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Eco-Technological Development is Firmly Convinced that Human Nature is Eternal and Stability Will Return!
The human task is to make of oneself a work of art. It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief. There are four chief ways in which guidance may be given. They are: intuitive feeling, giving in a general ways approbation or rejection of a proposed course of action; direct and precise inner message; the shaping of outer circumstances; and the teaching of inspired texts. If all four exist together, and if they all harmonize, then you may step forward in the fullest assurance. However, if there are contradictions between them, then great caution and some delay is certainly advisable. It is also needful to remember that the higher self can only be known by the higher part of the mind, that is, the intuition. The emotions are on a lesser and lower level, however noble or religious they may be. The immense satisfaction which the ecstatic raptures give is no indication that one is directly touching reality, but only that one is coming closer to it. They may seem purely spiritual, but they still belong to the ego’s feeling nature and if one believes otherwise one will fall into self-deception. Only through the pure intuition, freed from emotional egoism and transcending intellectual illusion, can one really make a contact with the Overself. And that will happen in a state of utter and perfect tranquillity; there will be none of the emotional excitement which marked the successful practice of the earlier stage of meditation exercises. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
When the deliverance of intuition cancels the deliverance of reason, one may trust oneself to the first, but only when one is sure it is what it purports to be. When one finds some of one’s own intuitions formulated and printed in someone else’s book, one feels their truth is confirmed and one’s own mind confronted. One has the right to judge an intuition rationally before submitting to it, but what if one’s judgment is itself wrong? Intuition may support reason but must supplant it only on the gravest occasions. The sudden revelation of correct understanding, whether in certain situations or about uncertain problems, may come unexpectedly or abruptly anytime during the day. It springs up of its own accord or it appears in a dream message. If the intuitive feeling leads one gently at some times, it also leads one firmly at other times. An intuition is directly self-revealing; it does not depend on what kind of thought and study were done before it appeared. It is also self-evident: the correctness of the receiving conscious is very calm, and when the lapse of time tends to strengthen its authority. The intuitive answer may come in one of several ways, but the commonest is either a self-evident that one cannot help thinking it. This is how intuition usually appears and is usually recognized for what it is. Develop them that another sign to recognize intuitions is the unexpectedness. #RandolphHrris 2 of 21
The mysterious appearance of an intuition may well make us ask where it comes from. At one moment it is no there; at the next it is lodged in the mind. Sometimes we are wiser than we know and utter involuntary answers which surprise us with their unexpected wisdom or unknown Truth in one way intuitions are born. Because it comes from within, it comes with its own authority. When it is “the real thing,” the seeker will not have to question examine or verify its authenticity, will not have to run to others for their appraisal of its worth or its rejection as a pseudo-intuition. One will know overwhelmingly what it is in the same way that one knows who one is. Education and experience alone do not make the mind; there is something higher that mixed itself in now and again with disconcerting incomprehensible spontaneity. One reason why an intuition is so often missed is that it flashes into the mind as disjointedly, as abruptly, and as inconsequentially as a person or s thing sometimes comes momentarily into the field of vision through the corner of an eye. Today the human with a pacemaker or a plastic aorta is still recognizably a human. The inanimate part of one’s body is still relatively unimportant in terms of one’s personality and consciousness. However, as the proportion of machine components rise, what happens to one’s awareness of self, one’s inner experience? If we assume that the brain is he seat of consciousness and intelligence, and that no other part of the body affects personality or self very much, then it is possible to conceive of a disembodied brain—a brain without arms, legs, spinal cord or other equipment—as a self, a personality, an embodiment of awareness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
It may then become possible to combine the human brain with a whole set of artificial sensors, receptors, and effectors, and to call that tangle of wires and plastic a human being. All this may seem to resemble medieval speculation about the number of angels who can pirouette on a pinhead, yet the first small seps toward some form of human-machines symbiosis are already being taken. Moreover, they are being taken not by a lone mad scientist, but by thousands of highly trained engineers, mathematicians, biologists, surgeons, chemists, neurologists and communications specialists. Dr. W. G. Walter’s mechanical “tortoises” are machines that behave as though they had been psychologically conditioned. These tortoises were early specimens of a growing breed of robots ranging from the “Perceptron” which could learn (and even generalize) to the more recent “Wanderer,” a robot capable of exploring an area, building up in its memory an “image” of the terrain, and able even to indulge in certain operations comparable, at least in some respects, to “contemplative speculation” and “fantasy.” Experiments by Ross Ashby, H. D. Block, Frank Rosenblatt and others demonstrate that machines can learn from their mistakes, improve their performance, and, in certain limited kinds of learning, outstrip human students. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Reports Dr. Block, professors of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University: “I do not think that there is a task you can name that a machine cannot do—in principle. If you can define a task and a human can do it, then a machine can, at least in theory, also do it. The converse, however, is not true.” Intelligence and creativity, it would appear, are not a human monopoly. Robotology may be the new wave of the future. Technicians at Disneyland have created extremely life-life computer-controlled humanoids capable of moving their arms and legs, grimacing, smiling, glowering, simulating fear, joy and a wide range of other emotions. Built of clear plastic, that according to one reporter, “does everything but bleed,” the robots chase girls, play music, fire pistols, and so closely resemble human forms that visitors routinely shriek with fear, flinch and otherwise react as though they were dealing with real human beings. The purposes to which these robots are put may seem trivial, but the technology on which they are based is highly sophisticated. It depends heavily on knowledge acquired from the space program—and this knowledge is accumulating rapidly. There appears to be no reason, in principle, why we cannot go forward from these present primitive and trivial robots to build humanoid machines capable of extremely varied behaviour, capable of even “human” error and seemingly random choice—in short, to make them behaviourally indistinguishable from humans except by means of highly sophisticated or elaborate tests. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
At that point we shall face the novel sensation of trying to determine whether the smiling, assured humanoid behind the airline reservation counter is a pretty young lady or a carefully wired robot. (This raises a number of half-amusing, half-serious problems about the relationships between humans and machines, including emotional and even relationships involving pleasure of the flesh. Professor Block at Cornell speculates that human-made relationships involving pleasures of the flesh may not be too far distant. Pointing out that people often develop emotional attachment to the machines they use, he suggests that we shall have to give attention to the “ethical” questions arising from our treatment of “these mechanical objects of our affection and passion.”) The likelihood the that flight attendant with be both human and robot is likely. The thrust toward some form of human-machine symbiosis is furthered by out increasing ingenuity in communicating with machines. A great deal of much-publicized work is being done to facilitate the interaction of humans and computers. However, quite apart from this, Russian and American scientists have both been experimenting with the placement or implantation of detectors that pick up signals from the nerve ends at the stub of an amputated limb. These signals are then amplified and used to activate an artificial limb, thereby making a machine directly and sensitively responsive to the nervous system of a human being. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The human need not “think out” one’s desires; even involuntary impulses are transmittable. The respon 89sive behaviour of the machine is as automatic as the behaviour of one’s own hand, eye or leg. In Flight to Arras, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, novelist, poet and pioneer aviator, described buckling himself into the seat of a fighter plane during World War II. “All this complication of oxygen tubes, heating equipment; these speaking tubes that form the ‘intercom’ running between the members of the crew. This mask through which I breathe. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an umbilical cord. Organs have been added to my being, and they seem to intervene between me and my heart.” We have come far since those distant days. Space biology is marching irresistibly toward the day when the astronaut will not merely be buckled into one’s capsule, but become a part of it in the full symbiotic sense of the phrase. One aim is to make the craft itself a wholly self-sufficient Universe, in which algae is grown for food, water is recovered from body waste, air is recycled to purge it of the ammonia entering the atmosphere from urine, et cetera. In this totally enclosed fully regenerative World, the human being becomes an integral part of an on-going micro-ecological process whirling through the vastness of space. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Thus Theodore Gordon, author of The Future and himself a leading space engineer, writes: “Perhaps it would be simpler to provide life support in the form of machines that plug into the astronaut. One could be fed intravenously using a liquid food compactly stored in a remote pressurized tank. Perhaps direct processing of body liquid wastes, and conversion to water, could be accomplished by a new type of artificial kidney built in as part of the spaceship. Perhaps sleep could be induced electronically…to lower one’s metabolism.” Und so weiter. One after another, the body functions of human become interwoven with, dependent on, and part of, the machine functions of the capsule. The ultimate extension of such work, however, is not necessarily to be found in the outer reaches of space; it may well become a common part of everyday life here on the mother planet. This is the direct link-up of the human brain—stripped of its supporting physical structures—with the computer. Indeed, it may be that the biological component of the supercomputers of the future may be massed human brains. The possibility of enhancing human (and machine) intelligence by linking them together organically opens enormous and exciting probabilities, so exciting that Dr. R. M. Page, director of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, has publicly discussed the feasibility of a system in which human thoughts are fed automatically into the storage unit of a computer to form the basis for machine decision-making. Furthermore, research from countless sources contributes toward the eventual symbiosis. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
In one of the most fascinating, frightening and intellectually provocative experiments ever recorded, Professor Robert White, director of neurosurgery at the Metropolitan General Hospital in Cleveland, has given evidence that the brain can be isolated from its body and kept alive after the “death” of the rest of the organism. The experiment, described in a brilliant article by Oriana Fallaci, saw a team of neurosurgeons cut the brain out of a rhesus monkey, discard the body, then hook the brain’s carotid arteries up to another money, whose blood then continued to bathe the disembodied organ, keeping it alive. Said one of the members of the medical team, Dr. Leo Massopust, a neurophysiologist: “The brain activity is largely better than when the brain had a body…No doubt about it. I even suspect that without his senses, he can think more quickly. What kind of thinking, I do not know. I guess he is primarily a memory, repository for information stored when he had his flesh; he cannot develop further because he no longer has the nourishment of experience. Yet this, too, is a new experience.” The brain survived for five hours. It could have lasted much longer, had it served the purposes of research. Professor White has successfully kept other brains alive for days, using machinery, rather than a living monkey, to keep the brain washed with blood. “I do not think we have reached the stage,” he told Miss Fallaci, “where you can turn humans into robots, obedient sheep. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
