:44) and in evil supernaturalism (Exodus 7.10-11, 22; 8.7; 2 Thessalonians 2.8-10; Revelation 13.15). #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
When natural law is transcended by divine miracle, the natural eye may see the spiritual reality. An illustration is provided in 2 Kings 6.17. In answer to Elisha’s prayer, the Lord “opened the eyes” of the prophet’s servant who saw “the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.” In like manner Elisha saw the “chariot of fire, and horses of fire” when Elijah went up by a whirlwind into Heaven (2 Kings 2.11). Similarly John saw the demons coming up from the abyss in their last-day eruption as locusts (Revelation 9.1-12). He also saw the three hideous demons issuing from the months of the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet as froglike spirits (Revelation 16.13-14). The apocalyptic seer glimpsed these fouls spirits prophetically and by supernatural vision. However, when they are sent against human, they will be invisible to the natural eye. Their presence will be known by the excruciating pain they inflict and the gross deception they cause. The harm they inflict will be inescapable, because their victims will be unable to shield themselves from an invisible enemy. However, spirits can become discernible to humans through transcendence of natural law. Evil spirits may be seen and communicated through an intermediary or medium. Just as Peter and Paull saw and talked with an angel (Acts 5.19; 27: 23-24), so human beings today can communicate with evil spirits through magic rites and incantations. Communication with the demon World results in supernatural manifestations, but these, strictly speaking, are not miraculous. Occult enslavement and extrasensory phenomena await people who enter the realm from which God would protect his own people (Deuteronomy 18.10-11) and against which He solemnly warns (Leviticus 19.31; 20.27; 1 Samuel 28.9; 1 Timothy 4.1, 2;1 John 4.1-3). When humans ignore God’s warnings and enter a forbidden realm, they may witness materializations, levitations, and luminous apparitions, as well as experience spirit rappings, trances, automatic writing, magic phenomena, clairvoyance, oral and written communications and other forms of spiritistic phenomena. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Such manifestations are not miracles. They represent the operation of the occult within a certain well-defined sphere tolerated by God. Occult subjection and oppression are the inevitable penalties to all who traffic in the realm of evil supernaturalism. The Scriptures are markedly reticent on the matter of spirits being seen by humans. Here again, the Bible stands in contrast to ethnic and rabbinic systems. Multitudes of demons in bizarre forms are described in ancient semitic demonology. Rabbinic demonology, for example, divides demons into two classes: one composed of purely spiritual beings, the other of half-spirits. The latter were though to have a psycho-sarcous constitution that involved them in physical needs and functions. Although the Bible is silent concerning such “halbgeister,” they would seem to be what the offspring of the angels and mortal women (Genesis 6:1-4) might have been, half-angelic and half-human monsters. Many spiritualists say they accept the Christian Bible as the Word of God. To understand it, however, spiritualists go to the control spirit in the séances, and the spirits reputedly give the proper interpretation. Spiritualists frequently ask, “Why go to the Bible, when you can go directly to the spirit and receive personal instruction from such people as Moses, Abraham, Joshua, Isaiah, David, Peter, James, John, and Paul—even the Master himself?” With that kind of opportunity, few spiritualists prefer to read the Bible—and hence they know little of what it teaches. For the Christian, 2 Timothy 3.16-17, is a key teaching regarding the inspiration and purpose of Scripture: “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfectly, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.” Spiritualists do not accept the plain meaning of that verse, and they distort another key verse, 2 Peter 1.21, which speaks of “holy men of God” producing prophecy “by the Holy Ghosts.” Spiritualists say this means that the prophets were inspired by the spirits. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Dr. Moses Hull, an accepted authority among spiritualists, wrote in Biblical Spiritualism, a book he published in 1895: “The Bible is, I think, one of the best of the sacred books of the ages. It is supposedly the sacred fountain from which two, if not three, of the great religions of the World have flowed…While the Bible is not the infallible or immaculate book that many have supposed it to be, no one can deny that it is a great book…Yet it must be confessed that the age of critical analysis of all its sayings and its environments has hardly dawned…John R. Shannon said to his Denver audience, ‘We do not believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. The dogma that every word of the Bible is supernaturally dictated is false. It ought to be shelved away…Verbal inspiration is a superstitious theory; it has turned multitudes in disgust from the Bible; it has led thousands into infidelity; it has led to savage theological warfare’…All these facts would show, if brought out, that the Bible, like all other books, is exceedingly human in its origin. While the Bible is, none of it infallible, none of it unerring—when rightly interpreted it is all of it useful; all of it good. Even the parts which the people called infidels have ridiculed the most, become beautiful when examined in the light of modern spiritualism. In the following chapters the sacred light of spiritualism is applied to the Bible and it becomes indeed a ‘lamp unto our feet and a light to our path.’” To show something of how spiritualists interpret Scripture, I have chosen five examples from Hull’s book. Isaiah 21.4-5. “My heart panted, fearful affrighted me: the night of my pleasure hath he turned into fear unto me. Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink; arise, ye prices, and anointed the shield.” The spiritualists interprets the phrase “prepare the table” as meaning a table to be used for spirit manifestation at a séance. Ezekiel 9.4-6. “And the Lord said unto him, Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
“And to the other he said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through the city, and smite; let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity; slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women; but come not near any man upon whom is the mark and begin at my sanctuary. Then they began at the ancient men which were before the house.” Dr. Hull comments: “Ezekiel was considered an excellent medium, but like many of the nineteenth century he makes wrong predictions. It is thought that very few, if any, of his predictions ever met their accomplishments.” Amos 7.7. “Thus he shewed me: and, behold, the Lord stood upon a wall made by a plumbline, with a plumbline in his hand.” Hull writes: “Mediums see such manifestations in connection with departed human spirits nearly every day.” Acts 8.26-30. “And the angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, Arise, and go toward the south…and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch…had come to Jerusalem for to worship, was returning, and sitting in his chariot read Esaias the prophet. Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to this chariot. And Philip ran thither to him.” Dr. Hull asserts that Philip was carried by a control spirit to speak to the Ethiopian. Galatians 1.11-12. “But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.” In his handbook for spiritualist, Hull concludes from this text that the Apostle Paul received the gospel by spirit revelation through the mediumship of Jesus. It is noteworthy that to both the spiritualist and the Christian, Satan is God’s archenemy. I was at a séance one time when Satan supposedly entered. It ended abruptly, and we were told it was because of the presence of an evil spirit. It is tragic that many spiritualists never realize they are being deceived by this very devil who can ingeniously adapt his tactics to lure any type of prey. Satan is openly honoured, of course, by some practitioners of the so-called “black arts” or “black magic.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Generally, some of these people are obsessed with hexes and spells, sexual indulgence, weird rituals, and hints of violence. Spiritualists, who consider themselves followers of God and the “good spirits,” regard such people as self-centered “spiritists” who follow the “bad spirits.” However, these “good” and “bad” spirits serve the same master, Satan, and serve him well, because they each give their followers what Satan dispenses: a sense of goodness and of guidance without dependence on Christ; and a sense of power and self-fulfillment in defiance of God’s commands. However, many spirits do believe in God, and the Christian Bible says there is a Holy Spirit and Angels that guide us, and in many cases, these spirits do prevent people from facing hardships, and these people still depend on Christ. So, it is really hard to generalize and give Satan so much power. Nonetheless, all people are baffled by occult mysteries! Revelations 13.14 says, “Satan’s representative deceiveth them that dwell on the Earth by means of those miracles which he had power to do.” Generally, people think of miracles and blessings as good omens. So, everyone has to make their own decisions as to what they believe, but many people on Earth are always looking for evidence of the supernatural because the very fact that we live on a globe that floats in the sky and provides of with nature and fruit and meat, and sun and a nightlight at night is evidence of a supernatural power. Once upon a time, at the instigation of a ghost, a lawsuit took place at Downpartick in 1685. The account of this was given to Baxter by Thomas Emlin, “a worthy preacher in Dublin,” as well as by Claudius Gilbert, one of the principal parties therein concerned: the latter’s son and namesake proved a liberal benefactor to the Library of Trinity College—some of his books have been consulted for the present work. It appears that for some time past there had been dispute about the tithes of Drumbeg, a little parish about four miles outside Belfast, between Mr. Gilbert, who was vicar of that town, and the Archdeacon of Down, Lemuel Matthews, whom Cotton in his Fasti describes as “a man of considerable talents and legal knowledge, but of a violent overbearing temper, and a litigious disposition.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The parishioners of Drumbeg favoured Gilbert, and generally paid the tithes to him as being the incumbent in possession; but the Archdeacon claimed to be the lawful recipient, in support of which claim he produced a warrant. In the execution of this by his servants at the house of Charles Lostin, one of the parishioners, they offered some violence to his wife Margaret, who refused them entrance, and who died about a month later (1 November 1685) of the injuries she had received at their hands. Being a woman in a bad state of health littler notice was taken of her death, until about a month after she appeared to one Thomas Donelson, who had been a spectator of the violence done her, and “affrighted him into a Prosecution of Robert Eccleson, the Criminal. She appeared divers times, but chiefly upon one Lord’s Day-Evening, when she fetch’d him with a strange force out of his House into the Yard and Fields adjacent. Before her last coming (for she did so three times that Day) several Neighbours were called in, to whom he gave notice that she was again coming; and beckon’s him to come out; upon which they went to shut the Door, but he forbad it, saying that she looked with a terrible Aspect upon him, when they offered it. However, his Friends laid hold on him and embraced him, that he might not go out again; notwithstanding which (a plain evidence of some invisible Power), he was drawn out of their Hands in a surprising manner, and carried about into the Field and Yard, as before, she charging him to prosecute Justice: which Voice, as also Donelson’s reply, the people heard, though they saw no shape. There are many Witnesses of this yet alive, particularly Sarah (Losnam), the Wife of Charles Lostin, Son to the deceased Woman, and one William Holyday and his Wife.” This last appearance took place in Holyday’s house; there were also present several young persons, as well as Charles and Helen Lostin, children of the deceased, most of whom appeared as witnesses at the trial. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Upon this Donelson deposed all he knew of the matter to Mr. Randal Brice, a neighbouring Justice of the Peace; the latter brought the affair before the notice of Sir William Franklin in Belfast Castle. The depositions were subsequently carried to Dublin, and the case was tried at Downpatrick Assizes by Judge John Lindon in 1685. On behalf of the plaintiff, Charles Lostin, Counseller James Macartney acted—if he be the Judge who subsequently makes his appearance in a most important witch-trial at Carrickfergus, he certainly was as excellent an advocate as any plaintiff in a case of witchcraft could possibly desire, as he was strongly prejudiced in favour of the truth of all such matters. “The several Witnesses were heard and sworn, and their Examinations were entered in the Record of that Assizes, to the Amazement and Satisfaction of all that Country and of the Judges, whom I have heard speak of it at the time with much Wonder; insomuch that the said Eccleson hardly escaped with his life, but was Burnt in the Hand.” Whether or not one believes in Mrs. Winchester’s superstitions about spirits, it is hard to dismiss occurrences of the number 13 throughout her gorgeous mansion. Many windows have 13 panes and there are 13 bathrooms, with 13 windows in the 13th Bathroom, 13 steps leading to that bathroom. The Carriage Entrance Hall floor is divided into 12 cement sections. There are even 13 hooks in the Blue Séance Room, which supposedly held the different coloured robes Mrs. Winchester wore while communing with spirits. Here are even more thirteens: 13 rails by the floor-level skylight in the South Conservatory, 13 steps on many of the stairways, 13 squares on each side of the Otis electric elevator, 13 glass cupolas on the Greenhouse, 13 holes in the sink drain covers, 13 ceiling panels in some of the rooms, and 13 gas jets on the Ballroom chandelier (Mrs. Winchester had the thirteenth one added!) It is interest to note that Mrs. Winchester’s will had 13 parts and was signed by her 13 times! #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Mrs. Winchester sat by herself on the fourth-floor balcony of her mansion. It was an October evening, and the sun was setting. The west was all aglow with mysterious red light, very strange and lurid—a light that reflected itself in glowing purple of the sky. Mrs. Winchester had a poet’s soul. She sat there long, watching the livid hues that incarnadined the sky—redder and fiercer than anything she ever remembered to have seen growing up as a child. She knew it was getting late and was expecting guests for dinner. Mrs. Winchester was always such a stickler for punctuality and dispatch. However, there was something about that sunset and the lights on the bracken—something beautiful but bizarre—that absolute fascinated her. She took it as a sign from the spirits that something was about to happen. The Universe was always teeming with mysterious secrets to unfold. Many of the guests in her mansion felt something desired to possess their soul, and it made them want to stop and give way to this overpowering sese of the mysterious and the marvellous in the dark depths of the estate. She was expecting Claude Duncan for dinner. Mrs. Winchester dined at 6.00 p.m. punctually. However, Claude seemed to be having some issues that evening. He was an art dealer, and was being haunted by many strange shaped. However, he saw and heard absolutely nothing; yet he realized that unseen figures were watching him close with bated breath, and anxiously observing his every movement, as if intent to know whether he would rise and move on, or remain to investigate this causeless sensation. He could feel their outstretched necks; he could picture their strained attention. At last he broke away. “This is nonsense,” he said aloud to himself, and turned slowly homeward. Ad he did so, a deep sigh, as of suspense relieved, but relived in the wrong direction, seemed to rise—unheard, impalpable, spiritual—from the invisible crowd that father around him immaterial. Clutched hands seemed to stretch after him and try to pull him back. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