“Yet…it could happen, it is not impossible. If you consider that we can transfer the head of a man onto the trunk of another man, if you consider that we can isolate the brain of a human and make it work without its body…To me, there is no longer any gap between science fiction and science…We could keep Dr. Einstein’s brain alive and make it function normally.” Not only, Professor White implies, can we transfer the head of one person to the shoulders of another, not only can we keep a head or a brain “alive” and functioning, but it can all be done, with “existing techniques.” Indeed, he declares, “The Japanese will be the first to [keep an isolated human head alive]. I will not, because I have not resolved as yet this dilemma: Is it right or not?” A devout Catholic, Dr. White is deeply troubled by the philosophical and moral implications of his work. As of the year 2018, a team of scientists recently revealed they had successfully conducted experiments on hundreds of pigs that involved keeping their brains alive for up to 36 hours after the animals had been decapitated. Researcher Dr. Nenad Sestan, who lead the team of Yale University scientists, disclosed the nature of the research in a meeting at the National Institutes of Health to discuss the ethical concerns surrounding edge research with the human brain. In essence they were able to successfully remove the pigs’ heads and resuscitate their brains while no longer connected to a body. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Through a delicate, complex process they were able to keep the brains alive by connecting them to a closed-loop system called “BrainEX” that pumps oxygen-rich artificial blood through the necessary areas of the brain to sustain life. The researchers intent, reportedly, is to create a complete atlas of the connections between human brain cells, a monumental undertaking that has never been done. By keeping the pig brains alive, they are able to study them in ways that will contribute to further breakthroughs. This could lead to a radical enhancement of our understanding of the human brain. The research itself is remarkable and, it could change everything. We may have to evolve the way we think about death, consciousness, souls, and what it means to be human. As the brin surgeons and he neurologist probe further, as the bio-engineers and the neurologists probe further, as the bio-engineers and the mathematicians, the communications experts and robot-builders become more sophisticated, as the space humans and their capsules grow closer and closer to one another, as machines begin to embody biological components and humans come bristling with sensors and mechanical organs, the ultimate symbiosis approaches. The work converges. Yet the greatest marvel of all is not organ transplantation or symbiosis or underwater engineering. It is not technology, nor science itself. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The greatest and most dangerous marvel of all is the complacent past-orientation of the race, its unwillingness to confront the reality of acceleration. Thus humans move swiftly into an explored Universe, into a totally new stage of eco-technological development, firmly convinced that “human nature is eternal” or that “stability will return.” He stumbles into the most violent revolution in human history muttering, in the words of one famous, though myopic sociologist, that “the processes of modernization…have been more or less ‘completed.’” He simply refuses to imagine the future. In 1865 a newspaper editor told his readers that “Well informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.” Barely a decade later, the telephone erupted from Mr. Bell’s laboratory and changed the World. One the very day that the Wright brothers took wing, newspapers refused to report the event because their sober, solid, feet-on-the-ground editors simply could not bring themselves to believe it had happened. After all, a famous American astronomer, Dr. Simon Newcomb, had not long before assured the World that “No possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which humans shall fly long distances.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Not long after this, another expert announced publicly that it was “nothing less than feeblemindedness to expect anything to come of the horseless carriage movement.” Six years later the one-millionth Ford automobile rolled off an assembly line. And then there was the great Dr. Rutherford, himself, the discoverer of the atom, who said in 1933 that the energy in the atom’s nucleus would never be released. Nine years later: the first chain reaction. Again and again the human brain—including the first class scientific brain—has blinded itself to the novel possibilities of the future, has narrowed its field of concern to gain momentary reassurance, only to be rudely shaken by the accelerative thrust. This is not to imply that all the scientific or technological advances so far discussed will necessarily materialize. Still less does it imply that they will all occur between now and the turn of the century. Some will, no doubt, die a-borning. Some may represent blind alleys. Others will succeed in the lab, but turn out to be impractical for one reason or another. Yet all this is unimportant. For even if none of these developments occur, others, perhaps even more unsettling, will. We have scarcely touched on the computer revolution and the far-ramifying changes that must follow in its churning wake. We have barely mentioned the implications of the thrust into outer space, an adventure that could, before the new millennium arrives, change all our lives and attitudes in radical and as yet unpredicted ways. (What would happen if an astronaut or space vehicle returned to Earth contaminated with some fast-multiplying, death-dealing microorganism or space ghost?) #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
We have said nothing about the laser, the holograph, the powerful new instruments of personal and mass communication, the new technologies of crime and espionage, new forms of transport and construction, the developing horror of chemical and bacteriological warfare techniques, the radiant promise of solar energy, the discovery that life can be conceived in a test tube, the startling new tools and techniques for education, and an endless list of other fields in which high-impact changes lie just ahead or are already here. In the coming years, advances in all these fields will fire off like a series of rockets carrying us out of the past, plunging us deeper into the new society. Now will this new society quickly settle into a steady state. It, too, will quiver and crack and roar as it suffers jolt after jolt of high-energy change. For the individual who wishes to live in one’s time, to be a part of the future, the super-industrial revolution offers no surcease from change. It offers no return to the familiar past. It offers only the highly combustible mixture of transience and novelty. This massive injection of speed and novelty into the fabric of society will force us not merely to cope more rapidly with familiar situations, events and moral dilemmas, but to cope at a progressively faster rate with situations that are, for us, decidedly unfamiliar, “first-time” situations, strange, irregular, unpredictable. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
This will significantly alter the balance that prevails in any society between the familiar and unfamiliar elements in the daily life of its people, between the routine and non-routine, the predictable and unpredictable. The relationship between these two kinds of daily-life elements can be called the “novelty ratio” of the society, and as the level of newness or novelty rises, less and less of life appears subject to our routine forms of coping behaviour. More and more, there is a growing weariness and wariness, a pall of pessimism, a decline in our sense of mastery. More and more, the environment comes to seem chaotic, beyond human control. Thus two great social forces converge: the relentless movement toward transience is reinforced and made more potentially dangerous by a rise in the novelty ratio. Nor, as we shall next see, is this novelty to be found solely in the technological arrangements of the society-to-be. In its social arrangements, too, we can anticipate the unprecedented, the unfamiliar, the bizarre. All things which are as they ought to be are conformed unto this second law eternal; and even those things which to this eternal law are not conformable are notwithstanding in some sort ordered by the first eternal law. There is a paradox about tribulation in Christianity. Blessed are the poor, but by “judgment” (id est, social justice) and alms we are to remove poverty wherever possible. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Blessed are we when persecuted, but we may avoid persecution by flying from city to city, and may pray to be spared it, as Our Lord prayed in Gethsemane. However, if suffering is good, ought it not to be pursued rather than avoided? I answer that suffering is not good in itself. What is good in any painful experience is, for the sufferer, one’s submission to the will of God, and, for the spectators, the compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads. If wholeness or integration consists in the union of opposites, symbolized by the emergence of quaternities and mandalas, it follows that the most obvious pair of opposites, good and evil, are to be found in the self. Yet the self, as we have seen, is a God-image, or at least cannot be distinguished from one. The conventional Christian view of God is dualistic, in that God is entirely good (the doctrine of the Summum Bonum), while evil is contained in Satan. However, earlier Christian belief was monotheistic. Clement of Rome taught that God rules the World with a right and a left hand, the right being Christ, the left Satan. All of our lives, many of us has wrestled with the problem of the origin of evil. Just as we have to remember the gods of antiquity in order to appreciate the psychological value of the anima/animus archetype, so Christ is our nearest analogy of the self and its meaning. It is naturally not a question of a collective value artificially manufactured or arbitrarily awarded, but of one that is effective and present per se, and that makes its effectiveness felt whether the subject is conscious of it or not. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Yet, though the attributes of Christ (consubstantiality with the Father, co-eternity, filiation, parthenogenesis, crucifixion, Lamb scarified between opposites, One divided into Many, et cetera) undoubtedly mark Him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle He corresponds to only one half of the archetype. The other half appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that one consists of its dark aspect. Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Saviour crucified between two thieves. This great symbol tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites. However, it is fitting that one of these two extremes, and the best, should be called the Son of God because of His excellence, and the other, diametrically opposed to him, the son of the evil demon, of Satan and the devil. The opposites even condition one another. Where there is evil…there must needs be good contrary to the evil. The one follows from the other; hence we must either do away with both, and deny that good and evil exist, or if we admit the one, and particularly evil, we must also admit good. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Evil spirits and impure demons do not have the contrary virtue substantially, and they were not created evil but chose the condition of wickedness (malitiae gradus) of their own free will. For it is certain that to be evil means to be deprived of good. To turn aside from good is nothing other than to be perfected in evil. However, who can accurately judge what is good and evil because in some cases it is subjective. Take for instance, The Queen of the Damned, the movie by Warner Brothers, which is based on an Anne Rice novel Queen of the Damned. The vampire Queen, Akasha is 6,000 years old and trying to preserve her race and the planet by feeding on humans. Some might see this as an evil act, where others might she it as a benevolent act. After all, how much different is it from humans trying to preserve their race from feeding on animals and plant life? Food is food, right? This shows clearly that an increase in either good or evil means a diminution of the other, so that good and evil represent equivalent halves of an opposition. Naturally there can be no question on a total extinction of the ego, for then the focus of consciousness would be destroyed, and the result would be complete unconsciousness. The relative abolition of the ego affects only those supreme and ultimate decision which confront us in situations where there are insoluble conflicts of duty. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
This means, in other words, that in such cases the ego is a suffering bystander who decides nothing but must submit to decision and surrender unconditionally. The “genius” of humans, the higher and more spacious part of one whose extent no one knows, has the final word. It is therefore well to examine carefully the psychological aspects of the individuation process in the light of Christian tradition, which can describe it for us with an exactness and impressiveness far surpassing our feeble attempts, even through the Christian image of the self—Christ—lacks the shadow that properly belongs to it. In the fallen and partially redeemed Universe we may distinguish the simple good descending from God, the simple evil produced by rebellious creatures, and the exploitation of the evil by God for His redemptive purposes, which produced the complex good to which accepted suffering and repented sin contribute. Now the fact that God can make complex good out of simple evil does not excuse—though by mercy it may save—those who do the simple evil. And this distinction is central. Offences must come, but woe to those why whom they come; sins do cause grace to abound, but we must not make that an excuse for continuing to sin. The crucifixion itself is the best, as well as the worst, of all historical events, but the role of Judas remains simply evil. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Love is a feeling of deep devotion, concern, and affection. The greatest example of God’s love for His children is found in the infinite Atonement of Jesus Christ. Love for God and fellow humans is a characteristic of disciples of Jesus Christ. Have you recognized the love of God in your life? We manifest our love for Heavenly Father by keeping His commandments and serving His children. Our expressions of love for others may include being kind to them, listening to them, mouring with them, comforting them, serving them, praying for them, sharing the gospel with them, and being their friend. When we remember that we are all children of God—that we are spirit brothers and sisters–our love for those around us increases. The love that results from this realization has the power to transcend all boundaries of nation, creed, and colour. Dear Lord in Heaven, please remind me on my drive that my anger harms me more than that which angers me. Lord of Peace, in ultimate calm sitting, please pass on to me some of your beatific pose. Please remind us that we have the power to overcome anger, as our Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave his life for us and love us and is not angry that our sins before he was born, while he was born, and after his death is the toll he paid for us to cross over into this mortal realm and he still love us. May even my commute be done in beauty. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Land folk, I am here, newly arrived to this place. I have come from my previous home, where I lived under the protecting gaze of the Land Spirits there. In this new place, then, I wish to establish peace again between my people and the people of the land, as it as been done since the unremembered time. I bring gifts to you, I bring offerings, as a suppliant should when entering a chieftain’s hall. Please accept the from me and, with them, my friendship. Please establish between us peace. Please encompass me about with your protection, Holy Ones of ancient times. Please stand about me on all sides, warding away from me all dangers, keeping away from me all harm. Who may be compared to Thee, Father of mercy, who in love rememberest Thy creatures unto life? Faithful art Thou to grant eternal life to the departed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who callest the dead to life everlasting. Holy art Thou and holy is Thy name and unto Thee holy beings render praise daily. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Holy God. We sanctify Thy name on Earth even as it is sanctified in the Heavens above, as described in the vision of Thy Prophet: And the seraphim called one unto another saying: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole Earth is full of His glory. Whereupon the angels in stirring and mighty chorus rise toward the seraphim and with resounding acclaim declare: Blessed by the glory of God from His Heavenly abode. From Thy Heavenly abode, please reveal Thyself, O our King, and reign over us, for we wait for Thee. O when wilt Thou reign in America? Speedily, even in our days, do Thou establish Thy dwelling here forever. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
You made it past Wednesday! Time to kick back and relax in your #Riverside Residence 1 home. Grab some loungewear from your spacious Primary Bedroom closet and head downstairs to the kitchen to make plans for the weekend. 😄
Or you could learn more about this residence on our website! And with approximately 2,300 square feet, all on one level, you will likely find all the space you need. Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/
My God Sits in the Back of the Limousine, My God Has the House on the Cover of the Magazine!
When choosing between two evils, I always like to take the one I have never tried before. The justification for majority rule rests squarely on the political ends that the constitution is designed to achieve, and therefore on the two principles of justice. As a reminder, the first principle of justice states that each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all. The second principle of justice states that social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle). The first principle of equal basic liberties is to be embodied in the political constitution, while the second principle applies primarily to economic institutions. Fulfillment of the first principle takes priority over fulfillment of the second principle, and within the second principle fair equality of opportunity takes priority over the difference principle. The first principle affirms that all citizens should have the familiar basic rights and liberties: liberty of conscience and freedom of association, freedom of speech and liberty of the person, the rights to vote, to hold public office, to be treated in accordance with the rule of law, and so on. The first principle accords these rights and liberties to all citizens equally. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Unequal rights would not benefit those who would get a lesser share of the rights, so justice requires equal rights for all, in all normal circumstances. The second distinctive feature of the first principle is that it requires fair value of the political liberties. The political liberties, concerned with the right to hold public office, the right to affect the outcome of national elections and so on. For these liberties, citizens who are similarly endowed and motivated should have similar opportunities to hold office, to influence elections, and so on regardless of how rich or poor they are. This fair value proviso has major implications for how elections should be funded and run. The second principle of justice has two parts. The first part, fair equality of opportunity, requires that citizens with the same talents and willingness to use them have the same educational and economic opportunities regardless of whether they were born rich or poor. In all parts of society there are to be roughly the same prospects of culture and achievement for those similarly motivated and endowed. So, for example, if we assume that natural endowments and the willingness to use them are evenly distributed across children born into different social classes, then within any type of occupation (generally specified) we should find that roughly one quarter of people in that occupation were born into the top 25 percent of the income distribution, one quarter were born into the second-highest 25 percent of the income distribution, one quarter were born into the lowest 25 percent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Since class of origin is a morally arbitrary fact about citizens, justice does not allow class origin to turn into unequal opportunities for education or meaningful work. The second part of the second principle is the difference principle, which regulates the distribution of wealth and income. Allowing inequalities of wealth and income can lead to a larger social product: higher wages can cover the costs of training and education, for example, and can provide incentives to fill jobs that are more in demand. The difference principle allows inequalities of wealth and income, so long as these will be to everyone’s advantage, and specifically to advantage of those who will be worst off. The difference principle requires, that is, that any economic inequalities be to the greatest advantage of those who are advantaged least. The difference principle is partly based on the negative thesis that the distribution of natural assets is undeserved. A citizen does not merit more of the social product simply because one was lucky enough to be born with the potential to develop skills that are currently in high demand. Yet this does not mean that everyone must get the same shares. The fact that citizens have different talents and abilities can be used to make everyone better office. In a society governed by the difference principle, citizens regard the distribution of natural endowments as a common asset that can benefit all. Those better endowed are welcome to use their gifts to make themselves better off, so long as their doing so also contributes to the good of those less well endowed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The difference principle this expresses a positive ideal, an ideal of deep social unity. In a society that satisfies the difference principle, citizens know that their economy works to everyone’s benefit, and that those who were lucky enough to be born with greater natural potentials are not getting richer at the expense of those who were less fortunate. In justice as fairness, humans agree to share one another’s fate. I have assumed that some form of majority rule is justified as the best available way of insuring just and effective legislation. It is compatible with equal liberty and possesses a certain naturalness; for if minority rule is allowed, there is no obvious criterion to select which one is decide and equality is violated. A fundamental part of the majority principle is that the procedure should satisfy the conditions of background justice. In this case these conditions are those of political liberty—freedom of speech and assembly, freedom to take part in public affairs and to influence by constitutional means the course of legislation—and the guarantee of the fair value of these freedoms. When this background is absent, the first principle of justice is not satisfied; yet even when it is present, there is no assurance that legislation with be enacted. One problem with this procedure of majority rule is that it may allow cyclical majorities. However, the primary defect from the point of view of justice is that it permits the violation of liberty. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
There is nothing to the view, then, that what the majority wills is right. In fact, none of the traditional conceptions of justice have held this doctrine, maintaining always that the outcome of the voting is subject to political principles. Although in given circumstances it is justified that the majority (suitably defined and circumscribed) has the constitutional right to make law, this does not imply that the laws enacted are just. The dispute of substances about majority rule concerns how it is best defined and whether constitutional constraints are effective and reasonable devices for strengthening the overall balance of justice. These limitations may often be used by entrenched minorities to preserve their illicit advantages. This question is one of political judgment and does not belong to the theory of justice. It suffices to note that while citizens normally submit their conduct to democratic authority, that is, recognized the outcome of a vote as establishing a binding rule, other things equal, they do not submit their judgment to it. A justice constitution is defined as a constitution that would be agreed upon by rational delegates in a constitutional convention who are guided by the two principles of justice. When we justify a constitution, we present considerations to show that it would be adopted under these conditions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Similarly, just laws and policies are those that would be enacted by rational legislators at the legislative stage who are constrained by a justice constitution and who are conscientiously trying to follow the principles of justice as their standard. When we criticize laws and policies, we try to show that they would not be chosen under this ideal procedure. Now since even rational legislators would often reach different conclusions, there is a necessity for a vote under ideal conditions. The restrictions on information will not guarantee agreement, since the tendencies of the general social facts will often be ambiguous and difficult to assess. The Lord has said that “there is a law, irrevocably decreed in Heaven before the foundations of this World, upon which all blessings are predicated—and when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 130.20-21. It would seem from this declaration that there is no permanent progress made in any field or in any place except it be through obedience to the governing law. We know this is true in the Heavens, because the Lord said: “That which is governed by law is also preserved by law and perfected and sanctified by the same. That which breaketh a law, and abideth not by law, but seeketh to become a law unto itself, and willeth to abide in sin [sin, being the breaking of the law], and altogether abideth in sin, cannot be sanctified by law, neither by mercy, justice, nor judgment. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
“For judgement goeth before the face of one who sitteth upon the throne and governeth and executeth all things. And one hath given a law unto all things, by which they move in their times and their seasons; and their courses are fixed, even the courses of the Heavens and the Earth, which comprehend the Earth and all the planets,” Doctrine and Covenants 88.34-35, 40, 42-43. This scripture tells us that all things in God’s economy, even those which to us seem inanimate, obey the laws by which they are governed. “The Earth [for example] abideh the law of a celestial kingdom, for it filleth the measure of its creation, and transgresseth not the law,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.25. Therefore, it shall be crowned with glory, even with the presence of God the Father; that bodies who are of the celestial kingdom may possess it forever and ever; and they who are not sanctified through the law which I have given unto you, even the law of Christ [which is His gospel—the perfect law of liberty] must inherit another kingdom, for one who is not able to abide the law of the celestial kingdom cannot abide a celestial glory. And one who cannot abide the law of a terrestrial kingdom cannot abide a terrestrial glory. And one who cannot abide the law of a telestial kingdom cannot abide a telestial glory,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.19-24. How blessed are Latter-day Saint to be assured by the revealed word of God that there will be no capriciousness in the World to come. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
We are so blessed that every soul will be rewarded according to the law that one has obeyed; all divine law is as immutable as the law of gravity; it is the same yesterday, today, and forever; judgment will be mercifully administered, but it will be administered pursuant to law, and it will not rob justice. Not only are we blessed by having this knowledge concerning the rule of law; we are twice blessed by having both a knowledge and an understanding of the laws by which we are to be judged. If we were to fail to obey the law, in our light of our knowledge of the perfect law of liberty, how shortsighted, how foolish, how tragic that would be. Latter-day Saints should strictly obey the laws of the government in which they live. By our own declaration of faith we are committed to do so, for we declare to the World that “we believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honouring, and sustaining the law,” reports Articles of Faith 1.12. This we do in harmony with the Lord’s command: “Let no human break the laws of the land, for one that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land. Wherefore, be subject to the powers that be, until one reigns whose right it is to reign, and subdues all enemies under one’s feet,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.21-22. Civil authority is of divine origin. It may be more or less adapted to the needs of humans; more or less just and benevolent, but, even at its worst, it is better than anarchy. Revolutionary movements that aim at the abolition of government itself are contrary to the law of God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
When the rule of law breaks down in a family, a community, a state, or a nation, chaos reigns. The kingdoms of Heaven are to be free from chaos, because no one will be in any one of them who does not by one’s own free will obey the laws thereof. Here on Earth, some people steadfastly refuse to face such facts. We avoid them by stubbornly refusing to recognize the speed of change. It makes us feel better to defer the future. Even those closet to the cutting edge of technology and scientific research can scarcely believe the reality. Even they routinely underestimate the speed at which the future is breaking on our shores. Thus Dr. Richard J. Cleveland, speaking before a conference of organ transplant specialists, announced in January, 1967, that the first human heart transplant operation will occur “within five years.” Yet before the same year was our Dr. Christiaan Barnard had operated on a fifty-five-year-old grocer named Louis Washkansky, and a staccato sequence of heart transplant operation exploded like a string of firecrackers into the World’s awareness. In the meantime, success rates are rising steadily in kidney transplants to 97 percent. Successful liver, pancreas, and ovary transplants are also reported. Scientists and doctors are getting so good that they even have the ability to do face transplants now. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Such accelerating medical advances must compel profound changes in our ways of thinking, as well as our way of caring for the sick. Startling new legal, ethical and philosophical issues arise. What, for instance, is death? Does death occur when the heart stops beating, as we have traditionally believed? Or does it occur when the brain stops functioning? Hospitals are becoming more and more familiar with cases of patients kept alive through advanced medical techniques, but doomed to exist as unconscious vegetables. What are the ethics of condemning such a person to death to obtain a healthy organ needed for transplant to save the life of a person with a better prognosis? Lacking guidelines or precedents, we flounder over the moral and legal questions. Ghoulish rumors race through the medical community. There has been speculation about the possibility of future murder rings supplying healthy organs for unofficial surgeons whose patients are unwilling to wait until natural sources have supplied the heart or liver or pancreas they need. In Trenton, New Jersey USA—an Israeli citizen living in Brooklyn, New York USA, admitted to brokering three illegal kidney transplants for payments of $120,000.00 UDS or more before he was caught conspiring to organize another illegal sale. Levy Izhak Rosenbaum also known as Isaac Rosenbaum, age 60 at the time he brought to trial in 2011 (now age 70), plead guilty to an information charging him with three counts of acquiring, receiving, and otherwise transferring human organs for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation; and one count of conspiracy to do the same. Mr. Rosenbaum was originally charged with the conspiracy by Complain in July 2009. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The defendant entered his guilty plea before U.S. District Judge Anne E. Thompson in Trenton federal court. Mr. Rosenbaum’s convictions were the first under the federal statue involving illegal market sales of kidneys from paid donors. “Mr. Rosenbaum admitted he was not new to the human kidney business when he was caught brokering what he thought was an organ trafficking,” U.S. Attorney Fishman said. “Trafficking in human organs is not only a grave threat to public health, it reserves lifesaving treatment for those who can best afford it at the expense of those who cannot. We will not tolerate such an affront to human dignity.” According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court: Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that from January 2006 through February 2009, he conspired with other to provide a service, in exchange for large payments, to individuals seeking kidney transplants by obtaining kidneys from paid donors. Specifically, Mr. Rosenbaum admitted to arranging three transplants on behalf of New Jersey residents that took place in December 2006, September 2008, and February 2009. Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that he was paid approximately $120, 000.00 USA, $150,000.00 USA, and $140,000.00 USD, respectively on behalf of these three recipients. Mr. Rosenbaum’s kidney business was exposed through the use of cooperating criminal defendant Solomon Dwek and an undercover FBI agent (the “UC”) who was posing as an employee of Dwek and who represented to Mr. Rosenbaum that her uncle was in need of a kidney transplant. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Dwek and the UC first met with Mr. Rosenbaum in mid-February 2008 at which time Mr. Rosenbaum informed them that “it’s illegal to buy and sell organs,” but assured them that “I’m doing this a long time.” Mr. Rosenbaum explained to Dwek and the UC that he would help the recipient and the donor concoct a fictitious story to make it appear that the transplant was the product of a genuine donation and that he would be in charge of babysitting the donor upon the donor’s arrival from overseas. In Washington, the National Academy of Science, backed by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, has been studying social policy issues springing from advances in the life sciences. At Stanford, a symposium, also funded by Russell Sage, examines methods for setting up transplant organ banks, the economics of an organ market, and evidence of the economics of an organ market, and evidences of class or racial discrimination in organ availability. The possibility of cannibalizing bodies or corpses for usable transplant organs, grisly as it is, will serve to accelerate further the pace of change by lending urgency to research in the field of artificial organs—plastic or electronic substitutes for the heart or liver or spleen. (Eventually, even these may be made unnecessary when we learn how to regenerate damaged organs or severed limbs, growing new ones as the lizard now grows a tail.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