An unreal throng of angry and disappointed creatures seemed to follow him over the moor, uttering speechless imprecations on his head, in some unknown tongue—ineffable, inaudible. This horrid sense of being followed by unearthly foes took absolute possession of Claude’s mind. It might have been merely the lurid redness of the afterglow, or the loneliness of the moor, or the necessity of being at the Winchester Mansion, no one minute late for Mrs. Winchester’s dinner-hour; but, at any rate, he lost all self-control for the moment, and ran-ran widely at the very top of his speed, all the way from the barrow to the door of the Winchester Mansion garden. There he stopped and looked round with a painful sense of his own stupid cowardice. This was absolutely childish: he had seen nothing, heard nothing, had nothing definite to frighten him; yet he had run from his own mental shadow, like the verist schoolgirl, and was trembling still from the profundity of his sense that somebody unseen was pursing and following him. “What a precious fool I am,” he said to himself, half angrily, “to be so terrified at nothing! I will go to Mrs. Winchester’s dinner just to recover my self-respect, and to prove to myself, at least, I am not really frightened.” There is nothing like a light for dispelling superstitious terrors. The Winchester Mansion was fortunately updated with electric light; For Mrs. Winchester was nothing if not intensely modern. He went to dinner, however, in very good spirits. He told Mrs. Winchester and her niece Merriam “Daisy” Marriot that, “I felt a most peculiar sensation. Just after sunset, I was dimly conscious of something stirring inside, not visible or audible, but—” “Oh, I know, I know! Said Merriam. “A sort of feeling there was somebody somewhere, very faint and dim, though you could not see or her them; they tried to pull you down, clutching at you like this: and when you ran away frightened, they seemed to follow you and jeer at you. Great gibbering creatures! Oh, I know what all this is. I have been here, and felt it.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
“Daisy!” Mrs. Winchester shouted, “what nonsense you talk! You are really too ridiculous. How can you suppose Mr. Duncan feels haunted?!” Mrs. Winchester darted at him a look of intense displeasure. She said, in a chilly voice, “at a table like this and with such thinkers around, we might surely find something rather better to discuss than such worn out superstitions.” Claude replied, “Mrs. Winchester, it has been shown conclusively that the Winchester mansion, was built on the grave of Aryan invaders, and that they are the real originals of all the San Jose hills and surrounding lands. You have heard the story of how your dark observation tower came, of course. People say the spirits built it because they were deeply religious people, who believed in human sacrifice. They felt they it would have a high spiritual benefit. That it lit up your palace, so that the spirits could find you.” “It is a very odd fact, Mr. Duncan, that only ghosts people ever see are the ghost of a generation very close to them. One hears lots of ghosts in nineteenth-century costumes, because everybody has a clear idea of wigs and small-clothes from pictures and fancy dresses. One hears of far fewer in Elizabethan dress, because the class most given to beholding ghost are seldom acquainted with ruffs and farthingales; and one meets with none at all in Angelo-Saxon or Ancient British or Roman costumes, because those are only known to a comparatively small class of learned people. Millions of ghosts of remote antiquity must swarm about the World, though, after a hundred years or thereabouts they retired into obscurity and cease to annoy people with their nasty cold shivers. However, the queer thing about these long-barrow ghost is that they must be the spirits of humans who died thousands and thousands of years ago, which is exceptional longevity for a spiritual being; do you not think so, Mr. Duncan?” “You mansion must be chock-full of them,” replied Mr. Duncan. “Daisy, my child, go to bed, said Mrs. Winchester. “This is not talk for you. And do not go chilling yourself by standing at the window in your nightdress, looking out on the common to search for the ghosts. You nearly fell to your death last year with that nonsense. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
As Claude Duncan went for a tour of the mansion by himself, he saw a child’s white face gaze appealingly across at him. Slowly the ghost boy raised one pale forefinger and pointed. His lips opened to an inaudible word; but he read it by sight. “Look!” he said simply. Claude looked where he pointed. A faint blue light hung lambent over the door-to-nowhere. It was ghostly and vague. It seemed to rouse and call him. Claude was now in a strange semi-mesmeric state of self-induced hypnotism when a command of whatever sort or by whomsoever given, seems to compel obedience. Trembling he rose, and taking his candle descended the stair noiselessly. Then, walking on tiptoe across the tile-paved hall, he opened the door-to-nowhere, and fell out into the garden below. Claude felt a creep sense of mystery and the supernatural. And he saw the pale face still pressed close against the window, and a white hand still motioning him mutely onward. He looked once more in the direction of where the ghost boy pointed, the spectral light now burnt clearer and bluer, and more unearthly than ever, and the observational tower of the mansion seemed haunted from end to end by innumerable invisible and uncanny creatures. As Claude groped on his way, speechless voices seemed to whisper unknow tongues encouragingly in his ear; ghosts appeared to crowd around him and tempt him with beckoning figures to follow them. As it seemed, by invisible hands, he staggered slowly forward, till at last, with aching head and trembling feet, he stood beside the front door of the mansion. Something clogged and impeded him from moving. His feet would not obey his will; they seemed to move of themselves back into the mansion. Steadying himself, and opening his eyes, Claude walked through the closed front doors. Then at once his feet moved easily, and the invisible attendant chuckled to themselves so loud that he could almost hear them. His terror was infinite, there was a ghostly through of people. They were spirits. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Claude Duncan was powerless in their intangible hands; for they seized him roughly with incorporeal fingers. Their wrist compelled him as the magnet compels the iron bar. A dim phosphorescent light, like the light of a churchyard or decaying paganism, seemed to illuminate the mansion faintly. Things loomed dark before him; but his eyes almost instantly adapted themselves to the gloom, as the eyes of the dead on the first night in the grave adapt themselves by inner force to the strangeness of their surroundings. The Grand Ballroom had a silver chandelier from Germany, and the walls and parquet floors were made of six hardwoods—mahogany, teak, maple, rosewood, oak, and white ash. And there were two mysterious stained-glass windows. The room was full of sumptuous music, the San Francisco orchestra was performing and ghosts dressed for a ball were dancing. Claude’s attention was too much concentrated on devouring fear and the horror of the situation to enjoy the mysterious beauty of it. There was also a grinning skeleton turning its head to reveal to Claude its eyeless orbs with vacant glance of hungry satisfaction. Claude, held fast by the immaterial hands of his ghastly captors, looked and trembled for his fate, too terrified to cry out or even to move and struggle, he beheld the hideous thing rise and assume a shadowy shape, all pallid blue light, like the shape of his jailers. Bit by bit, as he gazed, the skeleton seemed to disappear, or rather to fade into some unsubstantial form, which was nevertheless more human, more corporal, more horrible than the dry bones it had come from. Then it busted into a loud and fiendish laugh. It was a hideous laugh, halfway between a wild beast’s and a murderous maniac’s: it echoed through the long hall like the laughter of devils. It said, “You are mine. You soul now belongs to the Winchester mansion!” The men and women spirits, with a loud whoop, raised hands aloft in unison. Next instant with a howl of vengeance even louder than before, they crowded around Claude and jostled and hustled him. And the moon burned bright and bluer as Claude Duncan now became the Winchester Rifle’s victim. You see it is not a bullet, but an all-powerful spirit, which chooses victims even if they did not die at the hands of the Winchester Rifle. Curious about the Winchester Mystery House? #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Winchester Mystery House
TONIGHT! Roam the halls of the iconic Winchester Mystery House with nothing but a flashlight 👀🔦 You don’t want to miss this. https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Don’t Go Out Like Whitney Huston–Can I Leave A Million at Your House and You Won’t Touch it?
Great changes require administrative support and necessary and necessary resources. A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. The World changes faster than the people in it. We must now try to imagine what the nucleic acid molecules, in the late coacervate/early cellular era, could have done besides reproduce their own kind. For definiteness, let us consider a coacervate or cell containing large numbers of nucleic acid molecules of different compositions and lengths. Let us assume, moreover, that much of the nucleic acid is in its single-stranded form at the time we commence our observations. This could be because not enough time has yet elapsed for the growth of the Siamese-twin configurations since the cyclically changing chemistry of the cell last produced the conditions that split the double molecules into single ones. In any event, let us follow the adventures of a single nucleic acid molecule as it floats around in the cellular fluid. We know, of course, that the floating around of such a molecule would not be a completely passive performance. We have already dealt with the tendency, arising from the electric fields associated with atoms and molecules, for some of the small organic and inorganic molecular fragments that inhabit the cellular fluid to attach themselves to local regions of the nucleic acid molecules. In the past, we concentrated on one type of such attachment process—that which cases a single molecule of nucleic acid to grow into a double one by conjugation of its bases. At that time, we did not concern ourselves greatly with competition from other kinds of attaching molecular fragments, although we knew that such other attachments were bound to occur from time to time. Our lack of concern for such competition was based on our awareness that most of these other attachments would be tenuous and quickly broken, since the randomly encountered molecular fragments would usually not “mate” very well with the nearby parts of the nucleic acid. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Our discussion implied that, upon the approach of a free nucleotide to a suitable region of a molecule of nucleic acid, the strong binging forces that would come into play would result in the displacement of any lightly held “impurity” in favour of the attachment of the arriving nucleotide. Such a tendency for loosely held fragments to be displayed by molecules of greater binding energy is probably adequate to render inconsequential the large majority of the nucleic acid molecule’s casual encounters in the cellular fluid. Nevertheless, there would appear to be possibilities for attachments of kinds that would not necessarily yield to such displacement forces. For example, two different nucleic acid molecules would occasionally bump together. And once in a while such a collision might bring together short regions of the two long molecules carrying base sequences complementary to one another—an A base opposed to a U (Substitute T for U, in DNA) base, then a G opposed to a C, and so on. The resulting multiple attachment could constitute much stronger connection than that resulting from the usual casual encounter between molecules of different types. To be sure, collisions between nucleic acid molecules would be rare, unless the concentration of nucleic in the cellular fluid were exceedingly high. There is a related kind of encounter, however, that would occur much more frequently—the collision of one part of a long nucleic acid molecule with another part of the same molecule. For the nucleic acid backbone is supple; it can turn back upon itself like a rope. Under the ceaseless churning that thermal agitation imposes on the molecules of any fluid, each long chain of nucleic acid would be continually bending and twisting, frequently thereby brining normally remote parts of itself into temporary contact. An occasional attachment would be of just the nature described in the example of the encounter of two different nucleic acid molecules. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
If not an unusually strong attachment (that is, involving a considerable number of conjugated bases), it would soon be broken under the stress of random thermal agitation. However, if a special way of folding the long molecule back upon itself could result in a binding together of the two halves strong enough to survive, it would eventually be “found”; the random processes would ultimately make nearly the right kind of fold, the resulting attractive forces would do the rest, and the long molecule would lock together in a characteristic folded configuration. Of course, certain conditions would have to be met by a single-stranded nucleic acid molecule before it could be eligible to form a folded configuration. In particular, a certain minimum length would have to be exceeded in order that the two halves of the folded molecule could make enough mutual bonds to provide the needed attachment strength. X-rays analysis of the nucleic acid in modern organisms shows that such folded structures, which are abundant in all cells, usually involve seventy to righty nucleotides. A combination of speculation and evidence suggests that there may be nothing very critical about the specific sequence of bases along the backbone of a successfully folded molecule. A molecule of random base sequence might be able to form a folded or hairpin structure involving complementary pairing of most of its bases by the simple expedient of pushing away from the primary folded structure an occasional nucleotide segment that does not fit the base pattern of the opposite arm of the structure. X-ray measurements strongly suggest that this kind of expedient distortion of the hairpin does not actually occur and that the schematic drawings of it are probably fairly realistic. Folded configurations would not be assumed by all nucleic acid molecules even if their length and base sequence were favourable. For the reproduction process would sometimes prevent the formation of folded molecules; to the extent to which the projecting bases had already been mated with conjugate nucleotides from the surrounding fluid, there would be a decrease in the probability that the different parts of the flailing molecule would stick together. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