And it is totally possible that the human body could be advanced to regrow limbs, organs, and other healthy tissues as it already replaces blood, hair, teeth, nail, skin and you see how can manifest and growth tumors and cancer. So if scientists are able to unlock the secrets of the human body, stopping death and loss of organs and life is totally possible. The drive to develop spare parts for failing human bodies will be stepped up as demand intensified. The development of an economical artificial heart, Professor Lederberg says, “is only a few transient failures away.” Professors R. M. Kenedi of the bio-engineering group at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow believes that “artificial replacements for tissues and organs may well have become commonplace.” For some organs, this is in fact, a reality. Already more than 3 million cardiac patients Worldwide—including a former Supreme Court justice—are alive because they carry, stitched into their chest cavity, a tiny pacemaker—a device that sends pulses of electricity to activate the hearts. Each year 600,000 pacemakers are implanted. Approximal 90,000 heart valve substitutes are now implanted in the United States of America and 280,000 Worldwide each year; it is estimated that nearly half are mechanical valves and half are bioprosthetic valves. Implanting hearing aids, artificial kidneys, arteries, hip joints, lungs, eye sockets and other parts are all in various stages of early development. We shall, before many decades are past, implant tiny, aspirin-sized sensors in the body to monitor blood pressures, pulse, respiration and other functions, and tiny transmitters to emit a signal when something goes wrong. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Such signals will feed into giant diagnostic computer centers upon which the medicine of the future will be based. Some of us will carry a tiny platinum plate and a dime-sized “stimulator” attached to the spine. By turning a midget “radio” on and off we will be able to activate the stimulator and kill the pain. Initial work on these pain-control mechanisms is already under way at the Case Institute of Technology. Push button pain killers are already being used by certain cardiac patients. Such developments will lead to vast new bio-engineering industries, chains of medical-electronic repair stations, new technical professions and a reorganization of the entire health system. They will change life expectancy, shatter insurance company life tables, and bring about important shifts in the human outlook. Surgery will be less frightening to the average individual; implantation routine. The human body will come to be seen as modular. Through application of the modular principle—preservation of the whole through systematic replacement of transient components—we may add two or three decades to the average life span of the entire population. Imagine that, people living to be an average of 100 to 120 and strong and healthy. Unless, however, we develop far more advanced understanding of the brain than we now have, this could lead to one of the greatest ironies in history. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Sir George Pickering Regius professor of medicine at Oxford, has waned that unless we watch out, “those with senile brains will form an ever increasing fraction of the inhabitants of the Earth. I find this,” he added unnecessarily, “a terrifying prospect. With President Joe Biden being the 46th President of the United States and the oldest President so far, being 78 years of age, many feel this is why Speaker on the United States House, Nancy Pelosi fought to remind the people about the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The 25th Amendment deals with Presidential Disability and Succession, which says that is a President becomes unable to do his or her job, the Vice President shall become President. This amendment was passed by Congress 6 July 1965, and ratified 10 February 1967. Such terrifying prospects will drive us toward more accelerated research into the brain—which, in turn, will generate still further radical changes in the society. Today we strive to make heart valves or artificial plumbing that imitate the original they are designed to place. We have even been able to use valves from the hearts of pigs into human beings. We strive for functional equivalence. Once we have mastered the basic problems, however, we shall not merely install plastic aortas in people because their original aorta is about to fail. We shall install specially-designed parts that are better than the original, and then we shall move on to install parts that provide the user with capabilities that were absent in the first place. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Just as genetic engineering holds out the promise of producing “super-people,” so, too, does organ technology suggest the possibility of track stars with extra-capacity lungs or hearts; sculptors with a neural device that intensifies sensitivity to texture; students with super computer brains. We will no longer implant merely to save a life, but to enhance it—to make possible the achievement of moods, states, conditions or ecstasies that are presently beyond us. Under these circumstances, what happens to our ago-old definitions of “human-ness?” How will it feel to be part protoplasm and part transistor? Exactly what possibilities will it open? What limitations will it place on work, play, socialism, intellectual or aesthetic responses? What happens to the mind when they body is changed? Questions like these cannot be long deferred, for advanced fusions of human and machine—called “Cyborgs”—are closer than more people suspect. We are constantly faced by the hoariest of all problems, which is “Why did the Universe arise out of the depth and darkness of the Absolute Spirit?” The Seer can offer us a picture of the way in which this Spirit has involved itself into matter and is evolving itself back to self-knowledge. That is only the How and not the Why of the World. The truth is not only that nobody has ever known, that nobody knows, and that nobody will ever know the final and fundamental purpose of creation, but that God Himself does not even know—for God too has arisen out of the Absolute no less than the Universe, has found Himself emanated from the primeval darkness and utter silence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Even God must be content to watch the flow and not wonder why, for both God and humans must merge and be absorbed when they face the Absolute for the last time. (In the symbolic language of the Bible, “For humans cannot meet God face to face and live.”) That which IS can be none other than Final Being itself, not dependent on anything or anyone, mysteriously self-sufficient without a shape, yet all shaped things and creature have emerged from elements which trace back to it. Forever alone, there was none to witness the Beginning. As Mind the Real is static, as World-Mind it is dynamic. As Godhead It alone is in the stillness of being; but as God it is the source, substance, and power of the Universe. As Mind there is no second thing, no second intelligence to ask the question why it stirred and breathed forth World-Mind, hence why the whole World-process exists. Only humans ask this question and it returns unanswered. For all of us, for the witless and for the wise, there are unanswerable questions in life and we must learn to live with them. None of us is a full and finalized encyclopedia, for however, far we may penetrate into the meaning of things we are always confronted in the end by the Unknowable Mystery. We do not know why the whole process of involution and evolution ever started at all: because we find that there is in the deepest metaphysical sense no becoming and process at all, there is only the Real. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
At the ultimate level there is neither purpose nor plan because there is no creation. Mind, which forever is, can undergo n change in itself and no multiplication of itself. If it could, it would not be what it is—the Ultimate, the Unconditioned, and the Unique. Nor, being perfect, complete, could it have desire, purpose, aim, or motive for itself. Therefore it could not have projected the Universe on account of any benefit sought or gain needed. There is no answer to the question why the Universe was sent forth. It is to impose human limitation upon the transcendental Godhead to say that It has any eternal purpose to fulfill for Itself in the cosmos, whether that purpose be the establishment of a perfect society on Earth or the training of individuals to enter into fellowship with It and participate in Its creative work. Purpose implies a movement in times whereas the Godhead is also the Timeless. Neither this Earth nor the societies upon it can be necessary to God’s serenely self-sufficient being. Yet these fallacies are still taught by the theology of theistic orthodox. We know as much, and as little, about the Primal Mind as we know why there was a beginning of the Universe—that is, precisely nothing. If being asked how to prevent oneself from being deceived by these pseudo-intuitions, it can be said that a useful rule is to check them against other sources on the same subject and see if they all harmonize. If, for example, fifty inspired humans who have written on the subject teach what contradictions the alleged intuition, then there is something wrong on one side or the other and careful investigation is called for. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
It is always safer to ascertain what the great scriptural texts or the classic mystical testaments have to tell on the matter and not depend solely on what one’s intuition tells. We need more. And most of us—deep down—cannot deny it. There is a core of truth buried in every heart, a truth that we cannot escape. All-Father God, protector of travelers, please guards us, please guide us, please bring us through in safety and ease on our journey today. As I enter your realm, spirits of the air, as I mount to the clouds in this airplane, I place myself in your hands. There, among the vagaries of the winds, I will not be afraid, because I know you are my allies. As I fly today, please be at my side. Please protect me until I land again safely. Who is like unto Thee, O Lord, among the mighty? Who is like unto Thee, glorious in holiness, revered in praises, doing wonders? At the shore of the Red Sea, the redeemed offered praise unto Thy name. Singing a new song, they proclaimed Thy sovereignty: “The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.” O Rock of America, arise to help Thy scattered folk; deliver all who are crushed beneath oppression’s heel. Thou art our Saviour: the Lord of Hosts is Thy name; blessed art Thou, O Lord, Redeemer of America. O Lord, please open Thou my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. Expand your faith so you can access everything God has in store. Allow God to be present in your life and have faith in Him, and you will see God make miracles and blessings that you can only imagine in your best dreams! #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Cresleigh Homes
The largest home at #MillsStation is Residence 4 with 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, and all that natural light. Family nights are even better with an open floor plan between the Kitchen and Great Room! 😍🙌
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Residence Four at Mills Station boasts 2,692 square feet in the largest home in the community. The open concept design includes four bedrooms, three and one half bathrooms and a two car garage plus workshop.
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Yesterday and All Our Yesterdays—Stuck Fast in Yesterday!
Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It is perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we have learned something from yesterday. There is quite clearly no difficulty in explaining why we are to comply with just laws enacted under a just constitution. In this case the principles of natural duty and the principle of fairness establish the requisite duties and obligations. Citizens generally are bound by the duty of justice, and those who have assumed favoured offices and positions, or who have taken advantage of certain opportunities to further their interests, are in addition obligated to do their part by the principle of fairness. The real question is under which circumstances and to what extent we are bound to comply with unjust arrangements. Not it is sometimes said that we are never required to comply in these cases. However, that is a mistake. The injustice of a law is not, in general, a sufficient reason for not adhering to it any more than the legal validity of legislation (as defined by the existing constitution) is a sufficient reason for going along with it. When the basic structure of society is reasonably just, as estimated by what the current state of thins allows, we are to recognize unjust laws as binding provided that they do not exceed certain limits of injustice. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
In trying to discern these limits we approach the deeper problem of political duty and obligation. The difficulty here lies in part in the fact that there is a conflict of principles in these cases. Some principles counsel compliance while other direct us the other ways. Thus the claims of political duty and obligation must be balanced by a conception of the appropriate priorities. There is, however, further problem. As we have seen, the principles of justice (in lexical order) belong to ideal theory. The persons in the original position assume that the principles they acknowledge, whatever they are, will be strictly complied with and followed by everyone. Thus the principles of justice that result are those defining a perfectly just society, given favourable conditions. With the presumption of strict compliance, we arrive at a certain ideal conception. When we as whether and under what circumstances unjust arrangements are to be tolerated, we are faced with a different sort of question. If needed it applies at all, we must ascertain how the ideal conception of justice applies, to cases where rather than having to make adjustments to natural limitations, we are confronted with injustice. The discussion of these problems belongs to the partial compliance part of nonideal theory. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
It included, among other things, the theory of punishment and compensatory justice, just war and conscientious objection, civil disobedience and militant resistance. These are among the central issues of political life, yet so far the conception of justice as fairness does not directly apply to them. Now I shall not attempt to discuss these matters in full generality. In fact, I shall take up but one fragment of partial compliance theory: namely, the problems of civil disobedience and conscientious refusal. And even here I shall assume that the context is one of a state of near justice, that is, one in which the basic structure of society is nearly just, making due allowance for what it is reasonable to expect in the circumstances. An understanding of this admittedly special case may help to clarify the more difficult problems. However, in order to consider civil disobedience and conscientious refusal, we must first discuss several points concerning political duty and obligation. For one thing, it is evident that our duty or obligation to accept existing arrangements may sometimes be overridden. These requirements depend upon the principles of right, which may justify noncompliance in certain situations, all things considered. Whether noncompliance is justified depend on the extent to which laws and institutions are unjust. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Unjust laws do not all stand on a par, and the same is true of policies and institutions. Now there are two way in which injustice can arise: current arrangements may depart in varying degrees from publicly accepted standards that are more of less just; or these arrangements may conform to a society’s conception of justice, or to the view of the dominant class, but his conception itself may be unreasonable, and in many cases clearly unjust. As we have seen, some conceptions of justice are more reasonable than others. While the two principles of justice and the related principles of natural duty and obligation define the most reasonable view among those on the list, other principles are not unreasonable. Indeed, some mixed conceptions are certainly adequate enough for many purposes. As rough rule a conception of justice is reasonable in proportion to the strength of the arguments that can be given for adopting it in the original position. This criterion is, of course, perfectly natural if the original position incorporates the various conditions which are to be imposed on the choice of principles and which lead to a match with our considered judgments. Although it is easy enough to distinguish these two ways in which existing institutions can be unjust, a workable theory of how they affect our political duty and obligations is another matter. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
When laws and policies deviate from publicly recognized standards, an appeal to the society’s sense of justice is presumably possible to some extent. This condition is presupposed in undertaking civil disobedience. If, however, the prevailing conception of justice is not violated, than the situation is very different. The course of action to be follow depends largely on how reasonable the accepted doctrine is and what means are available to change it. Doubtless one can manage to live with a variety of mixed and intuitionistic conceptions, and with utilitarian view when they are not too rigorously interpreted. In other cases, though, as when a society is regulated by principles favouring narrow class interests, one may have no recourse but to oppose the prevailing conception and the institution it justifies in such ways as promise some success. Secondly, we must consider the question why, in a situation of near justice, we normally have a duty to comply with unjust, and not simply with just, laws. While some writers have questioned this contention, I believe that most would accept it; only a few think that any deviation from justice, however small, nullifies the duty to comply with existing rules. How, then, is this fact to be accounted for? Since they duty of justice and the principle of fairness presuppose that institutions are just, some further explanation is required. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Now one can answer this question if we postulate a nearly just society in which there exists a viable constitutional regime more or less satisfying in the principles of justice. Thus I suppose that for the most part the social system is well-ordered, although not of course perfectly ordered, for in this event the question of whether to comply with unjust laws and policies would not arise. Under these assumptions, the earlier account of a just constitution as an instance of imperfect procedural justice provides an answer. It will be recalled that in the constitutional convention the aim of the parties is to find among the just constitutions (those satisfying the principle of equal liberty) the one most likely to lead to just and effective legislation in view of the general facts about the society in question. The constitution is regarded as a just but imperfect procedure framed as far as the circumstances permit to insure a just outcome. It is imperfect because there is no feasible political process which guarantees that the laws enacted in accordance with it will be just. In political affairs perfect procedural justice cannot be achieved. Moreover, the constitutional process must rely, to a large degree, on some form of voting. I assume for simplicity that a variant of majority rule suitably circumscribed is a practical necessity. Yet majorities (or coalitions of minorities) are bound to make mistakes, if not from a lack of knowledge and judgment, than as a result of partial and self-interested views. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Nevertheless, our natural duty to uphold just institutions binds us to comply with unjust laws and policies, or at least not to oppose them by illegal means as long as they do not exceed certain limits of injustice. Being required to support a just constitution, we must go along with one of its essential principles, that of majority rule. In a state of near justice, then, we normally have a duty to comply with unjust laws in virtue of our duty to support a just constitution. Given humans as they are, there are many occasions when this duty will come into play. The contract doctrine naturally leads us to wonder how we could ever consent to a constitutional rule that would require us to comply with laws that we think are unjust. One might ask: how is it possible that when we are free and still without chains, we can rationally accept a procedure that may decide against our opinion and give effect to that of others? Once we take up the point of view of the constitutional convention, the answer is clear enough. First, among the very limited number of feasible procedures that have any chance of being accepted at all, there are none that would always decide in our favour. And second, consenting to one of these procedures is surely preferable to no agreement at all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The situation is analogous to that of the original position where the parties give up any hope of free-rider egoism: this alternative is each person’s best (or second best) candidate (leaving aside the constraint of generality), but it is obviously not acceptable to anyone else. Similarly, although at the stage of the constitutional convention the parties are now committed to the principles of justice, they must make some concession to one another to operate a constitutional regime. Even with the best of intentions, their opinions of justice are bound to clash. In choosing a constitution, then, and in adopting some form of majority rule, the parties accept the risks of suffering the defects of one another’s knowledge and sense of justice in order to gain the advantages of an effective legislative procedure. There is no other way to manage a democratic regime. Nevertheless, when they adopt the majority principle the parties agree to put up with unjust laws only on certain conditions. Roughly speaking, in the long run the burden of injustice should be more or less evenly distributed over different groups in society, and the hardship of unjust policies should not weigh too heavily in any particular case. Therefore the duty to comply is problematic for permanent minorities that have suffered from injustice for many years. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
And certainly we are not required to acquiesce in the denial of our own and others’ basic liberties, since this requirement could not have been within the meaning of the duty of justice in the origin position, nor consistent with the understanding of the rights of the majority in the constitutional convention. Instead, we submit our conduct to democratic authority only to the extent necessary to share equitably in the inevitable imperfections of a connotational system. Accepting these hardships is simply recognizing and being willing to work within the limits imposed by the circumstances of human life. In view of this, we have a natural duty of civility not to invoke the faults of social arrangements as a too ready excuse for not complying with them, nor to exploit in evitable loopholes in the rules to advance our interests. The duty of civility imposes a due acceptance of the defects of institutions and a certain restraint in taking advantage of them. Without some recognition of this duty mutual trust and confidence are liable to break down. Thus in a state of near justice at least, there is normally a duty (and for some also the obligation) to comply with unjust laws provided that they do not exceed certain bounds of injustice. This conclusion is not much stronger than that asserting our duty to comply with just laws. It does, however, take us a step further, since it covers a wider range of situations; but more important, it gives some idea of the questions that are to be asked in ascertaining our political duty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Like the geography of the planet, the human body has until now represented a fixed point in human experience, a “given.” Today we are fast approaching the day when the body can no longer be regarded as fixed. Humans will be able, within a reasonably short period, to redesign not merely individual bodies, but the entire human race. In in 1962 Drs. J. D, Watson and F. H. Crick received the Novel prize for describing the DNA molecule, advanced in genetic have come tripping over one another at a rapid pace. Molecular biology is now exploding from the laboratories. New genetic knowledge has permitted us to tinker with human heredity and manipulate the genes to create altogether new versions of humans. One of the more fantastic possibilities is that humans will be able to make biological carbon copies of themselves. Through a process known as “cloning” it will be possible to grow from the nucleus of an adult cell a new organism that has the same genetic characteristics of the person contributing the cell nucleus. The resultant human “copy” would start life with a genetic endowment identical to that of the donor, although cultural differences might thereafter alter the personality or physical development of the clone. Cloning would make it possible for people to see themselves born anew, to fill the World with twins of themselves. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Cloning would, among other things, provide us with solid empirical evidence to help us resolve, once and for all, the ancient controversy over “nature vs. nurture” or “heredity vs. environment.” The solution of this problem, through the determination of the role played by each, would be one of the great milestones of human intellectual development. Whole libraries of philosophical speculation could, by a single stroke, be rendered irrelevant. An answer to this question would open the way for speedy, qualitative advances in psychology, moral philosophy and a dozen other fields. However, cloning could also create undreamed of complications for the race. There is a certain charm to the idea of Albert Einstein bequeathing copies of himself to posterity. We could bring Mrs. Winchester back and learn the secrets of her mansion, and find out if she wanted to complete or expand it. However, what of horrible figures enshrined in history? Should there be laws to regulate cloning. Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg, a scientist who takes his social responsibility very seriously, believes it conceivable that those who are most narcissistic, and that the clones they produce will also be narcissists. Even if narcissism, however, is culturally rather than biologically transmitted, there are other eerie difficulties. Thus Dr. Lederberg rises a question as to whether human, if permitted, might not “go critical.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
“I use that phrase,” Dr. Lederberg told me, “in almost exactly the same sense that is involved in nuclear energy. It will go critical if there is a sufficient positive advantage to doing so. This has to do with whether the efficiency of communication, particularly along educational lines, is increased as between identical genotypes or not. The similarity of neurological hardware might make it easier for identical copies to transmit technical and other insights from one generation to the next.” How close is cloning? We have technically been able to clone humans for almost a decade, but as far as we know, no one has actually cloned a whole person. Technically, it is not difficult to produce a clone embryo. However, to even research human cloning, scientists would need to ethically collect a large amount of donated eggs and find enough surrogates to carry them. But even if they made it through that logistical nightmare. Across the board, scientists have found that some embryos expire before they are implanted. And those that make it to term often die soon after birth or end up wit severe abnormalities. Simply, these are risks that are easier to take when it comes to experimenting with non-human beings. However, scientists have learned how the various organs of the body develop, and they have begun to experiment with various means of modifying them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Eventually, things like the size of the brain and certain sensory qualities of the brain are going to be brought under direct developmental control. I think this is very near. However, this ethical, moral, and political questions raised by the new biology simply boggle the mind. Who shall live and who shall die? What are humans? Who shall control research into these fields? How shall new findings be applied? Might we not unleash horrors for which humans are totally unprepared? In the opinion of many of the World’s leading scientist human cloning is a disaster waiting to happen. However, gene editing has some benefits. Imagine the implications of the biological breakthroughs in what might be termed “birth technology.” Within a mere ten to fifteen years a woman will be able to buy a tiny frozen embryo that has been perfected, take it to her doctor, have it implanted in her uterus, carry it for nine months, and then give birth to it as thought it had been conceived in her own body. The embryo would, in effect, be sold with a guarantee that the resultant baby would be free of genetic defect. The purchaser would also be told in advance the colour of the baby’s eyes, and hair, its gender, its probable size at maturity and its probable Intelligence Quotient (IQ). #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Indeed, it will be possible at some point to do away with the female uterus altogether. Babies will be conceived, nurtured and raised to maturity outside the human body. It is clearly only a matter of years before the work begun by Dr. Daniele Petrucci in Bologna and other scientists in the United States of America and the Soviet Union, makes it possible for women to have babies without the discomfort of pregnancy. Fertilized human eggs might be useful in the colonization of the planets. Instead of shipping adults to Mars, we could ship a shoebox full of such cells and grow them into an entire city-size population of humans. When you consider how much it costs in fuel to lift every pound off the launch pad, why send full-grown men and women aboard space ships? Instead, why not ship tiny embryos, in the care of a competent biologist…We miniaturize other spacecraft components. Why not the passengers? Long before such developments occur in outer space, however, the impact of the new birth technology will strike home on Earth, splintering our traditional notions of sexuality, motherhood, love, child-rearing, and education. Discussions about the future of the family that deal only with The Pill overlook the biological witches’ brew now seething in the laboratories. The moral and emotional choices that will confront us in the coming decades are mind-staggering. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Many believe that we are playing God and should not, but we have been made in the image of God and should we sit back and watch as the environment and the human race and animal and plant life have been destroyed, or try to fix errors and make a primary race of humans that is healthy, control the weather and make Earth a paradise and produce enough food to feed humanity, make other planets inhabitable to sustain the human life that is produced by a healthy society, and product animal and plant life from going extinct? We really could produce an animal planet, have a forest planet, so forth and so on. It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. I emphatically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it—that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right. I believe, on the contrary, that they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will. God’s will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces, the intrinsically good. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
However, when we have said that God commands things only because they are good, we must add that one of the things intrinsically good is that rational creatures should freely surrender themselves to their Creator in obedience. The content of our obedience—the thing we are commanded to do—will always be something intrinsically good, something we ought to do even if (by an impossible supposition) God had not commanded it. However, in addition to the content, the mere obeying is also intrinsically good, for, in obeying, a rational creature consciously enacts its creaturely role, reverses the act by which we fell, treads Adam’s dance backward, and returns. We therefore agree with Aristotle that what is intrinsically right may well be agreeable, and that the better a human is the more one will like it; but we agree with Dr. Kant so far as to say that there is one right act—that of self-surrender—which cannot be willed to the height by fallen creatures unless it is unpleasant. And we must add that this one right act includes all other righteousness, and that the supreme cancelling of Adam’s fall, the movement full speed astern by which we retrace our long journey from Paradise, the untying of the old, hard know, must be when the creature, with no desire to assist it, stripped naked to the bare willing of obedience, embraces what is contrary to its nature, and does that for which only one motive is possible. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Such an act may be described as a test of the creature’s return to God: hence our fathers said that troubles were sent to us. A familiar example is Abraham’s trial when he was ordered to sacrifice Isaac. With the historicity or the morality of that story I am not now concerned, but with the obvious question, “If God is omniscient He must have known what Abraham would do, without any experiment; why, then, this needless torture? However, as St. Augustine points out, whatever God knew, Abraham at any rate did not know his obedience could endure such a command until the even taught him; and the obedience which he did not know that he would choose, he cannot be said to have chosen. The reality of Abraham’s obedience was the act itself; and what God knew in knowing that Abraham would obey was Abraham’s actual obedience on that mountain top at that moment. To say that God need not have tried the experiment is to say that because God knows, the thing known by God need not exist. However, God uses these legends in the Bible and gives us free will to cultivate us and not allow nature nor nurture to control us, in hopes that we learn to yield to the righteous will of God through guidance and not force. If pain sometimes shatters the creature’s false self-sufficiency, yet in supreme Trial or Sacrifice it teaches one the self-sufficiency which really ought to be one’s—the strength, which if Heaven gave it, may be called one’s own: for then, in the absence of all merely natural motives and supports, one acts in that strength, and that alone, which God confers upon one through one’s subject will. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s, and this is one of the many senses in which one that loses one’s soul shall find it. In all other acts our will is fed through nature, that is, through created things other than the self—through the desires which our physical organism and our heredity supply to us. When we act from ourselves alone—that is, from God in ourselves—we are collaborators in, or live instruments of, creation: and that is why such an act undoes with backward mutters of dissevering power the uncreative spell which Adam laid upon his species. Hence as suicide is the typical expression of the stoic spirit, and battle of the warrior spirit, martyrdom always remains the supreme enacting and perfection of Christianity. This great action has been initiated for us, done on our behalf, exemplified for our imitation, and inconceivably communicated to all believers, by Christ on Calvary. There the degree of accepted Death reaches the utmost bounds of the imaginable and perhaps goes beyond them; not only all natural supports, but the presence of the very Father to whom the sacrifice is made deserts the victim, and surrender to God does not falter though God forsakes it. The doctrine of death which I describe is not peculiar to Christianity. Nature herself has written it large across the World in the repeated drama of the buried seed and the re-arising corn. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
From nature, perhaps, the oldest agricultural communities learned it and with animal, or human, sacrifices showed forth for centuries the truth that without shedding of blood is no remission; and though at first such conceptions may have concerned only the crops and offspring of the tribe, they came later, in the Mysteries, to concern the spiritual death and resurrection of the individual. The Indian ascetic, mortifying one’s body on a bed of spikes, preaches the same lesson; the Greek philosopher tells us that the life of wisdom is a practice of death. The sensitive and noble heathen of modern times makes one’s imagined gods die into life. Mr. Huxley expounds non-attachment. We cannot escape the doctrine by ceasing to be Christians. It is an eternal gospel revealed to humans wherever humans have sought, or endured, the truth: it is the very never of redemption, which anatomizing wisdom at all times and in all places lays bare; the unescapable knowledge which the Light and that lighteneth every human presses down upon the minds of all who seriously question what the Universe is about. The peculiarity of the Christian faith is not to teach this doctrine but to render it, in various ways, more tolerable. Christianity teaches us that the terrible task has already in some sense been accomplished for us—that a master’s hand is holding ours as we attempt to trace the difficult letters and that our script need only be a copy, not an original. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Again, where other systems expose our total nature to death (as in Buddhist renunciation) Christianity demands only that we set right a misdirection of our nature, and has no quarrel, like Plato, with the body as such, nor with the psychical elements in our make-up. And sacrifice in its supreme realization is not exacted of all. Confessors as well as martyrs are saved, and some old people whose state of grace we can hardly doubt seem to have gotten through their, on average, seventy to ninety years surprisingly easily. The sacrifice of Christ is repeated, or re-echoed, among His followers in varying degrees, from the curellest martyrdom down to a self-submission of intention whose outward signs have nothing to distinguish them from the ordinary fruits of temperance and sweet reasonableness. The causes of tis distribution I do not know; but from our present point of view it ought to be clear that the real problem is not why some humble, pious, believing people suffer, but why some do not. Our Lord Himself, it will be remembered, explained the salvation of those wo are fortunate in the World only by referring to the unsearchable omnipotence of God. Guide to travelers, for your help I pray, that you might be with me as I go on my way. I give greetings to the God of this place, I, a traveler, offer up prayers. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
From my land to this one, I have come, meaning no harm to any who dwell here. Land of Spirits, I pray to you; though I do not yet know you, I honour you. Lord of Trees, I pray to you as I enter this forest. Please watch over my steps while I am under your care. Throughout all generations God endureth and His name endureth; His throne is established, and His kingdom and His faithfulness are eternal. His words have living and abiding power. They are forever trustworthy and for all time precious both for our fathers and for us, for our children, and for all future generations of His servants, the seed of America. As for our ancestors so for our descendants, Thy teaching is good and endures forever and ever; it is a truth, a faith, a law which shall not pass away. It is true that Thou art the Lord our God and the God of our fathers, our King and our fathers’ King, our Redeemer and the Redeemer of our Fathers. From everlasting Thou has been our Creator, the Rock of our salvation; our Deliverer and Redeemer forever; there is no God besides Thee. Thou has been the help of our father from of old, a Shield and a Deliverer to their children in every generation. In the height of the Universe is Thy habitation, and Thy laws of righteousness please reach unto the ends of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
At night, passers-by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. The bell in the belfry high in the gables tolled regularly at midnight to summon incoming flights of spirits. Later it tolled again to warn these visitors to return to their sepulchres. About once a week these departed ones relaxed and danced in the Great Ball Room.