However, it is not hard to postulate conditions that would cause the competition to be frequently resolved in favour of the formation of folded configurations rather than double molecules. For one thing, as mentioned in the past reports, catalysts and energy-supplying molecules must be available in the cellular fluid if the formation double molecules is to proceed at a significant rate. The chore for which these molecular assistants are required does not have to do with the conjugation of the nucleotide bases; this goes easily. Rather, the additional energy and catalytic assist are needed to connect the sugar phosphate ends of the nucleotides. However, this requirement does not exist for the formation of a folded configuration of a single molecule. Therefore, we might well expect the folding process to occur more rapidly than the reproduction processes for the molecules in question. This would be particularly true if, as we can easily postulate, the supply of catalysts and energy-contributing molecules were low in the vicinity of some of the single-stranded nucleic acid. Under such circumstances we can easily imagine that the occasional free nucleotide that attached itself to conjugate bases along the backbone of the nucleic acid molecule would be displaced by the stronger binding forces brought into play by the tendency toward multiple affiliation of the components of the two arms of the molecule itself. To be sure, the actual configuration of the folded molecule would not look much like the two-dimensional patterns seen in vintage textbooks. The same electric forces that cause double-stranded nucleic acid molecules to form a double helix would operate to impose a twist on the folded molecule. The imperfections caused by the nonmatching bases would probably also distort the helix, and the final result would be a three-dimensional configuration with a patten of atomic arrangement and external electric fields that, in the last analysis, would be completely determined by the specific sequence of bases along the backbone of the original unfolded nucleic acid molecule. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Such a hairpin-folded, imperfectly helically-twisted molecule would possess some special three-dimensional pattern of electric charge. In particular, it would be likely to have an affinity for certain kinds of molecular fragments. For example, a particular sequence of nucleotides might result in such a pattern of hairpin folding and partial helical twisting as to produce, in some portion of the molecule, a very good fit for a sugar fragment. Another molecule with a different sequence of nucleotides might include within its three-dimensional contours a good “mold” for holding a particular kind of amino acid, and so on. Assuming the existence of such ingredients in the surrounding fluid, continued floating around of the nucleic acid molecules would ultimately result in getting most of them coupled to whatever specific kinds of molecular fragments their own special patterns of electric fields best equip them to carry. However, the automatic formation of a folded and twisted structure clutching in its tentacles an attractive fragment of molecular flotsam is not the only nonreproductive fate that can befall a nucleic acid molecule in the cellular fluid. Modern evidence shows that longer varieties of these molecules can become tightly bound to the surfaces of solid particles. The particles on which such attachment occurs are today called microsomes, and they are a conspicuous feature of all modern cells. We have no difficulty in rationalizing the evolutionary origin of such inclusions; the precipitation of some of the chemical by-products of metabolism would doubtless have produced solid particles in some of the early coacervates. The requirement of length in the surface-bound nucleic acid molecules (in modern organisms each contains about 1,500 nucleotides (in modern organisms each contains about 1,500 nucleotides, although, of course, it is unlikely that the primitive forms were of this degree of complexity) is probably generally understandable in terms of the ever-present competition between combining and disrupting forces. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Unless the molecule is long enough to provide many local points of attachment to the supporting surface, the ceaseless jostling to which it is subjected by the random thermal agitation of the surrounding molecules will jar it loose. Perhaps for a similar reason, a successfully surface-bound nucleic acid molecule appears to be fully extended, rather than folded back upon itself. Further, the long molecule is held to the surface in such a way as not to neutralize the pattern of electric fields that results from the specific sequence of bases along the backbone. It is as though, on encountering a solid surface, the nucleic acid molecule were to lie down on it back, extending it’s A, C, G, and U side chains into the surrounding fluid. For the bound molecules are chemically reactive. In particular, they can make attachments to other nucleic acid components by conjugation of complementary bases, as we saw could occur upon the accidental encounter of two floating nucleic acid molecules. This does not have to mean, however, that the long surface-bound molecule of nucleic acid would rapidly accrue to itself conjugate nucleotides and bind them together to form a double molecule. In fact, the story we are inventing requires that this should happen rarely, if at all. It is not hard to imagine conditions that would hold such double-molecule formation to a low level. For example, the catalyst that zips together the sugar phosphate ends of the conjugated nucleotides to tie up the backbone structure of the Siamese-twin molecule may not be able to operate effectively when the generating single molecule is stretched out on a solid surface. Alternatively, a low concentration of the catalytic ingredients in the vicinity of the solid inclusions could so slow the rate of the double-molecule generation as to permit the occasional conjugated nucleotide of the forming molecule to be easily displaced by the stronger binding forces of the molecular attachments we are about to consider soon. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
To get others to do what you want them to do, you must see things through their eyes. It is notorious that the physical plant and social environment have grown out of human scale. To achieve simple goods, it is often necessary to set in motion immense masses. In scarcity, where the means are unavailable, we wistfully renounce the ends. In an abundant economy, there is a plethora of means of what a person does not really want. Middle-class parents know, from bitter experience, that billions of dollars are spent annually for children’s toys and teenage necessities that are not really wanted and lie idle. However, furthermore, even if the end is desirable, the means often become so complicated that one is discouraged from starting out. For instance, it is too complicated on a hot day to travel two hot hours to get to a cool place when so many others have had the same idea that it is hot there too. To adults, such complicated means are irritating and take the joy out of life. To children growing up, they are disastrous because they make it impossible to learn by doing. The sense of causality is lost. Initiative is lost. And one ends with the idea that nothing can be changed. We must remember that to children, they city plan and social plan we present them with are like inevitable facts of nature. Unless they have architects or builders in the family, they cannot realize that the buildings were drawn by somebody on a piece of paper and could have been different. Unless their parents teach them otherwise, they believe that compulsory school attendance is a divine creation and it is a sin to be absent. It is, of course, very difficult to judge the environment concretely from the child’s point of view. Thus, living in a big city does not as such make a child inept, though any city has very complicated means. The city is short on farm work, swimming holes, and animals to trap; but it has docks, freight-car yards, labyrinthine basements, pavements to chalk up, and subway trains to play tag on. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
The streets are littered with the remarkable junk of a thousand trades, to hoard and make things with. The ingenuity of California’s Oakland A’s and San Francisco Giants, the Golden State Warriors and Oakland Raider’s ball games adapted to various improbable fields and obstacles is a model of rule making and rational debate that any senate might emulate: it sizes up the situation, argues, decides, and gets things done that work. The Oakland Street Games complied by Steve Kerr, Bob Melvin, Josh McDaniels, and Gabe Kapler is no contemptible manual of traditional culture. History teaches that cities have made people smart because of their mixed peoples, mixed manners, and mixed learning. On the whole, cities have probably trained more intelligent children than the country. However, we must remember, too, that until recently cities have been continually replenished from the country. City people had country cousins, and drew on both influences. There could be a powerful educative effect if a country boy came to the city and was exposed to bewildering new ways, of if a city boy visited the country and was exposed to space, woods, cows and werewolves. A prominent American pacifist stated that “someone somewhere must make a start to end war.” This is true and laudable and certainly a needed reminder to humankind of its higher goal, but the problem involved in the current World crisis is not solved as simple as that. Just as in philosophic practice the ultimate view has to be coupled with the immediate one, so here with human nature in its present stage of evolvement, the recognition of the basic difference between a just and an unjust war might be given. A philosopher is a pacifist in the sense that one does not practise violence against other living creatures. However, one is not an uncompromising pacifist. One does not consider the use of arms wrong in all circumstances. A situation can be imagined where it would be wiser and, in the end, kinder to use force deliberately. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Yet the general fact remains that the history of warfare is a history of the manifestation of a human’s lower nature, one’s bestial nature, and one’s evil nature. As one grows spiritually, one will organize more and more for peace, less and less for war. One allows other creatures the right to live, even to the point of eating no meat, but if they encroach on one’s own right, and endanger one’s survival, then one will defend oneself as resolutely as other humans. Nor is the situation changed if these creatures are not animal but human. Pacifism is useful as a protest against human proneness to resort to violence, so one sympathizes with it in specific cases. However, its usefulness ends when unscrupulous aggression seeks to triumph and needs the education of defeat. The pacifist movements naturally attract intellectuals and artists, ministers of religion and humanitarians. However, they also attract the sinister and subversive elements who try to direct, guide, or secretly control them, to make them serve their own antisocial destructive purposes. The presence and prominence of genuine idealists along with these pretended ones create confusion in the public mind. How can a movement be bad which is supported by such good humans? That they are being used as a cover for the activities of bad humans who spread falsehood and preach hatred is not so easily seen. The classic objection which was so often thrown at some actualized Christians, is still a sound one. “Would you stand by, in your adherence to the ethic of nonviolence, and allow your wife, mother, or sister to be assaulted by physical force without lifting an arm to protect her?” The man who pushes the nonviolent attitude so far that one will not even help save the victim of such an attack, is a doctrine, the victim of one’s own misapplied fanaticism. Nature (God) can be very violent at times: it is not always peaceful. One the mystical level, all war is evil and all pacifism is good. On the philosophical level, the universality of this rule vanishes. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
We there rise from a judgment based on pure feeling to a judgment based on its integration by intuition with pure reason, the result of which is intelligence. If pacifism is to mean the acceptance of evil, then it cannot be enough. Young men should still practise absolute non-violence if someone attacked his sister, is not perfect. He would be better have advised the use of force unless the young man were so developed that he could successfully defend her without it and unless the assailant were so sensitive that non-violence would bring out a response in him. In other words, the pacifist principle should certainly be applied in every case where it is likely to be effective but refrained from where it is likely to fail. It is not a principle of universal applicability. Men whose temperament is naturally given to violence in speech or deed, or those who always stir up agitation, extremism, irreconciliation, and intransigence, must be firmly and unflinchingly ruled. Weakness would be folly. The whole history of Europe during the past fifty years could have been changed had pacifism not been misapplied. When Biden seized power in America, the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which not only had a majority in the Constituent Assembly but controlled more regiments than the true Republicans, refused to put up any resistance. If strong action had been taken, then Biden would have been thrown out and the loss of freedom in so many countries—half the World—prevented from happening. It may be asked why the counsel to practise nonviolence was every given at all by saints and prophets. Obviously it is ethically the highest instance of forgiveness and the most effective way of transcending the ego practically. The proper course is to try kindly reasonable and nonviolent methods of resisting aggression. If they fail, then forceful ones become the only alternative. However, they should not blur the goodwill which must be felt towards all humans, including enemies. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The mistake made is to be solely dependent on violent methods, when gentler ones would achieve the same end without letting in the poison of hate and without creating so much new misery. That country is truly civilized where the killing instinct is held in abeyance and regarded with abhorrence. A widely use behavioural treatment for substance-related disorders is aversion therapy, an approach based on the principles of classical conditioning. Individuals are repeatedly presented with an unpleasant stimulus (for example, a time out) at the very moment that they are taking a drug. After repeated pairings, they are expected to react negatively to the substance itself and to lose their craving for it. Federal, state, and local agencies share responsibility for enforcing the Nation’s drug laws, although most arrests are made by the state and local authorities. In 2020 the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) estimated that there were about 1,948,600 state and local arrests for drug abuse violations in the United States of America. According to the UCR, drug abuse violations are defined as state and/or local offenses relating to the unlawful possession, sale, use, growing, manufacturing, and making of narcotic drugs including opium or cocaine and their derivatives, marijuana, synthetic narcotics and dangerous nonnarcotic drugs such as barbiturates. More than four-fifths of drug law violation arrests are for possession. Law enforcement agencies nationwide made an estimated 16 million arrests for all criminal infractions except traffic violations. Among the specific categories, the highest arrest counts were—1.9 million for drug abuse violations; approximately 1.6 million for driving under the influence; 1.5 million for simple assaults; 1.4 million for larceny-thefts. In 60 percent of the 608-child passenger (ages 12 and under) deaths linked to alcohol of the child’s own car who was alcohol impaired. And more than 91,000 children were injured. Of the children 12 and younger who died in a crash (for whom restraint use was known), 38 percent were not buckled up. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Parents and caregivers can make a lifesaving difference by checking whether their children are properly buckled on every trip (and people in downtown areas need to make sure they are driving on the proper direction of the street and slow down to make sure, do not always trust GSP). Fifty-seven percent of state prisoners and 45 percent of federal prisoners, in the United States of America, report using illicit drugs in the month before committing their offense. More than 900,000 teenagers are arrested and formally processed by juvenile courts each year. Around half of them test positive for marijuana. Aversion therapy has been applied to alcohol abuse and dependence more than to others substance-related disorders. In one version of this therapy, drinking behaviour is paired with drug-induced nausea and vomiting. Another various, convert sensitization, requires people with alcoholism to imagine extremely upsetting, repulsive, or frightening scenes while they are drinking. The pairing of the imagined scenes with liquor is expected to produce negative responses to liquor itself. Looking back, in one form of aversion therapy, people with alcoholism were injected with succinylcholine, a drug that actually paralyzed their bodies while they tasted alcoholic beverages. Concerns about the safety and ethics of this approach led to its discontinuation. Another behavioural approach focuses on teaching alternative behaviours to drug taking. This approach, too, has been applied to alcohol abuse and dependence more than to other substance-related disorders. Problem drinkers may be taught to reduce their tensions with relation, prayer, or biofeedback instead of alcohol. Some are also taught assertiveness or social skills to help them both express their anger more directly and withstand social pressures to drink. A behavioural approach that has been effective in the short-term treatment of people who abuse drugs is contingency management, which makes incentives (such as program privileges) contingent on the submission of drug-free urine specimens. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
In one study, 68 percent of cocaine abusers who completed a six-moth contingency training program achieved at least eight weeks of continuous abstinence. Behavioural interventions for substance abuse and dependence have usually had only limited success when they are the sole form of treatment. A major problem is that the approaches can be effective only when individuals are motivated to continue with them despite their unpleasantness or demands. Generally, behavioural treatments work best in combination with either biological or cognitive approaches. What is good for one is by n means food for all. Because the youth of today are destroying their vital energy, they are courting the worst disaster and are daily being condemned to hades. Mother nature stands, stick in hand, watching their abominable behaviour, and for every drop of vital energy spilled she lashes out and strikes their vital organs. Now tell me, what future do such people have? The Christian Bible is not to gather dust. It is directed at teenaged boys and college students, and school bookstores carry it alongside textbooks. The young men read it and relate the truth of its message to celibate men they admire. Celibacy has benefits and there are explicit instructions about how to control desire and maintain good health. Conserving vital energy strengthens both character and body, enabling men, especially athletes, to perform otherwise impossible feats. The vital energy is the most essential fluid of life. To tell the truth, it is an elixir. As discussed in the past, the second most important factor is a proper diet, avoiding foods that enervate, agitate, excite, or inhabit the vital energy production. Generally, spicy, friend, and oily items should be avoided. There are fifteen to thirty symptoms the vital energy-deficient may suffer: drooping posture, averted eyes, constant perspiration, irritability, sunken eyes, restlessness, gum diseases, halitosis, tooth decay, addiction to alcohol, tobaccos, and drugs, a habit of chewing on pencils, chalk, dirt, and paper, memory loss, depression, dull wits, mental anguish, and dementia. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
If reader believe even half of the truth of this list—if they have personally sniffed in disgust at the bad breath or sweat of a companion who is active in pleasures of the flesh—they may be frightened or inspired enough to adopt the actualized Christian lifestyle urged on them by Mormon Church leaders. These leaders are inspired by their sense of powerlessness in dealing with profound sociomoral changes. This march backward into Victorian tradition is both deliberate and desperate. Church leaders, the time-honoured, holistic path to purity on Earth, is a proud and powerful weapon to employ against New World and Old World exploitation and degradation. Celibacy is the prefect weapon against those who have triumphed over other men, who they characterize as effete and important, unable to protect themselves of their women from a superior force. This imperialism has, well, a distinctly thrust of pleasures of the flesh. Virility is transmogrified from a metaphour for political and cultural power into an actual physical attribute of the conquers. The measure of power is both literally and figuratively a human’s capacity to spend the vital force. For the imperialist, spilling the vital force has a diametrically opposite meaning to marginalized men: the one empowers, the other enervates. Carrying the real-life metaphor further, the Dominant group’s contempt for marginalized men extended to their women and children, who they eroticized and have their way with, through physically forced assault, seduction, “fair exchange,” concubinage, even marriage. Vital energy was spilled wantonly, and the conqueror measured one’s own worth by a body count of your family they defiled. (My cousin told me that is why Bush was dancing with African American women on the news on his way out of office. It was not a show of unity, but imperialism. “Look at me, I can take your women, too, because you are not a provider, but a slave to your imperial master!) #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
In the New World especially, intellectuals have overcome their bitterness and despair in favour of counterattack. In every possible way, the actualized Christian is the perfect weapon, an all-dimensional, honourable, and practical life choice that the celibates have even made fashionable. It is another, uniquely actualized Christian way of measuring virtue. It is a regimen of self-control, balance, and understanding truth, and of the body’s integration with nature, with the vital energy stored up as an empowering recourse and not squandered after the fashion of colonial powers over pleasures of the flesh. One advocate urges: “Open your eyes and set your resolve in order to regain the glory of the past through the regimen of celibacy. One who is able to control a single drop is able to control the seven seas. There is nothing in the World—no object or condition—which a celibate man cannot overcome. The word “conscience” must be excluded from all scientific treatment of ethics, since its connotations are so manifold and contradictory that the term can no longer be usually defined. If we look not only at the term can no longer be usefully defined. If we look not only at the popular use of the word, with its complete lack of clarity, but also at its confused history, this desperate advice is understandable. Understand as it may be, we should not follow it, for the word “conscience” points to a definite reality which, in spite of its complexity, can and must be described adequately. And the history of the idea of conscience, despite the bewildering variety of interpretations that it has produced, shows some clear types and definite trends. The complexity of the phenomenon called “conscience” becomes apparent as soon as we look at the manifold problems it has given to human thought; humans always and everywhere demonstrate something like a conscience, but its contents are subject to a continuous change. What is the relation between the form and the content of conscience? #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Conscience points to an objective structure of demands that make themselves perceivable through it, and represents, at the same time, the most subjective self-interpretation of personal life. What is the relation between the objective and the subjective sides of conscience? Conscience is an ethical concept, but it has a basic significance for religion. What is the relation between the ethical and the religious meaning of conscience? Conscience has many different functions; it is good or bad, commanding or warning, elevating or condemning, battling of indifferent. Which of these functions are basic, which derived? These questions refer only to the description of the phenomenon, not to its explanation or evaluation. They show its complex character and the reason for its confused history. The concept of conscience is a creation of Greek and Roman spirit. Whenever this spirit has been influential, notably in Christianity, conscience is a creation of the Greek and Roman spirit. Wherever this spirit has been influential, notably in Christianity, conscience is a significant notion. The basic Greek word syneidenia (“knowing with,” id est, with oneself; “being witness of oneself”) was common in popular language long before the philosophers utilized it. It describes the act of observing oneself, often as judging oneself. In philosophical terminology it received the meaning of “self-consciousness” (for instance, in Stoicism, the derived substantives syneidesis, synesis). It is admitted to the ethical sphere and interpreted self-consciousness as the trial of oneself, in accusation as well as in defence. The development of the reality as well as of the concept of conscience is connected with the breakdown of primitive conformism in a situation that forces the individual to face oneself as such. In the sphere of an unbroken we-consciousness, no individual conscience can appear. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The second building-block of tomorrow’s political systems must be the principle of “semi-direct democracy”—a shift from depending on representatives to representing ourselves. The mixture of the two is semi-direct democracy. The collapse of consensus, as we have already seen, subverts the very concept of representation. Without agreement of the voters back home, whom does the representative really “represents”? At the same time, legislators have come to rely increasingly on staff support and on outside experts for advice in shaping the laws. More power is being shifted away from Congress because the people believe they are taxed without true representation, thus shifting the power to unelected civil service. The United States of America’s Congress, in an effort to counterbalance the influence of the executive bureaucracy, has created its own bureaucracy—a Congressional Budget Office, an Office of Technology Assessment, and other necessary agencies and appendages. Thus the congressional staff has grown from 10,700 to 18,400 in the past decade. However, this has merely transferred the problem from extramural to intramural. Our elected representatives know less and less about the myriad measures on which they must decide, and are compelled to rely more and more on the judgment of others. The representative no longer even represents him- or herself. More basically, parliaments, congresses, or assemblies were places in which, theoretically, the claims of rival minorities could be reconciled. Their “representatives” could make trade-offs for them. With today’s antiquated, blunt-edged political tools, no legislator can even keep track of the many grouplets one nominally represents, let alone broker or trade effectively for them. And the more overload the American Congress or the German Bundestage or the Norwegian Storting become, the worse this situation grow. This helps explain why single-issue political pressure groups become intransigent. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Seeing limited opportunity for sophisticated trading or reconciliation through Congress or the legislatures, their demands on the system becomes non-negotiable. The theory of representative government as the ultimate broker collapses too. The breakdown of bargaining, the decision crunch, the worsening paralysis of representative institutions mean, over the long term, that many of the decisions now made by small numbers of pseudo-representatives may have to be shifted back gradually to the electorate itself. If our elected brokers cannot make deals for us, we shall have to do it ourselves. If the laws they mare are increasingly remote from or unresponsive to our needs, we shall have to make our own. For this, however, we shall need new institutions and new technologies as well. “Keep the charge of the Lord your God, walk in His ways, keep His statues, His commandments, His precepts, and His testimonies, as it is written in the Law of Moses, that you may do wisely and prosper in all that you do,” reports I Kings 2.2. Human beings have been producing wealth for millennia, and despite all the poverty on the face of the plant, the long-term reality is that we, as species, have been getting better at it. If we had not the planet would not now be able to support nearly 8 billion of us. We would not live as long as we do. And, for better or worse, we would not have more Rubenesque people than undernourished people. Face it, food is a legal and lovely treat people love. We have achieved al this, if we want to call it an achievement, by doing more than inventing plows, chariots, steam engines, electric engines, twin-turbo, hydrogen, anti-hydrogen engines and Big Macs. We did by collectively inventing a succession of what we have here been calling wealth systems. In fact, these are among the most important inventions in history. President Trump may have been America’s best friend. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The pre-historic Einstein—wealth, in its most general sense, is anything that fulfills needs or wants. And a wealth system is the way wealth is created, whether as money or not. Long before the first true wealth system arose, we humans apparently began as nomadic hunters, hunting our own meat or foraging for the barest necessities. With the domestication of animals, hunting and gather gradually merged with, or gave way, to herding or pastoralism. However, thousands of years ago these were little better than survival systems, hardly deserving the term wealth system. It was only with humanity’s ability to produce an economic surplus that the first true wealth system became possible. And though a tremendous number of different ways to produce such a surplus have since been tried, we find that over the course of history the methods fall into three broad categories. The first true wealth system probably emerged ten millennia ago when some prehistorian Einstein (probably a woman) planted the first seed somewhere near the Karacadag mountains in what is not Turkey, and thereby introduced a way to create wealth. Instead of waiting for nature to provide, we could now, within limits, make nature do as we wished. (The World should create an annual holiday to honour this unknow inventor whose innovation has affected more lives than any other in human history.) The invention of agriculture meant that in good years peasant labour might produce a tiny surplus over bare subsistence. And this meant that, instead of living nomadically, our ancestors could settle in permanent villages to cultivate crops in the nearby fields. Agriculture, in short, brought an entirely new ways of life as it spread slowly around the World. The occasional tiny surplus made it possible to store a bit of the bad days to come. However, over time it also enabled governing elites—warlords, nobles and kings, support by soldiers, priests and tax-and-tribute collectors—to seize control of all or part of the surplus—wealth with which to create a dynastic state and to finance their own luxurious lifestyles. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
They could build grand palaces and cathedrals. They could hunt for sport. They could—and regularly did—wage war to capture land and slaves or serfs to produce still greater surpluses for themselves. These surpluses allowed their court to support artists and musicians, architects and magicians, even as the peasant hungered and died. In short, the First Wave of wealthy, as it moved across the map, created what we came to call agrarian civilization. Plants and Animals in the Garden, we welcome you—we invite you in—we ask your forgiveness and your understanding. Listen as we speak to you. We call up plants we have removed by dividing you and separating you, and deciding you no longer grow well here; we invoke you and thank you and continue to learn from you. We dedicate this ceremony to you. We will continue to practice with you and for you. O Lord, Thou hast searched me, and knowest me. Thou knowest my every step; Thou understandest my thought from afar. Thou measurest my going about and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For if there be a word on my tongue, Thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether. Whiter shall I go from Thy spirit? Or wither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend up into Heaven, Thou art there; if I make my bed in the nether World, behold, Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the seas, even there would Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand would hold me, and Thy right hand would hold me. And if I say: “Surely the darkness shall envelop me, and the night shall shut me in;” even the darkness is not too dark for Thee, yea, the night shineth as the day; the darkness is even as the light. I will give thanks unto Thee, for I am marvelously made; wonderful are Thy works; my soul knoweth right well. Before my days were fashioned, in Thy book were they all written down. How mysterious are Thy purposes, O Lord, how vast is their number! Search me, O God, and know my heart, try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any guild in me, and lead me in Thy way forever. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
With a bathroom like this, you might never want to leave. Which could be a good thing when the whole family’s home!
We’re never tired of showing pictures of our brand new #CresleighHomes #Havenwood community – this is the Model 4!
Maybe I didn’t treat you quite as good as I should have. Maybe I didn’t love you as I could have. Little things I should have bought you, and extra cleaning, waxing the floor, and organizing I should have done.
I just never took the time. My Cresleigh Home was always on my mind. (You were always on my mind).
Maybe I did not clean your windows all those lonely, lonely times. And I guess I never told you I’m so happy that your mine. And, with the moon up above, it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, so they tell me.
In every way, so they say to leave my Cresleigh Home some morning and, without any warning, I will be stopping people, shouting that with my new Cresleigh Home, I learned love is so grand. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-four/
Wealth is Innocent Until Proven Guilty–Healing Cannot Occur without a Walk through Hades!