Yes, there was a six-foot cypress hedge enclosing the estate. The writer’s father in 1888, helped with much of the ground’s landscaping, pruned this hedge and planted many of the still-standing ornamental trees. He mentioned no barbed wire–nor did the man who removed this hedge decades later.
Entrance was not really barred but we were reluctant to trespass. Adults stretched their necks when they drove by and small boys settled for a peek through the cypress hedge. So much for answers to a few of those endless rumors surrounding our mysterious lady.
Ghosts have always been a part of the human psyche and experience. Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there. The Victorian Gardens are open today! winchestermysteryhouse.com
Business Underlies Everything—Do Business in Great Waters!
Diet is a way of eating for the kind of life you want. Accelerated changes in the human condition require an array of symbolic images of humans which will match up to the requirements of constant change, fleeting impression and a high rate of obsolescence. We need a replaceable, expendable series of ikons. Speed has become something undreamt-of, and constant movement every human’s intimate experience. We are different from what we were three moments ago, and in three minutes more, we will again be different. The image appears and disappears, but nothing is retained. Whether one regards this as fun or not depends on the individual, perhaps; but the overall direction of such movement is clear. We are racing toward impermanence. Human’s relationships with symbolic imagery are growing more and more temporary. Events speed past us, compelling us to reassess our assumptions—our previous formed images of reality. Research topples older conceptions of humans and nature. Ideas come and go at a frenetic rate. (A rate, that, in science at least, has been estimated to be twenty to one hundred times faster than a mere century ago.) Image-laden messages hammer at our senses. Meanwhile, language and art, the codes through which we transfer image-bearing messages to one another, are themselves turning over more rapidly. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
All this cannot—and does not—leave us unchanged. If one is to adapt successfully to the churning environment, it accelerates the rate at which the individual must process one’s imagery. Nobody really knows how we convert signals from outside into images within. Yet psychology and the information sciences cast some light on what happens once the image is born. They suggest, to begin with, that the mental model is organized into many highly complex image-structures, and that new images are, in effect, filed away in these structures according to several classificatory principles. A newly generated image is filed away with other images pertaining to the same subject matter. Smaller and more limited inferences are ranged under larger and more inclusive generalizations. The image is checked out for its consistency with those on file. (There is evidence of the existence of a specific neural mechanism that carries out this consistency-check procedure.) We make a decision, with respect to the image, as to whether it is closely relevant to our gals, or whether, instead, it is remote and hence, for us, unimportant. Each image is also evaluated—is it “good” or “bad” for us? Finally, whatever else we do with the new image, we also judge its truth. We decide just how much faith to place in it. Is it an accurate reflection of reality? Can it be believed? Can we base action on it? #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Large numbers of images may have to be reclassified, shuffled, changed again until a suitable integration is found. The mental model must be seen not as a static library of images, but as a living entity, tightly charged with energy and activity. It is not a “given” that we passively receive from outside. Rather, it is something we actively construct and reconstruct from moment to moment. Restlessly scanning the outer World with our senses, probing for information relevant to our needs and desires, we engage in a constant process of rearrangement and updating. At any given instant, innumerable images are decaying, dropping into the black immensity of the forgotten. Others are entering the system, being images, “using them,” and returning them to file, perhaps in different place. We are constantly comparing images, associating them, cross-referencing them in new ways, and repositioning them. This is like muscular activity, it is a form of work. It requires high energy to keep the system operating. Change, roaring through society, widens the gap between what we believe and what really is, between the existing images and the reality they are supposed to reflect. When this gap is only moderate, we can cope more or less rationally with change, we can react sanely to new conditions, we have a grip on reality. When this gap grows too wide, however, we find ourselves increasingly unable to cope, we respond inappropriately, we become ineffectual, withdraw or simply panic. At the final extreme, when the gap grows too wide, we suffer psychosis—or even death. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
To maintain our adaptive balance, to keep the cap within manageable proportions, we struggle to refresh our imagery, to keep it up-to-date, to relearn reality. Thus the accelerative thrust outside us finds a corresponding speed-up in the adapting individual. Our image-processing mechanism, whatever they may be, are driven to operate at higher and higher speeds. This has consequences that have been as yet largely overlooked. For when we classify an image, any image, we may a definite, perhaps even measurable, energy-investment in a specific organizational pattern in the brain. Learning requires energy; and relearning requires even more. All the researches on learning seems to confirm the view that “energies” are bound in support of past learning, and that new energies are essential to unbind the old. At the neurological level, any established system appears to include exceedingly intricate arrangements of cell material, electrical changes and chemical elements. At any cross section in time the somatic structure represents a tremendous investment of fixed forms and potentials. What this means is very simple: there are cost involved in relearning—or, in our terminology, reclassifying imagery. There is an assumption that human’s potential for re-education are unlimited. This is, at best, an assumption, not a fact, and it is an assumption that needs close and scientific scrutiny. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The process of image formation and classification is, in the end, a physical process, dependent upon finite characteristics of nerve cells and body chemicals. In the neural system as now constituted there are, in all likelihood, inherent limits to the amount and speed of image processing that the individual can accomplish. How fast and how continuously can the individual revise one’s inner images before one smashes up against these limits? Nobody knows. It may well be that the limits stretch so far beyond present needs, that such gloomy speculations are unjustified. Yet one salient fact command attention: by speeding up change in the outer World, we compel the individual to relearn one’s environment at every moment. This, in itself, places a new demand on the nervous system. The people of the past, adapting to comparatively stable environments, maintained longer-lasting ties with their own inner conceptions of “the-way-things-are.” We, moving into high-transience society, are forced to truncate these relationships. Just as we must make and break our relationships with things, places, people, and organizations at an ever more rapid pace, so, too, must we turn over our conceptions of reality, our mental images of the World at shorter and shorter intervals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Transience, then, the forcible abbreviation of human’s relationships, is not merely a condition of the external World. It has its shadow within us as well. New discoveries, new technologies, new social arrangements in the external World erupt into our lives in the form of increased turnover rates—shorter and shorter relational durations. They force a faster and faster pace of daily life. They demand a new level of adaptability. And they set the stage for that potentially devastating social illness—future shock. When you have not discovered them for yourself, being told what your impulses are can lead to compliance and to role-playing the personality you have been told you have; it can lead to a false idea of yourself, to a False Self. I am concerned with the search for the self and the restatement of the fact that certain conditions are necessary if success is to be achieved in this search. These conditions are associated with what is usually called creativity. It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. Self means the whole personality, conscious and unconscious, integrated and non-integrated, the whole map as well as the current working model. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The self is something that can be experience and apprehended: it cannot be accurately described in words. A child that is playing happily is exploring what happens in various manageable circumstances—what people and things feel like when one handles then, what one feels like wen handling them, what they can do, and what they can be made to do. In play we have freedom to overcome timidity by trial and error, uninhibited by the fear of mistakes. Interest can build up gradually, at our own pace, and we can stop when we want to. There is no impingement, however helpfully it is meant, from the World of others. Others are not wanted just then, however loved they may be at other times. Babies are persons. You may be sure that if one is just an ordinary baby, one will notice the attractive object and one will reach for it. As a matter of fact, probably as soon as one has reached for it, one will suddenly be overcome with reserve. It is as if one thought, “I had better think this thing out; I wonder what feelings mother will have on this subject. I had better hold back until I know.” So, as if nothing were further from one’s thoughts, one will turn away from the spoon. In a few moments, however, one will return one’s interest in it, and one will very tentatively put a finger on the spoon. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The baby may perhaps grasp the spoon, and look at mother to see what one can get from her eyes. At this point I will probably have to tell mother what to do, because otherwise she will help too much, or hinder, as the case may be; so I ask her to take as little part in what happens as possible. The baby gradually finds from one’s mother’s eyes that this new thing one is doing is not disapproved of and so one catches hold of the spoon more firmly and begins to make it one’s own. One is still very tense, however, because one is not certain what will happen if one does with this thing what one wants to do so badly. One does not even know for sure what it is that one wants to do. We guess that in the course of a little while one will discover what one wants to do with it because one’s mouth begins to get excited. The baby is still very quiet and thoughtful but saliva begins to flow from one’s mouth. One’s tongue looks sloppy. One’s mouth beings to want the spoon. One’s gums begin to want to enjoy biting on it. It is not very long before one has put it in one’s mouth. We can now say that the baby has taken this thing and made it one’s own. One has lost all the stillness that belongs to concentration and wondering, and doubt. Instead one is confident and very much enriched by the new acquisition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The True Self starts with a sense of being-at-one both with an interesting, helpful, friendly World and with whatever impulses, needs, and wishes may arise. What are the conditions in which the True Self can survive and maintain itself? Being securely held by a facilitating environment is apparently essential. The mother is the matrix or a framework of ego-relatedness. She facilitates conditions which provide security and the freedom to explore, to find, to create, to play. When parents provide such sure and unobtrusive protection that the child feels totally secure, the child does not need its watchful and defensive ego-functions, and they do not develop prematurely: this gives a longer time for the True Self to establish itself and ramify. To relax into non-purposive activity, to be undefended and not on the watch, that is a very rare state for most of us. It is sometimes achieved in psychotherapy, and by some children in infancy and childhood. When a silence falls between people who feel secure with each other, we have something like it. It is the stuff out of which friendship is made, and may turn out to be the matrix of transference. If we have had no experience of this state, it is hard to imagine it—or to allow it to happen. This is called ego-relatedness, for the e-merging self is not conscious of relating to anyone, but does not feel alone either, and is in fact not unrelated (not without an attachment figure), since someone is there, though without impinging on the child’s awareness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
This is a vulnerable state for there is another person to look after you, but you do not experience this other, except through knowing that it is safe for you to forget about yourself and about any dangers which might threaten. Because of this other, however, nothing can go wrong. Being safely held makes ego-relatedness possible. Ego-relatedness makes play possible. A moment of reflection will show that a person’s capacity to be alone is very convincing evidence that that person is capable of being separate, individuated, an individual. However, it is not about whether you can be on your own, but whether you can be in other people’s company, and yet be yourself, and feel comfortable and unthreatened. The capacity to be alone is based on the experience of being “alone” in the presence of someone else. This is the experience of ego-relatedness. In this state the ego-immaturity of the infant is naturally balanced by ego-support from the mother. Without sufficient experience of ego-relatedness, the capacity to be alone cannot develop. When we examine the phrase “I am alone,” the concept “I” implies that there has already been considerable emotional development: it implies the differentiation of “I” from “other,” an internal Word and an external one. The phrase “I am” shows that the individual has not only shape but also life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