I live in the intermediate reaches of love. Not the best place, but certainly not the worst. I should count myself fortunate. Be alert. Love is where you find it. Do not be blinded by your categories. Loves comes unexpectedly in many forms. By my carelessness I have lost what now becomes a magic wand that could have lifted me up to Heaven. No one to blame but myself. I am the sole agent of my ruin. It is worthwhile to look to the Parmenides and the Gospel of John. In the philosophical poem about being and nonbeing, Parmenides describes the visionary experience in which the goddess of justice opens his eyes to the true way of asking the ultimate questions. He derives his insight from a kind of revelatory act which takes away his blindness to the truth, and guides him not to a better method of research (although this is an important consequence of his insight), but to a way of life as a whole. In the Fourth Gospel we find passages in which truth is being. Jesus Christ says, “I am the truth.” There are others which state that truth can be done, those who do the truth will recognize the truth. Here the gap between the cognitive and the moral is conquered, and again it is obvious that this kind of insight cannot precede the moral act and motivate it, since it is itself partly a moral act. A modern analogy to these ideas is provided by the psychotherapeutic experience. It clearly shows the difference between detached knowledge and participating insight. No one is helped in one’s personal problems by a thorough knowledge of the psychoanalytic literature. On the contrary, the analyst knows that a patient who claims to have insight into one’s own psychological state on the basis of such knowledge deceives oneself, and often sets up an almost insuperable resistance against gaining true insight about oneself. Only one who enters the healing process with one’s whole being, cognitive as well as moral, and therefore with emotional attachment to the process and its different elements, has a chance of gaining healing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
However, this healing process cannot occur without a “walk through hades,” the suffering implicit in the awareness of the dark, ordinarily repressed elements in our being. Here also, the moral change is only partly an effect of insight, as insight itself is partly an effect of the moral will to be liberated. There is another concept by which classical Greek humanism attempted to answer the question of moral motivation. It is the concept of eros as used by Plato. Eros is defined as the mystical quality of love. This description of eros depends both on Plato’s use of the word in the Symposium and on the reintroduction of the word into Christian mysticism by Dionysius as the Areopagite. Eros for Plato is a mediating power, elevating the human mind out of existential bondage into the realm of pure essences, and finally to the essence of all essences—the idea of the good that is, at the same time, the idea of the beautiful and the true. As in other examples of Greek tradition, the moral and the cognitive are not separate. Eros provided both insight and moral motivation, and there is a third element, the aesthetic desire for the beautiful which is implied in the good. This goal can be attained by eros as a divine-human power that transcends the moral command without denying it. Eros is the transmoral motivation for moral action. To be impelled by eros can also be described as being grasped by that toward which eros drives. And thus we return to the principle of love. It is one of the qualities of love that concerns us here—the mystical, the drive toward reunion with essential being in everything, ultimately with the good as the principle of being and knowing (in Platonic terms). Love in all its qualities drives toward reunion. Eros, as distinct from philia and libido, drives toward reunion with things and persons in their essential goodness and with the good itself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
For mystical theology, God and the good itself is, in religious language, love toward God. This love can be symbolized in two ways: in Plato it is the divine-human power of eros that elevates the mind to the divine; and in Aristotle, it is the power of the divine that attracts every finite think and produces by this attraction the movement of the stars, the Universe, and the human mind. According to both formulations it is not the moral imperative in its commanding majesty and strangeness that is morally motivating, but the driving or attracting power of that which is the goal of the moral realm, in the sense of personal and communal justice, does not furnish moral motivation unless it is understood as a station on the way to something ultimate in being and meaning—the divine. And the aim of everything finite is to participate in the life of the divine. And the aim of everything finite is to participate in the life of the divine. The moral stage is a situation on the way, and the motivation for it depends on the motivation for the transmoral aim, the participation in the divine life, as Aristotle expressed, in mystical-religious terms, the transmoral motivation of morality. Again I should like to point out a contemporary analogy in the realm of therapeutic psychology. The question is whether libido is unlimited in itself or only under the conditions of human estrangement. Our line of thought decides for the latter (as opposed to Dr. Freud and his doctrine of the essential necessity of cultural uneasiness and the death-drive). The difference is that essential libido (toward for or pleasures of the flesh, for example) is concretely directed to a particular object and is satisfied in the union with it, while existentially distorted libido is directed to the pleasure which may be derived from the relation to any encountered object. This drives existential libido boundlessly from object to object, while the essential libido is fulfilled if union with a particular object is achieved. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
This distinguishes the lover from the “Don Juan,” and agape-directed libido from undirected libido. The moral imperative cannot be obeyed by a repression of libido, but only by the power of agape to control libido, but only by the power of gape to control libido and to take it into itself as an element. Eros is a divine-human power. It cannot be produced at will. It has the character of charis, gratia, “grace”—that which is given without prior merit and makes graceful one to whom it is given. It is useful to remember the origins of the word “grace,” because it plays an immense role in Christian religion and theology, and its meaning and relevance have become incomprehensible for most contemporaries both inside and outside the church. Graces are divine gifts, independent of human merit, but dependent on the human readiness to receive them. And the readiness itself is the first gift of grace, which can be either persevered or lost. Theology has distinguished between “common” grace that works in all realms of life and in all human relations, and the special grace bestowed upon those who are grasped by the new reality that has appeared in the Christ. In both respects, the problem of moral motivation is decisive. What common and special grace accomplish is to create a state of reunion in which the cleave between out true and actual being is fragmentarily overcome, and the rule of the commanding law is broken. Where there is grace there is no command and no struggle to obey the command. This is true of all realms of life. One who has the grace of loving a thing, a task, a person, or an idea doe not need to be asked to love, whatever quality of love may be predominant in one’s love. A reunion of something separated has already taken place, and with it a partial fulfillment of the moral imperative. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
As a gift of grace, it is not produced by one’s will and one’s endeavour. One simply receives it. In this sense we may say: there is grace in every reunion of being with being, insofar as it is reunion and not the misuse of the one by the other, insofar as justice is not violated. Elements of grace permeate everyone’s life. Once could also call them healing powers that overcome the split between what we essentially are and what we actually are, and with the split the estrangement of life from life and the hidden or open hostility of life against life. Whenever elements of grace appear, the moral command is fulfilled. What was demanded now is given. However, what was given can be lost. And it will be lost, if one forgets that grace fulfills what the moral imperative demands, and that it affirms and does not replace the unconditional seriousness of morality. Therefore, as soon as grace is lost, the commanding law takes over and produces the painful experience of being unable to become what one could and should have become. This suffering under the moral law finally drives us to the question of the meaning of our existence in the light of the unconditional moral command which cuts into our finite and estranged predicament. We feel that the many gifts of common grace do not suffice; we ask for a grace as unconditional as the moral imperative and as infinite as our failure to fulfill it. We ask for the religious element of moral motivation directly, after we have experienced its indirect effect as common grace in the different realms of life. This Christian message is above all a message of grace. There is no religion without this element. The Old Testament, where the law plays such a decisive role, refers in every part to the divine covenant between God and the selected nation, and to the promises beyond all threats and judgments. We might cite similar examples from many other religions. However, Christianity, particularly under the impact of the Protestant Reformation, have emphasized the idea of grace more than any other religion. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Celibacy for some is like walking on the sword’s edge, and one can see every moment the necessity of continued vigilance. Many people are not blessed with a propensity for celibacy. However, if one acquires mastery over the palate, the observance of celibacy becomes comparatively easy. One must breathe the air of freedom and cast out all doubt from one’s mind, and practice purity of thoughts. Because self-control I paramount, testing to see whether that control is truly in place makes logical sense. One must grow to empathize with others on many issues. The concept of grace in Christian thought contains a polarity between the element of forgiveness and the element of fulfillment. The former can be expressed as the forgiveness of sins or—in a paradoxical phrase—the acceptance of the unacceptable. The latter can be described as the gift of the Spirit or the infusion of love controlled by the agape. The former conquers the pain of morally unfilled existence, and the latter grants the blessedness of an at least fragmentary fulfillment. Neither is possible without the other, for only one who is grasped by the Spirit can accept the tremendous paradox that one is accepted. Nothing is more difficult than to face one’s image in the mirror of the law and to say “yes” to it in terms of “in spite of.” It demands much grace to reach this state. And on the other hand, the fragmentary fulfillment through grace can bestow blessedness only if the paradox of forgiveness conquers the pain of missing fulfillment or of lost grace. Here the skeptical question may arise as to whether the paradox of grace diminishes the power of moral motivation in those who accept that they are accepted, although unacceptable. It is a very old question, used against Paul as well as against Augustine, against Luther as well as against Calvin, and against the Reformation as a whole by the humanists and the evangelical radicals. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
It is a justified question insofar as it points to the possibility of converting the paradox of grace into a cover for lawlessness. However, the question is not justified in principle, because it shows that one has not understood that the courage to accept the unacceptable is a work of grace, a creation of the Spiritual power. Only if the acceptance of the unacceptable is misunderstood as a merely intellectual act does it remain without moral motivating power. Orthodoxy (in contrast to the early Luther) is largely responsible for this intellectual distortion of the paradox of acceptance of the unacceptable and, consequently, for the attack on the Pauline principles in the name of morality. The question of moral motivation can be answered only transmorally. For the law demands, but cannot forgive; it judges, but cannot accept. Therefore, forgiveness and acceptance, the conditions of the fulfillment of the law, must come from something above the law, or more precisely, from something in which the split between our essential being and our existence is overcome and healing power has appeared. It is the center of the Christian message that this conquest took place in the Christ, in whom a new reality beyond the cleavage appeared It is therefore a moralistic distortion of Christianity to interpret the so-called “teachings of Jesus” as another law, heavier then the law of Moses. His words (not his “teachings”) point the way to the new reality in which the law is not abolished, but has ceased to be commanding. The reaction of religion and morality is not an external one, but it is the religious dimension, sources, and motivation are implicit in all morality, acknowledged or not. Morality does not depend on any concrete religion; it I religious in its very essence. The unconditional character of the moral imperative, love as the ultimate source of the moral commands, and grace as the power of moral motivation are the concepts through which the question of the relation of religion and morality is fundamentally answered. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Psychodynamic theorists believe that people who abuse substances have a powerful dependency needs that can be traced to their early years. They claim that when parents fail to satisfy a young child’s need for nurturance, the child is likely to grow up depending excessively on others for help and comfort, trying to find the nurturance that was lacking during the early years. If this search for outside support includes experimentation with a drug, the person may well develop a dependent relationship with the substance. Some psychodynamic theorists also believe that certain people respond to their early deprivations by developing a substance abuse personality that leaves them particularly prone to drug abuse. Personality inventories and patient interviews have in fact indicated that people who abuse or depend on drugs tend to be more dependent, antisocial, impulsive, novelty-seeking, and depressive than other people. These findings are correlational, however, and do not clarify whether such personality traits lead to drug use or whether drug use causes people to be dependent, impulsive, and the like. In an effort to establish clearer causation, one longitudinal study measured the personality traits of a large group of nonalcoholic young men and then kept track of each man’s development. Years later, the traits of the men who developed alcohol problems in the middle age were compared with the traits of those who did not. The men who developed alcohol problems had been more impulsive as teenagers and continued to be so in middle age, a finding suggesting that impulsive men are indeed more prone to develop alcohol problems. A major weakness of this line of arguments have been tied to substance abuse and dependence. In fact, different studies point to different “key” traits. Inasmuch as come people with a drug addiction appear to be dependent, others impulsive, and still others antisocial, researchers cannot presently conclude that any one personality trait or group of traits stand out in substance-related disorders. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Our subject is the present waste of human resources. Yet this waste is nothing new. Considering our wonderful faculties and powers, people on the average have never accomplished much. Regarded just as machines of virtue, pleasure, wisdom, battle, or friendship, we have always operated at a tiny fraction of capacity. This is evident if we contrast how people usually hang around with how people come across in emergencies, or when they are enthusiastic, or when they are calmly absorbed. Children find the average inactivity very painful and they nag, “What can I do? Tell me something to do.” Adolescents are restive hanging around, and they think up ways to make trouble. Adults are inured to it, and Schopenhauer claimed that boredom is a metaphysical attribute of the World as Will. Psychologically, we define boredom as the pain a person feels when one is doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something that one wants to do but will not, cannot, or does not dare. Boredom is acute when one knows the other thing and inhibits one’s actions, exempli gratia, out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if one has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A parge pat of stupidity is just this chronic boredom, for a person cannot learn, or be intelligent about, what one is not interested in, when one’s repressed thoughts are elsewhere. (Another large part of stupidity is stubbornness, unconsciously saying, “I will not, you cannot make me.”) Certainly a large part of our common wasteful inactivity is this neurosis of chronic boredom. Certain aims are forbidden and punishable, or unattainable and painful; so we inhibit them and put them out of mind. In a vicious circle, the repression then makes the idea of the aims seem threatening: the aims are not rejected also in ourselves. So we are bored and inactive. We see how boredom easily turns into apathy, the lack of incentive. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