In the beginnings of “I am,” the individual is raw, undefended, vulnerable. The individual can achieve the “I am” stage only because a protective environment exists, created by the mother and other caring adults, though the baby is probably not aware of this. Next comes the phrase “I am alone,” a development from “I am” which depends on the infant’s awareness of the continued existence of a reliable mother whose reliability makes it possible for the infant to be alone and to enjoy being alone, for a limited period. Ego-relatedness as a state of mind comes, I imagine, after selfobject states of mind have started to develop: ego-relatedness seems to require a little more consciousness that there is something or someone besides yourself. The next development, in which transitional objects are created, probably cannot begin until after the state of mind in which selfobjcts predominant has declined. While the infant is still totally dependent on the (m)other, various phantasies float through its mind. In this state of mind the infant has in one sense complete control over the other, but the infant uses some of that control to give a phantasied independence to that other. They are more noticed now because we have not learnt to notice these things, all of which give the child some reassurance that its environment is a benevolent one and can provide what it needs. The child ensures that it never feels alone, powerless, or abandoned. Transitional experiences help the child develop. They allow one to experiment and come to terms, by easy stages, with some unpleasant facts when it is developmentally ready to accept them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The child knows that it is not in total control of the World but does have some control; that a relationship has two ends to it—self and other; that both ends of the relationship can be practiced in play so as to get a better grasp of their nature; and that self-assertion is not too dangerous. To begin with, a thumb or a blanket or a teddy bear was enough to satisfy the child with phantasies of comfort. One only wanted lulling. However, when the self begins to be strong enough to tolerate moments of frustration, the child may create a grown-up based on the nearest human being who will stand still for it. And then: “Oh, brave new World, that has such people in it.” Transitional processes are active and reach out to create the needed World, given half a chance. Intuition will not mislead you but your conscious mentality, which is its receiving agent, may do so. For your consciousness may partially deviate from its message, or even wholly pervert it, in giving deliverance to exaggerations or extravagances impossibilities or delusions, thus filling you with useless hopes or groundless fears. Consequently, at the very time when you suppose that you are being infallibly guided by intuition you may in fact be strongly guided by pseudo-intuition—which is something quite different. You may believe that you are honouring higher guidance when in actuality you are dishonouring it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The situation is therefore much less simple and much more complex than most people know. To get intuitive direction when, for example, two or more conflicting courses of action confront you is not so easy as it seems and less easy still during a time of trouble. For during such a time you will naturally catch at anything already unknowingly or knowingly pre-determined by some complex to be the best way out of it. The very desire for a particular thing, event, or action may put a pseudo-intuition into your mind. If you want to be wary of this you should seek corroboration from other sources and especially from right reason. Again, the first thought which enters your consciousness after you have decided to seek such direction and have committed your affair to the deeper mind, is not necessarily an authentic intuition. Nor is the second thought such a one, nor the third, and so on. If the impression is to be rightly received, it must be patiently received, and that quite often means that you must sleep on it, and sleep on it perhaps for several days, sometimes weeks. The trustworthy intuition is really there during all this time but the obstacles to knowing it are also there in yourself. Do not, therefore, lose the inner direction through haste nor set up a stone image to be worshipped by mistake in its place. Nor is it enough to say that intuitive truths are self-evident ones. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
What appeared to be self-evident to you twenty years ago may now appear self-delusive. All humans at some time or other receive intuitive suggestions from within, whilst a few humans receive them constantly. It is not therefore that intuition is such a rare and extraordinary manifestation. What is rare and extraordinary is its pure reception, its correct comprehension. For on the one hand we receive along with an intuition the suggestions of environment, education, heredity, and self-interest no less than the distortions of desire, fear, and hope, while on the other hand we receive the doubts and questionings of reason. Even if we correct the suggestions and adjust the distortions of the first group, we remain uncertain and unclear because reason naturally wants to know why? It wants to understand why an intuitive prompting should be accepted. And by the very nature of an intuition it is often something which neither past experience nor present logic can justify. This is not only because all the facts of the case are not at our command but, because of their endless ramifications or superphysical character, cannot possibly be at our command. These are some of the difficulties which confront humans at one’s present stage of evolution and which render so many so-called intuitions unreliable or undependable even though their original birth was genuinely what it claimed to be. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
What is the remedy? Only careful, ruthless, and impartial analysis of each and every intuition, constant vigilance over and checking of the results which ensue when they are accepted, and long self-training through several years can finally bring us to the clear recognition of what is or is not authentic intuitive guidance, suggestion, or information. One would not be so bad a judge of vale as to prefer reason over intuition, whenever one had the absolute certainty that it was intuition. However, past experience has shown how difficult it is to arrive at such certitude, how deceptive are the masks which impulse, desire, rashness, and selfishness can assume. Until, therefore, one’s development has reached a point where a genuine intuition is at once recognized as such and a pseudo-intuition quickly detected for what it is, one must not abandon the use of reason but rather regard it as a most valuable ally. If inner guidance is truly intuitive or merely pseudo-intuitive, how can one tell? One of the ways is to consider whether it tends to the benefit of all concerned in a situation, the others as well as oneself. The word “benefit” here must be understood in a large way, must include the spiritual result along with the material one. If the guidance does not yield this result, it may be ego-prompted and will then hold the possibility of error. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
An intuitive feeling is one untainted by the ego’s wishes, uncoloured by its aversions. Wrong personal intention may be negated by right intuitive guidance, but it is not easy to recognize the later as such. The difference between a mere impulse and a real intuition may often be detected in two ways: first by waiting a few days, as the subconscious mind has then a chance to offer help in deciding the matter; second, by noting the kind of emotion which accompanies the message. If the emotion is of the lower kind, such as anger, indignation, greed, or lust, it is most likely an impulse. If of the higher kind, such as unselfishness or forgiveness, it is most likely an intuition. When having to make a decision by the fact that it proceeds out of deep inner calm, out of utter tranquility, one may recognize the voice the voice of wisdom, whereas impulse is frequently born in exaggerated enthusiasm or undue excitement. The possibility of pain is inherent in the very existence of a World where souls can meet. When souls become wicked they will certainly use this possibility to hurt one another; and this, perhaps, accounts for four-fifths of the suffering in humans. It is human, not God, who by human avarice or human unenlighteness produced destruction, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
However, there remains, nonetheless, much suffering which cannot be thus traced to ourselves. Even if all suffering were human-made, we should like to know the reason for the enormous permission to torture their fellows which God gives to the worst of humans. Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator—to enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature. When it does so, it is good and happy. Lest we should think this a hardship, this kind of good begins on a level far above the creatures, for God Himself, as Son, from all eternity renders back to God as Father by filial obedience the being which the Father by paternal love eternally generates in the Son. This is the pattern which humans were made to imitate—which Paradisal humans did imitate—and wherever the will conferred by Creator is thus perfectly offered back in delighted and delighting obedience by the creature, there, most undoubtedly, is Heaven, and there the Holy Ghost proceeds. In the World as we now know it, the problem is how to recover this self-surrender. We are not merely imperfect creature who must be improved: we are rebels who must lay down our arms. The first answer, then, to the questions why our cure should be painful, is that to render back the will which we have so long claimed for our own, is in itself, whenever and however it is done, a grievous pain. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Even in Paradise I have supposed a minimal self-adherence to be overcome, though the overcoming, and the yielding, would there by rapturous. However, to surrender a self-will inflamed and swollen with years of usurpation is a kind of death. We all remember this self-will as it was in childhood: the bitter, prolonged rage at every thwarting, the burst of passionate tears, the morbid fear of obedience. Hence the older type of nurse or parent was right to train children to respect their elders and obey God’s rules. And now that we are grown up, we do not howl and stamp quite so much, that is partly because our elders began the process of raising us to be obedient in the nursery, and partly because the same passions now take more subtle forms and have grown clever at avoid deviant behaviour. However, the human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every human knows that something is wrong when one is being hurt. Pain is not only immediately recognizable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our unenlighteness; and anyone who has watched gluttons shovelling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
However, pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscious, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf World. A bad human, happy, is a human without the least inkling that one’s actions do not “answer,” that they are not in accord with the laws of the Universe. A compelling inner conviction or intuition need not necessarily collide with cold reason. However, as an assumed intuition which may be merely a bit of wishful thinking or emotional bias, it is always needful to check or confirm or discipline it by reasoning. The two can work together, even whilst recognizing and accepting each other’s peculiar characteristics and different methods or approach. Hence all intuitively formed projects and plans should be examined under this duplex light. The contribution of fact by reason should be candidly and calmly brought up against the contribution of inward rightness made by “intuition.” If they prove unworkable or unreasonable, we must not hesitate to scrap intuitively formed plans. The promptings that come from this inner being are so faintly heard at first, however, strong on their own plane, that we tend to disregard them as trivial. This is the tragedy of humans. The voices that so often mislead one into pain-brining courses—one’s passion, one’s ego, and blind intellect—are loud and clamant. The whisper that guides one aright and to God is timid and soft. So subtle is the oncoming and so mysterious is the working of the true intuition, so open and blatant is the fantasy that is false intuition, that the first test of authenticity is indicated here. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The corrective separation of true from false intuitions, and of impersonal from personal impressions, follows a careful disciplining of the consciousness and a cautious vigilance over the feelings. One can learn with time, and from the visible results it always brings, a better estimate of the truth or falsity of these impressions and intuitions. When the results injure one, one may know that the acceptance of that which led to them was an error; a careful study of which errors will point the way to their avoidance in the future. The intuitive consciousness eludes common sense at some times but aligns with it at others. The day will come when constant effort and long practice will permit one to recognize true from pseudo-intuition with the speed and certainty with which a musically trained ear recognizes notes and times (tunes) in a played piece. When a strong intuitive feeling contradicts—much more if it nearly swallows up—a conventional sense-impression, it is wise to become alert and reconsider the report. In this case I bring before the court, may it be your side that I argue, God. Please bring me to the truth, and please show me the way to proclaim it. May it not be the side of the more skillful that prevails, but that of the more deserving justice. Great Judge, please sit in judgment on this case! The One mind is experiencing itself in us, less in the ego-shadow and fully in God, hardly aware in that shadow and self-realized in the light that casts it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
With abounding love has Thou loved us, O Lord our God, with exceeding compassion has Thou revealed Thy mercy unto us. O our Father, our King, for the sake of our fathers who trusted in Thee and whom Thou did teach the laws of life, be also gracious unto us and please teach us. O our Father, compassionate Father, please have mercy upon us and imbue us with the will to understand, to discern, to hearken and to learn, to teach and to obey, to practice and to fulfill in love all the teachings of Thy Bible. Please deepen our insights in your Bible, and please make our hearts cleave to Thy commandments. Please grant us singleness of purpose to love and revere Thy name so that we may never suffer humiliation. Because we have faith in Thy holy, great and revered name, may we rejoice in Thy saving power. O gather us in peace from the four corners of the Earth, and please restore us triumphantly to our homeland, for Thou art the God who works salvation. Thou has chosen us from among all peoples and tongues by brining us near unto Thee in faithlessness that we might lovingly give thanks unto Thee and proclaim Thy unity. Blessed are Thou, O Lord, who in love has chosen Thy people America. Hear, O America: the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Blessed by His glorious kingdom for ever and ever. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
Sort of how tacos tonight just makes sense, getting cozy in this #Meadows Residence 1 Great Room is kind of a no-brainer. 😉🌮 The open concept floor plan means there’s plenty of room for a sectional. 😍
View elevations for this residence on our website. Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/
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The Last Infirmity of Noble Mind–To Scorn Delights and Live Labourious Day!