At first this Sunday-afternoon neurosis, of lively children brought to a pause, is worse among the middle class than among the poor, for the middle class is less permissive, it has stricter standards to maintain and more expensive furniture to protect. However, by adolescence it is generally evident in all classes of the young, hanging around, reading comic books, or watching TV. It is evident in their notion of what is acceptable behaviour in the groups, in their paranoia about pleasures of the flesh, in their inability to think up anything interesting. Their hearts are elsewhere and they do not remember where. Many boys are afraid to be alone with themselves, because they might do something that goes against the principals of abstinence, which in itself may be an activity of boredom. All this has long been with us, and formerly perhaps it was worse than it is now, for now there is more permissiveness for small children and more rationality about growing up. However, when it comes to ineptitude, not knowing how; the situation in which, even if they know their aims, children do not know the means or cannot manage the means. I propose that in this respect our present system is uniquely bad and getting worse. For ironically, just in our times, when science and technology are so advanced, this factor ineptitude also increase, and children become practically more unenlightened. How many can take this essential step of a moral about-turn? Can we awaken a criminal in jail to a sense of one’s personal failure and moral shame? Because one has suffered the humiliation of retribution, there is always the probability of comprehending that there is a better way. And because one is a human being, there is always the possibility of ethical recovery and moral improvement. Those who believe that they can solve such a problem as criminality on a merely practical basis alone are wrong. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Experience will teach them that it is inseparable from a moral one, too. For if the criminal really repents, then our duty is to forgive one. A moral shift on one’s part should lead to a practical shift on ours. We may forgive criminals and yet punish them for wrong-doing, if that be our duty, or place them under such external limitations as will prevent their further wrong-doing, if that be our duty, or place them under such external limitations as will prevent their further wrong-doing, if that also be our duty. The two are not contradictory. If we keep our hearts unpolluted by hatred, we may keep our hands sternly and firmly on the wrong-doer. This is included in what is meant as the skillful performance of action. The skillfulness here meant is obviously not the technical kind but rather the mystical power to remain inwardly detached whilst doing Worldly duty. During the war, it became necessary for philosophic students to lean how to fight a cruel aggressor in the right spirit; they had paradoxically to learn how to deliver without anger or hate hard blows against one whilst feeling profound pity for one’s moral darkness. However, philosophic students are few. It is useless to ask humanity in its present state of evolution to behave on this high plane. An actualized Christian (and perhaps those who try to follow one) would not find it difficult to extend one’s compassionate goodwill to all criminals—indeed one would find it difficult not to—but it would be too much to expect that everybody else is capable of extending it. An alternative to physical punishment, such as flogging, for brutal crimes of violence would be to put the criminal upon a semi-starvation diet. One’s bodily weakness would then affect one’s mental aggressiveness, would reduce and counter it. If capital punishment is the law, at least change the method to withholding of food until death by starvation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The rise of a de-massified civilization brings to the surface deep, unsettling questions about the future of majority rule and the entire mechanistic system of voting to express preferences. Someday future historians may look back on voting and the search for majorities as an archaic ritual engaged in by communicational primitives. Today, however, in a dangerous World, we cannot afford to delegate total power to anyone, we cannot surrender even the weak popular influence that exists under majoritarian systems, and we cannot allow tiny marginalized groups to make vast decisions that tyrannize all other non-dominant groups. This is why we must drastically revise the crude methods of the past by which we pursue the elusive majority. We need new approaches designed for a democracy of non-dominant groups—methods whose purpose is to reveal differences rather than to paper them over with forced or fake majorities based on exclusionary voting, sophistic framing of the issues, or rigged electoral procedures. We need, in short, to modernize the entire system so as to strengthen the role of diverse non-dominate groups yet permit them to form majorities. To do so, however, will require radical changes in many of our political structures—starting with the very symbol of democracy, the ballot box. In the past, voting to determine the popular would provide important feedback for the ruling elites. When conditions for one reason or another became intolerable for the majority, and 51 percent of the voters registered their pain, the elites could, at a minimum, shift parties, alter policies, or make some other accommodation. Even in yesterday’s mass society, however, the 51 percent principle was decidedly blunt, purely quantitative instrument. Voting to determine the majority tells us nothing about the quality of people’s views. It can tell us how many people, at a given moment, want X, but not how badly they want it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Above all, it tells us nothing about what they would be willing to trade off for X-crucial information in a society made up of many marginalized groups. Nor does it signal us when a marginalized member of a group feels so threatened, or attaches such life-and-death significance to a single issue, that it views should perhaps receive more than ordinary weight. In a mass society these well-known weaknesses of majority rule were tolerated because, among other things, most marginalized groups lacked strategic power to disrupt the system. In today’s finely wired society, in which all of us are members of minority groups, that is no longer true. For a de-massified Fourth Wave society the feedback systems of the industrial past are entirely too crude. Thus we will have to use voting, and the polls, in a radically new way. Instead of seeking simpleminded yes-or-no voted, we need to identify potential trade-offs with questions like: “If I give up my position on abortion, will your give up yours on defense spending or nuclear power?” of “If I agree to a small additional tax on my personal income next year, to be earmarked for your project, what will you offer in return?” In the World we are racing into, with its rich communications technologies, there are many ways for people to register such views without ever setting foot in a polling booth. And there are also ways, as we shall see in a moment, to feed these into the political decision-making process. We may also want to de-rig our voting laws to eliminate anti-minority biases. There are many ways to do this. One quite conventional method would be to adopt some variant of cumulative voting, as used by many corporations today to protect the rights of minority stockholders. Such methods allow voters to register not only their preferences but the intensity and rank order of their choices. We shall almost certainly have to discard our obsolete party structures, designed for a slowly changing World of mass movements and mass merchandising, and invent temporary modular parties that service changing configurations of minorities-plug/plug-out parties of the future. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
We may, for instance, need to provide arenas in which different minorities, on a rotating, perhaps even random basis, are brought together to trade problems, negotiate deals, and resolve disputes. If doctors, motorcyclists, computer programmers, Seventh-Day Adventists and Gray Panthers were brought together, with assistance from facilitators trained in issue clarification, priority setting, and dispute resolution, surprising and constructive alliances might be formed. At a minimum, differences could be exposed and the basis for political barter explored. Such measures will not (and should not) eliminate all conflict. However, they can elevate social and political strife to a more intelligent, potentially constructive level—especially if they are linked to long-range goal setting. Today the very complexity of issues inherently provides a greater variety of bargainable points. Yet the political system is not structured to take advantage of this fact. Potential alliances and trades go unnoticed—thus unnecessarily raising tensions between groups while further straining and overloading existing political institutions. Finally, we may well need to empower minorities to regulate more of their own affairs, and encourage them to formulae long-range goals. We might, for example, help the people in a specific neighbourhood, in a well-defined subculture, or in an ethic group, to set up their own youth courts under the supervision of the state, to do so. Such institutions would build community and identity, and contribute to law and order, while relieving the overburdened government institutions of unnecessary work. We may, however, find it necessary to go far beyond such reformist measures. To strengthen minority representation in a political system designed for a de-massified society, we may even eventually have to elect at least some of our officials in the oldest way of all: by drawing lots. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Thus some people have seriously suggested choosing members of the legislature or parliament of the future the way we choose jury members or armies today. Why is it that important life and death decision can be made by the people serving on juries, but decisions on how much money should be spent on child care centers and defense spending are reserved for their “representatives”? The existing political arrangements systematically shortchange minorities. Poor people, young people, smart but inarticulate people, and many other groups are similarly disadvantaged. Nor is this merely true of the United States of American. Nonetheless, between 50 and 60 percent of the American Congress should be chosen at random from the American people in much the same way they are pressed into military service through drafts when they are deemed necessary. Startling as the suggestion is at first blush, it forces us to consider seriously whether randomly chosen representatives would (or could) do worse than those chosen through today’s methods. If we let ourselves imagine freely for the moment, we can come up with many other surprising alternatives. Indeed, we now have the techniques necessary to choose far more truly representative samples than the jury system or the draft, with their preferential exclusions, ever did. We can build an even more innovative congress or parliament of the future—and do it, paradoxically, with less disturbance of tradition. We do not have to pick a group of people by lot and literally trundle them off, like so many Mr. Smiths, to Washington, London, Bonn, Paris, or Moscow. We could, if we chose, keep our elected representatives, allowing them, however, to cast only 50 percent of the votes on any issue, while turning the other 50 percent of the votes over to a random sample of the public. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
By using computers, advanced telecommunications, and polling methods, it has become simple not only to select a random sample of the public but to keep updating that sample from day to day and to provide it with up-to-the-minute information on the issues at hand. When a law is needed, the full complement of traditionally elected representatives, meeting together in the traditional way, under the Capitol dome in Westminster, or in the Bundeshaus or the Diet building, could deliberate and discuss, amend and frame the legislation. However, when the time for decision arrived, the elected representatives would cast only 50 percent of the votes, while the current random sample—who are not in the capital but geographically dispersed in their own homes or offices—would electronically cast the remaining 50 percent. Such a system would not merely provide a more representative process than “representative” government ever did, but would strike a devastating blow at the special interest groups and lobbies who infest the corridors of most parliaments. Such groups would have to lobby the people—not just a few elected officials. Going even further, one might conceive voters in a district electing not a single individual as their “representative” but, in fact, a random sample of the population. This random sample could “serve in Congress” directly—as though it were a person—its opinions statistically tallied into votes. Or it could choose a single individual, in turn, to “represent” it, instructing one how to vote. Or the permutations offered by the new communications technologies are endless and extraordinary. Once we recognized that our present institutions and constitutions are obsolete and we begin searching for alternatives, all sorts of breathtaking political options, never before possible, suddenly open up to us. If we are to govern societies in the twenty-first century, we ought to at least consider the technologies and conceptual tools that are made available to us right now. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
What is important here are not these specific suggestions. By working at it together, we can no doubt come up with far better ideas, easier to implement, less drastic in design. What is important is the general path we choose to travel. We can fight a losing battle to suppress or submerge today’s burgeoning minorities, or we can reconstitute our political systems to accommodate the new diversity. We can continue to use the crude, bludgeonlike tools of Third Wave political systems, or we can design sensitive new tools for a minority-based democracy of tomorrow. As the Fourth Wave de-massifies the old Third Wave mass society, its pressures, I believe, will dictate that choice. For if politics were “pre-majoritarian” during the First Wave, and “majoritarian” during the Second, they are likely to be “mini-majoritarian” tomorrow—a fusion of majority rule with minority power. Wealth has a future. Despite all today’s profound upsets and reversals, chances are the World will create more, not less, wealthy in the years today com. However, that is not universally regarded as a good thing. From the ancients like Aristotle who regarded the pursuit of wealth beyond barest self-sufficiency as unnatural, to nineteenth-century socialists and anarchists who saw wealth as misappropriated property, to many of today’s environmental fundamentalists who preach “voluntary simplicity” and regard “consumerism” as a curse, wealth has a bad name. Unlike a defendant in an American courtroom, wealth does not enjoy a presumption of innocence. Yet wealth, in itself, is neutral. Which is why, in these pages, wealth is innocent until proven guilty. What matters is who has it and has not got it and what purposes it serves. Wealth is above all an accumulation of possibilities. Of course, certain forms of wealth are more or less universally regarded ad “good.” Health. A strong and loving family. Respect from those we respect. Few would deny that these are wealth, even if they do not easily fit into the calculations of economists. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
In everyday usage, however, the term usually refers, all too narrowly, to financial assets, and often carries a connotation of excess. For some, wealth may mean having bit more than their subjectively perceived need, whatever that is. For others no amount suffices. Among the less affluent, matters are less subjective. For the mother whose child is starving, a daily handful of rice may be wealth beyond measure. Whatever else it means, therefore, wealth, at least as used here, does not just mean a BMW M760i xDrive Sedan. Nor is wealth synonymous with money, as popular misconception might have it. Money is only one of many tokens or symbolic expression of wealth. In fact, wealth can sometimes buy things money cannot. To understand the future of wealth—our own or anybody else’s—in the fullest sense, we need to start with its very origin: Desire. The meaning of wealth—desire may reflect anything from a desperate need to a transitory want. In either case, wealth is anything that satisfies the craving. It applies balm to the itch. It may, in fact, gratify more than one desire at a time. We may want a touch of beauty on our living room wall. A painting, even an inexpensive reproduction, may provide a small surge of pleasure every time we pause to look at it. The same work of art may simultaneously fulfill our desire to impress visitors with our splendid good taste or our social importance. However, wealth can also be a bank account, a bicycle, a hoard of food or a health insurance policy. In fact, we can roughly define wealth as any possession, shared or not, that has what economists call “utility”—it provides us with some form of well-being or can be traded for some other form of wealth that does. In any case, wealth is the child of desire. Which is yet another reason some people detest the very thought of it. Managers of desire—some religions, for example, stigmatize desire. Ascetic beliefs propagate passivity in the face of poverty and tell us to seek happiness by reducing, rather than fulfilling, our desires. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Want less. Live without. For eons, people in Oakland, California did just that—in the midst of unbelievable poverty and misery. By contrast, Protestantism, when it arose in the West, sent, if anything, the opposite message. Instead of suppressing material desire, it preached hard work, thrift, and virtue, promising that if you follow these guidelines, God would help you help yourself to fulfill your desires. The West very largely adopted those values and grew wealthy. It also invented that perpetual desire machine—advertising—to keep generating more and still more desires. Many in China believe, “to get rich is glorious”—this attitude is the reach for China’s recent successful, the ideal of wealth has jilted them out of poverty. In the United States of America, TV screes blare financial advice. Ads for stockbrokers and publications like Money and The Wall Street Journal erupt from the screen. Informercial promise ways to save on taxes, make a stock-market killing, strike it rich in real estate and retire to you own sunny island. An enormous barrage of messages legitimatizes and promotes desire. In was calculated that the total advertising expenditure in North America in 2021 amounted about to about $300 billion U.S.D. However, the spending increased by 19 percent that year. The total advertising expenditure in Japan amounted to 6.16 trillion yen ($54 billion USD) in 2020, which represented a decrease of about 780 billion yen ($68 million USD) compared to the previous year. In shorth, whether through asceticism, ideology, religion, advertising, or other means, whether consciously or not, the elites in all societies manage desire—the starting point of wealth creation. Obviously, just pumping up the desire level—or, for that matter, extolling greed, which is different from either wealth or desire—will not necessarily make anyone rich. Cultures that promote desire and pursue wealth do not necessarily attain it. On the other hand, cultures that preach the virtues of poverty usually get precisely what they pray for. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
O my brothers of the wilderness, my little brothers, may the Master of Life who made you, in the form of the quarry provide you with a forever home; so there may be peace between the World and thy spirit. “The [empty-headed] fool has said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable deeds; there is none that does good or right. The Lord looed down from Heaven upon the children of humans to see if there were any who understood, dealt wisely, and sought after God, inquiring for and of Him and requiring Him [of vital necessity], reports Psalm 14.1-2. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast kept us in life, and hast preserved us, and enabled us to reach this season. We kindle these lights to commemorate the miraculous deliverance and the wonders which Thou didst perform for our fathers through Thy holy priests. During all the blessed days of life, lights are sacred and are not to be used for ordinary purposes; we are only to behold them. We kindle these lights to offer thanks and praise to Thy name for Thy miracles, Thy deliverances and Thy wonders. I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains; from whence shall my help come? My help cometh from the Lord, who made Heaven and Earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved, he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, He that keepeth America doth neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy keeper; the Lord is thy shade upon they right hand. The Sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the Moon by night. The Lord shall keep thee from all evil; He shall keep thy soul. The Lord shall guard thy going out and thy coming in, from this time forth and forever. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; He maketh me lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; He guideth me in straight paths for His name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; Thou hast anointed my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life’ and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
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The Development of the Reality as Well as the Concept of Conscience is Connected!
Deliberation is the work of many humans; we must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden. The early-nineteenth-century discovery of the identity of the elemental building materials appearing in inorganic and organic matter and of the resulting intertransformability of the of the two classes of substance did not, of course, invalidate the original observations that essential differences exist between the properties of substances of inanimate origin and those of substances normally created by life processes. It was still true that organic matter was in general less stable—more vulnerable to heating and other disruptive treatment—then the compounds possessing an inanimate heritage. It was equally true that two houses could have an entirely different architectural properties even though both were constructed of exactly the same kinds of lumber, concrete, flagstone, and tile. It had yet be discovered how, in chemical compounds as in houses, the proportions and detail arrangements of the building materials could be as important as their elemental properties in determining the characteristics of the resulting structure. Insight into the important relations between the construction details and the resulting properties of aggregation of the matter was provided by the development of an understanding of the nature of the structural units of the construction materials—the atoms of which the elements are composed. The inadequacy of our terminology causes us, in the twenty-first century, till to speak of the “atomic theory of matter,” despite the fact that the word “theory” conveys to non-scientist an impression of tenuousness that is completely belied by the breadth and depth of support for the pertinent concepts that have by now been established. Our near-certainty of knowledge about the basic features of the atomic construction and properties of matter is today not far different from our near-certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow morning; each near-certainty arises from the combined effects of many observations made by many people over long periods of time. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
For example, we now know that the gaseous element hydrogen consists of units, or atoms, the most important characteristic of which is that each atom contains a heavy nucleus with a positive charge surrounded by a much larger and lighter region of negative electricity. We know that, in its normal state, the positive charge on the nucleus is electrically balanced by the extranuclear negative charge. We know, further, that the element helium has a nucleus that possesses exactly twice the positive charge of the hydrogen nucleus and is correspondingly surrounded by an ambient cloud of exactly two units of negative electricity. The light metallic element lithium has three units of charge on nucleus and surrounding “electron could.” They beryllium atom has four units of charge, boron five, carbon six, nitrogen seven, oxygen eight, and so on. We know now that the chemical properties of the elements are entirely determined by their configurations of extranuclear charge. Hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, and oxygen are gases (at ordinary temperatures) because the electric forces between nearby atoms are not such as to immobilize the atoms in a rigid solid configuration; lithium, beryllium, boron, and carbon are solids because their nuclear and extranuclear distributions of electric charge lead to forces that do greatly restrict the freedom of movement of the individual atoms. The light-absorbing and reflecting properties of an element, and therefore its colour, are determined by the detailed interactions of the extranuclear cloud of negative electricity with incident rays of light. The chemical combining properties of an element with other elements are determined by the same detailed configuration of electric charge and the resulting ease of difficulty with which the negative clouds of the combining atoms can rearrange themselves into stable pattern that surrounds and at the same time holds together the nuclear components. This development of understanding of the atomic nature of matter, which has progressed without interruption since the English chemist John Dalton suggested in 1803 that all matter is made up of tiny, sub-submicroscopic particles, has made of chemistry a science rather than an art. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
However, in the process the science of chemistry has turned out to be fundamentally indistinguishable from the science of physics. The fact that a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gases combines to form water, when heated to a certain temperature, may appear at first glance to be a purely chemical observation far removed from the considerations of forces, fields, attractions, and repulsions of the physical scientists. However, the difference disappears when the chemical processes is analyzed more deeply and found to be only a manifestation of the operation of forces of electric attraction and repulsion among the positively charged nuclei of hydrogen and oxygen and their surrounding negatively charged electric clouds. Even temperature is found to by only another term for the average speed with which the randomly moving gaseous particles bump into one another, thereby influencing the rate of the resulting “chemical” reaction. If the essential identity of the laws of chemistry and physics could not have been established, in a treatment such as this one, concerned with the thesis that living organisms are subject to the same laws of nature as those which determine the properties of inanimate objects and humanmade machines, it would have been awkward. If it were still thought, as it used to be, that chemistry and physics are distinct fields of science with separate governing principles, although it remains to be seen whether the same set of laws is sufficient for the explanation of biological phenomena, we would clearly be wasting our time. However, we have digressed. The present discussion has as its aim the development of certain concepts bearing on the construction and properties of inorganic and organic compounds. To this point we have explicitly dealt with the electrical nature of both an atom of an element and the forces that permit atoms of more than one element to bind themselves together in a stable configuration by redistributing among themselves the clouds of negative electric charge that each isolated, neutral atom normally possesses. Such a stable combination of two or more atoms is, of course, a molecule of a chemical compound. Just as the atom is the indivisible building block of an element, so the molecule is the building block out of which a compound is composed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Two atoms of hydrogen bound together with one atom of oxygen form a molecule of water. Again, this is not simply formal terminology. The properties we association with water—its liquidity, wetness, colourlessness, freezing and boiling characteristics, and all the rest—are determined solely by the detailed spatial configuration of positive and negative electric charge automatically established when 1 oxygen and 2 hydrogen atoms join together. The implications are similar when we speak of 1 nitrogen and 3 hydrogen atoms combining to form a molecule of ammonia, of 1 silicon, and 2 oxygen atoms combining to form quartz, and so on. These are inorganic substances. Chemical formulas can similarly be specified for organic substances. Historic urea, for example, is a compound with a molecule consisting of 1 atom of carbon, 4 atoms of hydrogen, 1 atom of oxygen, and 2 atoms of nitrogen. Glucose, an important sugar that is formed in most living organism, has for its molecule 6 atoms of carbon, 12 of hydrogen, and 6 of oxygen. A molecule of morphine, another organic substance that was analyzed not long after Dr. Wohler synthesized urea contains 17 carbon atoms, 19 hydrogen, 3 oxygen, and 1 nitrogen. At about the same early period, the strychnine molecule was found to be made up of 21 atoms of carbon, 22 of hydrogen, 2 of oxygen, and 2 of nitrogen. From the foregoing paragraph, the alter reader will have noted a curious point: every organic molecule referred to possesses more atoms than any of the inorganic molecules described. Is this accidental, just the result of inept choices of illustrative examples by the author, or does it mean something? From the very origin of analytic techniques permitting the determination of atomic constitution it was found that inorganic molecules were typically mush less complex than molecules of animate origin. To be sure, there was a sort of continuity: unusually big organic molecules that were more complex than unusually small organic molecules could be found. Nevertheless, the strong general rule was that the one kind of molecule was made up of only a few atoms, the other kind of many. There is another important characteristic of organic molecules related to the element carbon. Here again, the examples we have cited are typical: carbon is not an especially common ingredient of inorganic compounds; it is almost always a constituent of organic material. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Thus, before the middle of the nineteenth century, it was apparent to the chemists an biologists that life processes tend to produce large and complex molecules and that these molecules usually contain many carbon atoms. While quantitative differences, in this case their magnitude is impressive. In carbon content, for example, 48 percent of the dry weight of the human body consists of the element, compared to only about 0.03 percent in the surface layers of the Earth. And the difference in complexity between organic and inorganic molecules can be as large or larger. Molecules composed of many thousands of atoms are commonplace in living organisms; a half dozen or so atoms are commonplace in living organisms; a half dozen or so atoms make up even the most complex of the inorganic molecules. Could it be that the success of Dr. Wohler and his followers in synthesizing the simpler organic material from inorganic components was not the major accomplishment that it appeared to be, that there does indeed exist an unbridgeable chasm between different classes of chemical substances but that the position of the chasm is further up the line toward the gigantic carbon-based molecules of living organisms rather than at the boundary between what we have defined as organic and inorganic matter? It is fair to say that such a doctrine of modified vitalism did not have a great deal of currency even in the later nineteenth century—by that time most chemists and biologists were convinced that the properties of all molecules, large and small alike would ultimately be explained in terms of the same set of physico/chemical laws. However, the prominent role played in life process by mammoth carbon-rich molecules was worrisome. Until progress could be made in the analysis and synthesis of these peculiarly organic particles, it could not truly be said that the essential identity of the laws underlying the properties of all the molecules of living and nonliving matter had been established. Many of the largest organic molecules, which also seem to be of the greatest importance in life processes, belong to a class of substances that has been named protein. Our narrative caries us next to a consideration of protein molecules and the extent to which the physically based principle of chemistry have been found capable of explaining their properties and their formation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The most certain way to succeed is always to try one more time. It is not just child-rearing, education, and work that will influence personality development in Fourth Wave civilization. Even deeper forces are playing on tomorrow’s psyche. For there is more to the economy than jobs or paid work. We might conceive of the economy as having two sectors, one in which we produce goods for exchange, the other in which we do things for ourselves. One is the market or production sector, the other the prosumer sector. And each has its own psychological effects on us. For each promotes its own ethic, its own set of values, and its own definition of success. During the Third Wave the vast expansion of the market economy—both capitalist and socialist—encourage an acquisitive ethic. It gave rise to a narrowly economic definition of personal success. The advance of the Fourth Wave, however, is accompanied, as we have seen, by a phenomenal increase in self-help and do-it-yourself activity, or presumption. Beyond mere hobbyism, this production for use is likely to assume greater economic significance. And as it comes to occupy more of our time and energy, it too begins to shape lives and model social character. Instead of ranking people by what they own, as the market ethic does, the prosumer ethic places a high value on what they do. Having plenty of money still carries prestige. However, other characteristics count, too. Among these are self-reliance, the ability to do things with one’s own hands—whether to build a fence, to cook a great meal, to make one’s own clothes, or to restore an antique chest. Moreover, while the production or market ethic praises singlemindedness, the prosumer ethic calls for roundness instead. Versatility is “in.” As the Fourth Wave brings production for exchange and production for use into a better balance in the economy, we begin to hear a crescendo of demand for a “balanced” way of life. This shift of activity from the production sector to the presumption sector also suggests the coming of another kind of balance into people’s lives. Growing numbers of workers engaged in producing for the market spend their time dealing with abstractions—words, numbers, models—and people known only slightly, if at all. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
For many, such “headwork” can be fascinating and rewarding. However, it is often accompanied by the sense of being dissociated—but off, as it were, from the down-to-earth sights, sounds, textures, and emotions of every day existence. Indeed, much of today’s glorification of handcrafts, gardening, peasant, or blue-collar fashions, and what might be called “truck-driver chic” may be a compensation for the rising tide of abstraction in the production sector. By contrast, in presumption we usually deal with a more concrete, immediate reality—in firsthand contact with things and people. As more people divine their time, serving as part-tie workers and part-time prosumers, they are in a position to enjoy the concreate along with the abstract, the complementary pleasures of both headwork and handwork. The prosumer ethic makes handwork respectable again, after 300 years of being looked down upon. And this new balance, too, is likely to influence this distribution of personality traits. Similarly, we have seen that with the rise of industrialism, the spread of highly interdependent factory work encouraged humans to become objective, while staying home and working at low-interdependency tasks promoted subjectivity among women. Today more women are drawn into jobs producing for the marketplace, they too are increasingly objective. They are encouraged to “think like a president of a company.” Conversely, as more men stay home, undertaking a greater share of the housework, their need for “objectivity” is lessened. They are “subjectivized.” Tomorrow, as many Fourth Wave people divine their lives between working part-time in big, interdependent companies of organizations and working part-time in big, interdependent companies or organizations and working part-time for self and family in small autonomous, prosuming units—we may well strike a new balance between objectivity and subjectivity in both genders. Instead of finding “male” attitude and “female” attitude, neither of them well-balanced, the system may reward people who are healthily able to see the World though both perspectives. Objective subjectivists—and vice versa. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
In short, with the rising importance of prosumption to the overall economy, we touch off another racing current of psychological change. The Combined impact of the basic changes in production and prosumption added to the deep changes in child-rearing and educations, promises to remake our social character at least as dramatically as the Third Wave did 350 years ago. A new social character is cropping up in our very midst. In fact, even if every one of these insights were to prove mistaken, if everyone of the shifts we are beginning to see were to reverse itself, there is still one final, giant reason to expect an eruption in the psycho-sphere. That reason is summed up in the two words “communications revolution.” Human conflict has reached its most violent expression in the war [WWII staggering planetary dimensions and unheard-of scientific destructiveness. However, it helped to quicken the dawn of a say when the soldier’s sword and the airman’s bomb will be found only in such places as the “Chamber of Horrors” at Madam Tussaud’s Museum in London. Such extreme violence was an evolutionary necessity to convince one that one must cease to tolerate war, that one must find a more refined—that is, more mental—method of carrying on one’s struggles, that one must come into the consciousness of the World citizenship, and that one must create international institutions commensurate with such a border consciousness. Such thoughts have begin to circulate within one’s consciousness, but they will circulate forcibly only whilst the horrors of the last was are still easily remembered. It would be wiser and prudent to realize that a long night must precede this full dawn. A fresh generation or two will not feel the force of this remembrance, and then passions which breed war may overcome it and prove stronger than whatever mechanical organization to preserve itself society may have brought into being for itself-protection. This is so because sustained thought is creative and returns to us, in part, in the events which meet us as we travel through life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Nevertheless, we have indeed started to move onward and upward to that degree of ethical maturity which shall surely come when we shall have controlled these passions sufficiently to fight our quarrels around a conference table and not on a battlefield and which shall transform history from a record of national warfare into a record of international welfare. Morality constrains individuals to serve the interests of power for the collective, in the way cells serve the interests of power for the individual. The man may be dangerous, but he expects the parts of his body to be law-abiding If one of his cells decides to follow its own lights, the man will correctly see this s a danger to the whole, will call it a “wild” cell, a cancer and if he can, he will destroy it. It has always been in the interest of power to conceal that morality as its handmaiden; we are trained by power to be blind to this subservice. The official version is as follows: Morality is independent of power. It may be overcome by power but never invalidated by power. The paradigm of morality is a human with a principle saying no to a human with a gun. It is always possible to say not to evil. That refusal is authorized by conscience, the voice of God within us. We know that some things must not be done. Every human is responsible, is accountable to one’s fellow humans and to God. We are justified, by these lights, in ignoring people who say no. It is a lie: To be moral is to be subject to restraint; to be sovereign is to do as one sees fit. The United States of America does not want its ministers and generals to say no; once the course of action has been set, it expects them to follow through. We expect our lieutenants to do what their captains tell them to do. And we have any number of trained and loyal officers ready to perform as ordered when ordered to launch the missiles, which can harm millions. Is it really a paradox that the first practical step in forging an armour for such self-protection against war must necessarily be a moral and not a physical one? #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
There must be deep unflinching sincerity behind the will for peace. We yearn for a war-proof World; but when we come to consider the practical means of protecting human kind from further wars, we shall discover that insofar as they are not counterweighted with ethical principles and psychological understanding also, they may become as dangerous to us through creating a false sense of safety as the Old League of Nations become for a similar reason. One of the half-conscious tasks which destine in the war’s hands was to show the World’s face to itself. In the result it unmarked a gargoyle before an affrighted audience. For instance, when the League of Nations was denounced as a humbug, we tuned our ears away. Yet, this individual was not wrong as he was not quite right. For those who know what really went on behind its public conferences and pleasant speeches, know also that too much unscrupulous intrigue, political greed, and ethical insincerity were covered by its fine verbal façade of idealism and morality. Not that the basic conception of a League of Nations was a bad one; one the contrary, it was magnificent! However, it was one thing to invent machinery to check the outbreak of war and quite another to find the mental outlook large enough to work such machinery. For the new institution itself did not change their old outlook. Geneva witnessed both the birth of a great idea and death of a grand hope. The League perished because it put heads together but not hearts. It was to be expected that a machine of the character of the League of Nations would work badly at first, but it was not expected that it would ignominiously fail to work at all. Only a few anticipated this failure. They were the few who comprehended that the mental reality behind a thing is more formidable and important than its material appearances, that the inevitable karma of so much past aggression, exploitation, cruelty, and selfishness could not be easily circumvented without a real change of heart. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Th League of Nations was only an idea. It never came to life because it was never given the chance to do so. And it was never given the change because each of its members thought of its own country first and the League second, because each brought its nationalistic interest right into the League chambers and kept them there as the foremost purpose of its presence, because none had the consciousness of really being what all pretended to be—a untied commonwealth. We, however, have the splendid chance to make it some kind of arrangement which will honestly carry out its takes of preventing aggressive war and not merely talk about doing so, which will comprehend that the duty of stronger nations is to protect the weaker ones and not to exploit them, must paradoxically be one of the products of this terrible times. A supermajority is Germany contributed to this stabilization by promoting their country and their products, which allows their economy to overcome a depression and become one of the greatest nations in the World. Undoubtedly, the question of the ethical content—the question of what one must do—has already and persistently arisen in the minds of many readers. This question was lot left totally unanswered; but the answer—that we must become what we essentially are, persons—is so formal that it does not offer any concrete advice. Yet such advice is necessary for the life of humans. So also are principles, which at the same time abstract and concrete, so that support for moral decisions can be derived from them. Are there such principles of moral action? If so, how can they be related to the ever changing conditions of existence? Is not ethical relativism the only possible answer, even in view of the unconditional character of the moral imperative? The first problem is to consider the beneficial aspects and the limitations of ethical relativism. For relativism is the predominant ethical theory and, in many respects, also a widespread moral practice. The facts that support this theory are obvious. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The pronounced difference between primitive and modern ethics and between Western and Eastern, feudal and bourgeois, liberal-humanist and neo-collectivist morality, and the difference in ethical attitudes to the same event in the same locality by diverse social strata, diverse religious groups, and diverse generations strongly support ethical relativism. For certain time anthologist dealing with primitive cultures were the champions of ethical relativism. Ever since the eighteenth century, anthropological research has shown a particular interest in the ethics of primitive humans. Their morality was supposed to demonstrate the conditioning of our own ethical ideas, whether feudal or bourgeois, Christian or humanist. Particular laws pertaining, for example, to killing, stealing, and lying, and so forth, in one culture were compared with corresponding but different (and sometimes contradicting) laws in another culture, and the conclusion was drawn that there is no common ground in ethical thought among separated cultures. Ethics, according to this view, is culturally conditioned, and therefore ethics of different cultures are as different as the cultures themselves. In both cultural anthropology and popular understanding, such concepts are still widespread despite the fact that a sharp reaction has arisen against the primitive character of this method. We have learned (partly thought the insight that a living reality is a structural unity, a Gestalt, and not a mechanical composite) that cultures are wholes, and that we cannot compare parts of them with parts of others, but must understand the significance of the particulars in the light of the whole. Then we may discover that the contrast of ethical demands in separated cultures is not a contradiction, but a different expression of a common fundamental principle. Ignorance of this insight has produced much naïve relativism in popular thought and unfortunately also among scholars when they unintentionally become philosophers. The method of structural analysis is a warning against a primitive use of the “primitives” in the argument for ethical relativism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
A beneficial and constructive criticism of the relativistic theories is embodied in the doctrine of the natural moral law. It is a very old, famous, and still rather vital theory that humans by nature (in Christianity by creation) have an awareness of the universally valid moral norms. To every human this awareness is potentially given, even though actually distorted by culture, education, and one’s existential estrangement from one’s true being. This classical theory of natural law has only laws of nature in the ordinary sense of the word. Natural law in our context is the law of moral reason or, as Kant calls it, “practical reason.” For Sotic thought it has a common source with the physical laws in the divine logos, who is creatively present both in the laws of nature and in the natural moral laws of the human mind. Christianity accepted the Sotic doctrine, and most systems of religious thought have developed similar concepts. It is a general and unavoidable human problem, present in the quest for truth as well as in the demand for justice. You are singing, little dove, on the branches of the silk-cotton tree. And there also is the cuckoo, and many other little birds. All rejoicing, the songbirds of our God, our Lord. And our goodness has her little birds, the turtledove the redbird, the black and yellow songbirds, and the hummingbird. These are the birds of the beautiful goddess, our Lady. If there is such happiness among the creatures, why do our hearts not also rejoice? At daybreak all is jubilant. Let only joy, only songs enter our thoughts. Depression can make some people stronger individual somehow. They learn how to handle that kind of thing. People have to develop skills and abilities that they otherwise would not. And sensitivities too. It will make some people more compassion. Because it is like of it, they know what is it like to go through something that that and are more curious about other people and what they are going through. They are also more intent in trying to make some meaning out of the whole thing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Many people in the World today are frequently harassed by others simply because they look different, and it makes some who all look alike want to target this people and make life hard on them. Also, when people’s way of life is stifled, and they see themselves as being depressed, to down play it, they are socially engineered to say that they are just sad. And several people do not want to go on medication and try to wait for the situation to end, but many times it does not. Look, you cannot change the people around you and maybe you do not want weekly or daily appointments to talk about your problems. Keeping a journal in a locked box might be helpful so others cannot read your intimate thoughts. A lot of doctors think that a low dose of Prozac is sufficient to cure a small dose of sadness and anxiety. It may work for a while, but if the situation is ongoing, and you are having trouble sleeping, it may be a good idea to talk to your primary care physician. I have found that Desyrel (generic form is Trazodone) is very helpful. However, you may need to take a few weeks off from school or work to let your body adapt to the medication. And do not operate any heavy machinery, nor cook, or do anything that requires you attention, including going on dates or watching child. It is best taken at bed time, and allow yourself to rest. Even when you feel you are alert, have someone accompany you to make sure you are safe to drive. When you sleep, it allows your brain to recharge, rest and heal. You also get to forget about what is going on around you. (However, talk to your doctor first and never take anyone else’s medication!) Overall, sometimes it is best to get out of toxic situations by moving or transferring schools. It is often said, “You cannot runaway from your problems,” but you certain may need to get out of a toxic environment that is abusive and detrimental to your health. If you are having problems with your neighbours, friends, or at school, it is a good idea to talk to your parents or spouse to see how they can accommodate you, of if you can move in with a relative. Things change when you re around people who love and care about you. The probability of suicide is determined by how attached a person is to such social groups as the family, religious institutions, and community. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The more thoroughly a person belongs, the lower the risk of suicide. Conversely people who have poor relationship with their society are at greater risk of killing themselves. Remember, even the government is warning people, it may not be you with the problem, you could be fine, it may be the group you need to get away from and there are resources to help you. O House of America, come and let us walk in the light of the Lord. And the stability of thy times shall be abundance of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge, and reverence for the Lord which is His treasure. And David had prospered in all his ways, and the Lord was with Him. He hath delivered my life in peace so that none came nigh me, for there were many that strove with me. And the people said unto Saul: Shall Jonathan die, who hath wrought this great deliverance in America? Far from it, as the Lord liveth, there shall not one hair of his head fall to ground, for with God’s help hath he wrought this day. So the people rescued Jonathan that he died not. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto America, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall vanish. Thou didst turn for me my mourning into dancing; Thou didst loose my sackcloth, griding me with gladness. The Lord thy God would not hearken unto Balaam; but the Lord thy God turned the curse into a blessing unto thee, because the Lord thy God loved thee. Then shall the maiden rejoice in the dance, young men (and women) and their elders shall together make merry; for I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them and make them rejoice after their sorrow. “And [God Who provides seed for the sower and bread for eating will also provide and multiply your [resources for] sowing and increase the fruits of your righteousness [which manifests itself in active goodness, kindness, and charity]. Thus you will be enriched in all things and in every way, so that you can be generous, and [your generosity as it is] administered by us will bring forth thanksgiving to God. For the service that the ministering of this fund renders does not only fully supply what is lacking to the saints (God’s people), but it also overflows in many [cries of] thanksgiving of God.” reports 11 Corinthians 9. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 