We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists in the loved one, perfection. A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime. The types of skills which an anxious child develops are characteristic of one’s situation. Children with a sense of security and competence, and an interest in the World of challenging unyielding things, are likely to look for new things and enjoy the challenge. Children with a more insecurely-based self will feel more dependent on others, unsure whether they will be given good things and unsure whether they are allowed to get good things for themselves; they will therefore have less practice in developing the skills which lead to control over the environment in any direct way. The skills they develop are more likely to be in the area of getting others to comfort or approve or achieve for them. They may be a good deal more perceptive than their mores secure friends, their sensitivity to others developing from the time when voice and body-language might yield clues on what others were good for and how they could be got to be kind, pleased, not offended. Other people’s expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one’s being, the homunculi and the very earliest memory-traced. This kind of development, a compensatory structure, is called the False Self. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
In fact, all of us have a collection of overlapping selves or roles, some of us more so, some of us less. Some of these selves are falser than others: more strongly linked with being acceptable, less strongly linked with our deeper feelings. One of my friends has “George,” a robot bit of her very nice personality, whom she switches on at formal do’s and occasions when genuineness and spontaneity are very much not called for! It makes it pleasant for the rest of her to have her around, false self or not. In any case, the False Self is not a structure that should be unthinkingly denigrated. All of us need protective defences and devices against hurt. Some developments of the self are primarily defensive, deriving from the need to carry on when life no longer feels like a continuous stream of satisfying (or at least manageable) experiences. In the analysis of a False Personality the fact must be recognized that the analyst can only talk to the False Self of the patient about the patient’s True Self. It is as if a nurse brings a child, and at first the analyst discusses the child’s problem, and the child is not directly contacted. Analysis does not start until the nurse has left the child with the analyst, and the child has become able to remain with the analyst and has started to play. Normal healthy development starts with a strong biologically determined attachment to a mother figure, while exploration of the environment comes naturally at a later stage, exactly because the growing young individual feels secure and safe, not terrified, starving or desperate. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Lack of secure attachment forces the immature organism into action, but the action is accompanied by terror and stereotyping. Real understanding is lack when the infant has had no opportunity for a leisurely and secure playful exploratory phase, during which it has a chance to familiarize itself gradually with the fascinating World of other people and things. Mental representations of the self-in-the-World will have had to form prematurely for the sake of avoiding distress; because of this, a lot of enriching connections which might otherwise have been linked to these representations, will be missing. If the baby has been too worried to linger and enjoy, the adult will think, “Never mind the sunset, let’s go home before something goes wrong.” We ding either that individuals live creatively and feel that life is worth living, or else that they cannot live creatively and are doubtful about the value of living. This variable in human beings is directly related to the quality and quantity of environmental provision at the beginning of each baby’s living experience. Some unfortunate people have almost no complex ego-functioning, they just react. As soon as a need appears or an alarm is signalled, the instant any meaning or pattern begins to emerge, they respond with scarcely a moment of reflection. Premature development of the ego-functions means doing too much, being too little. Premature ego-development is experiences as a continual pressure to respond and react, a sense of straining. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In many ways similar to ecstatic destructiveness is the chronic dedication of a person’s whole life to hate and destructiveness. Not a momentary state as in ecstasies, it has nevertheless the function of taking hold of the whole person, of unifying one in the worship of one goal: to destroy. This state is a permanent idolatry of the god of destruction; one’s devotee has, as it were, given over one’s life to him. Some people have a special pleasures in destruction, thus they can feel in the midst of the daily pain an absorbing pleasure in seeing how the baggage of ideas and values has diminished, how the arsenal of idealisms has been ground piece by piece until nothing remains but a bundle of flesh with raw nerves; nerves that like taut strings renders each tune vibrantly and doubly so in the thin air of isolation. These people want power. They want an aim that fills their day, they want life with all the sweetness of this World, they want t know that the sacrifices are worth while. People who find pleasure in destructiveness do not fight so that the nation is happy, they fight to force it into its line of fate. Their intense masochism by which they make themselves a willing subject of a higher power is fueled by a unifying force of hate and the wish for destruction that they worship something they are willing to give their lives for. These types of individuals do not want to forget the pain they suffered for they believe forgetting will damn them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
By visualizing hurt and pain from the past every day and every hour, it creates a potent hate destructive people thrive on. They do not want to forget any humiliation, and slighting, any arrogant gesture, they want to think of every meanness done to them, every word that caused them pain and was meant to cause pain. They want to remember every face and every experience and every enemy. They want to load their whole life with the whole disgusting dirt, with this a piled-up mass of disgusting memories. They do not want to forget; but the little good that happened to them, that they want to forget. They hate not only their enemies, but they hate life itself. This is very clear from their disposition and how they feel about others, the environment, and animals. These types of individuals feel utterly unrelated and unresponsive to anybody or anything alive. One condition of their worship of hate is because their whole World had been broken down, morally and socially. Their thirst for revenge, the meaninglessness of their present existence, their social uprootedness, goes far to explain their worship of hate. What triggers the effect of their destructive behaviour? A person may first react with defensive aggression against a threat; by this behaviour one has shed some of the conventional inhibitions to aggressive behaviour. This makes it easier for others kinds of aggressiveness, such as destruction and cruelty, to be unleashed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Once this aggressive destruction is unleashed, it may lead to a kind of chain reaction in which destructiveness becomes so intense that when a critical mass is reached, the result is a state of ecstasis in a person, and particularly in a group. There is so much more to psychology than most people realize. And while it is important to be kind and show respect to others, there are just some people we should stay away from. People also have to realize that they cannot fix others and it is not always a great idea to reach out to others it pain, they may be baiting you into a situation that allow them to attach their pain and darkness to you and they may never want to let go. Therefore, follow the usual rules. Do not talk to strangers, and if someone makes you uncomfortable, stay away from them. We are creating and using up ideas and images at a faster and faster pace. Knowledge, like people, places, things, and organizational forms, is becoming disposable. If our inner images of reality appear to be turning over more and more rapidly, one reason may well be an increase in the rate at which image-laden messages are being hurled at our senses. Little effort has been made to investigate this scientifically, but there is evidence that we are increasing the exposure of the individual to image-bearing stimuli. The external environment showers stimuli upon us. Signals originating outside ourselves—sound waves, light, et cetera—strike our sensory organs. Once perceived, these signals are converted, through a still mysterious process, into symbols of reality, into images. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
The waves of coded information turn into violent breakers and come at a faster and faster clip, pounding at us, seeking entry, as it were, to our nervous system. Many schools of thought encourage us to shift the responsibility for our behaviour from our own shoulders to some inherent necessity in the nature of human life, and thus, indirectly, to the Creator. Popular forms of this view are the evolutionary doctrine that what we call badness is an unavoidable legacy from our animal ancestors, or the idealistic doctrine that it is merely a result of our being finite. Now Christianity, if I have understood the Pauline epistles, does admit that perfect obedience to the moral law, which we find written in our hearts and perceive to be necessary even on the biological level, is not in fact possible to humans. This would raise a real difficulty about our responsibility if perfect obedience had any practical relation at all to the lives of most of us. Some degree of obedience which you and I have failed to attain in the last twenty-four hours is certainly possible. The ultimate problem must not be used as one more means of evasion. Most of us are less urgently concerned with the Pauline question than with William Law’s simple statement: “If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
If our depravity were total, we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us so much goodness in human nature. Nor is there a universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each human’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which I have little cause to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying he apostolic injunction to “rejoice” as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain one’s faith in human nature, who is really sad. I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a human is, the more fully one is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that his humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smile. That is a most dangerous error. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (id est, a perfection) with an illusion (id est, an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because in encourages a human to mistake one’s first insights into one’s own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round one’s own silly head. No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy. The principle of perfection is a fascinating concept. There are two variants: in the first it is the sole principle of a teleological theory directing society to arrange institutions and to define the duties and obligations of individuals so as to maximize the achievement of human excellence in art, science, and culture. The principle obviously is more demanding the high the relevant ideal is pitched. Humankind must continually strive to produce great individuals. We give values to our lives by working for the good of highest specimens. For the questions is this: how can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens. The second variant is a more moderate doctrine in which perfection is accepted as but one standard among several in n intuitionist theory. The principle is to be balanced against others by intuition. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The extent to which such a view is perfectionist depends, then, upon the weight given to the claims of excellence and culture. If for example it is maintained that in themselves the achievements of the Greeks in philosophy, science, and art justified the ancient practice of slavery (assuming that this practice was necessary for these achievement), surely the conception is highly perfectionist. Th requirements of perfection override the strong claims of liberty. On the other hand, one may use the criterion simply to limit the redistribution of wealth and income under a constitutional regime. In this case it serves as a counterpoise to egalitarian ideas. Thus it may be said that distribution should indeed be more equal if this is essential for meeting the basic needs of those less favoured and only diminishes the enjoyments and pleasures of those better off. However, the greater happiness of the less fortunate does not in general justify curtailing the expenditures required to preserve cultural values. These forms of life have greater intrinsic worth than the lesser pleasures, however widely the latter are enjoyed. Under normal conditions a certain minimum of social resources must be kept aside to advance the ends of perfection. The only exception is when these claims clash with the demands of the basic needs. Thus given improving circumstances, the principle of perfection acquires an increasing weight relative to a greater satisfaction of desire. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
No doubt many have accepted perfectionism in this intuitionist form. It allows for a range of interpretations and seems to express a far more reasonable view than the strict perfectionist theory. Persons in the original position are asked to consider which principles one would select for the basic structure of society, but one must select as if one had no knowledge ahead of time what position one would end up having in that society. This choice is made from behind a “veil of ignorance,” which prevents one from knowing the individual’s ethnicity, social status, gender, and crucially, the individual’s idea of how to lead a god life. Ideally, this would force participants to select principles impartially and rationally. Individuals in the original position take no interest in one another’s interests, they know that they have (or may have) certain moral and religious interests and other cultural ends which they cannot put in jeopardy. Moreover, they are assumed to be committed to different conceptions of the good and they think that they are entitled to press their claims on one another to further their separate aims. The parties do not share a conception of the good by reference to which the fruition of their powers or even the satisfaction of their desires can be evaluated. They do not have an agreed criterion of perfection that can be used as a principle for choosing between institutions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
If it did not lead to a loss of freedom altogether to advance many of one’s spiritual ends, to acknowledge any such standard would be, in effect, to accept a principle that might lead to a lesser religious or other liberty. If the standard of excellence is reasonably clear, the parties have no way of knowing that their claims may not fall before the higher social goal of maximizing perfect. Thus is seems that the only understanding that the persons in the original position can reach is that everyone should have the greatest equal liberty consistent with a similar liberty for others. They cannot risk their freedom by authorizing a standard of value to define what is to be maximized by teleological principle of justice. Very often it is beyond question that the work of one person is superior to that of another. Indeed, the freedom and well-being of individuals, when measured by the excellence of their activities and works, is vastly different in value. This is true not only of actual performance but of potential performance as well. Comparison of intrinsic value can obviously be made; and although the standard of perfection is not a principle of justice, judgments of value have an important place in human affairs. They are not necessarily so vague that they must fail as a workable basis for assigning rights. The argument is rather that in view of their disparate aims the parties have no reason to adopt the principle of perfection given the conditions of the original position. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
In order to arrive at the ethic of perfectionism, we should have to attribute to the parties a prior acceptance of some natural duty, say the duty to develop human persons of a certain style and aesthetic grace, and to advance the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of the arts. However, this assumption would drastically alter the interpretation of the original position. While justice as fairness allows that in a well-ordered society the values of excellence are recognized, the human perfections are to be pursed within the limits of the principle of free associations. Persons join together to further their cultural and artistic interests in the same way that they form religious communities. They do not use coercive apparatus of the state to win for themselves a greater liberty or larger distributive shares on the grounds that their activities are of more intrinsic value. Perfectionism is denied as a political principle. Thus the social resources necessary to support associations dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences and culture generally are to be won as a fair return for services rendered, or from such voluntary contributions as citizens wish to make, all within a regime regulated by the two principle of justice. On the contract doctrines, then, equal liberty of citizens does not presuppose that the ends of different persons have the same intrinsic value, nor that their freedom and well-being is of the same worth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
It is postulated though that the parties are moral persons, rational individuals with a coherent system of ends and a capacity for a sense of justice. Since they have the requisite defining properties, it would be superfluous to add that the parties are equally moral persons. We can say if we wish that humans have equal dignity, meaning by this simply that they all satisfy the conditions of moral personality expressed by the interpretation of the initial contractual situation. And being alike in this respect, they are to be treated as the principles of justice require. Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all; social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: they are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society. However, none of this implies that their activities and accomplishments are of equal excellence. To think this is to conflate the notion of moral personality with the various perfections that fall under the concept of value. Persons’ being of equal value is not necessary for equal liberty. Their being of equal value is not sufficient either. Sometimes it is said that equality of basic rights follows from the equal capacity of individuals for the higher forms of life; but it is not clear why this should be so. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Intrinsic worth is a notion falling under the concept of value, and whether equal liberty or some other principle is appropriate depends upon the conception of right. Now the criterion of perfection insists that rights in basic structure be assigned so as to maximize the total of intrinsic value. Presumably the configuration of rights and opportunities enjoyed by individuals affects the degree to which they bring to fruition their latest powers and excellences. However, it does not follow that an equal distribution of basic freedom is the best solution. The situation resembles that of classical utilitarianism: we require postulates parallel to the standard assumptions. Thus even if the latent abilities of individuals were similar, unless the assignment of right is governed by a principle of diminishing marginal value (estimated in this case by the criteria for excellence), equal rights would not be insured. Indeed, unless there are bountiful resources, the sum of value might be best increased by very unequal rights and opportunities favouring a few. Doing this is not unjust n the perfectionist view provided that it is necessary to produce a greater sum of human excellence. Now a principle of diminishing marginal value is certainly questionable, although perhaps not so much as that of equal value. There is little reason to suppose that, in general, rights and resources allocated to encourage and to cultivate highly talented persons contribute less and less to the total beyond some point in the relevant range. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
To the contrary, this contribution may grow (or stay consistent) indefinitely. The principle of perfection provides, then, an insecure foundation for the equal liberty and it would presumably depart widely from the difference principle. The assumptions required for equality seem extremely implausible. To find a firm basis for equal liberty, it seems that we must reject the traditional teleological principles, both perfectionism and utilitarian. Justice as fairness requires us to show that modes of conduct interfere with the basic liberties of others or else violate some obligation or natural duty before they can be restricted. For it is when arguments to this conclusion fail that individuals are tempted to appeal to perfectionist criteria in an ad hoc manner. When it is said, for example, that certain kinds of relations involving pleasures of the flesh are degrading and shameful, and should be prohibited on this basis, if only for the sake of the individuals in question irrespective of their wishes, it is often because a reasonable case cannot be made in terms of the principle of justice. Instead we fall back on notions of excellence. However, in these matters we are likely to be influenced by subtle aesthetic preferences and personal feelings of propriety; and individual, class, and group differences are often sharp and irreconcilable. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Since these uncertainties plague perfectionist criteria and jeopardize individual liberty, it seems best to rely entirely on the principles of justice which have a more definite structure. Thus even in its intuitionistic form, perfectionism would be rejected as not defining a feasible basis of social justice. Eventually of course we would have to check whether the consequences of doing without a standard of perfection are acceptable, since offhand it may seem as if justice as fairness does not allow enough scope for ideal-regarding considerations. Yet, public funds for the arts and sciences may be provided through the exchange branch. In this instance there are no restrictions on the reasons, citizens may have for imposing upon themselves the requisite taxes. They may assess the merits of these public goods on perfectionist principles, since the coercive machinery of government is used in this case only to overcome the problems of isolation and assurance, and no one is taxed without one’s consent. The criterion of excellence does not sere here as a political principle; and so, if it wishes, a well-ordered society can devote a sizable fraction of its resources to expenditures of this kind. However, while the claims of culture can be met in this way, the principles of justice do not permit subsidizing universities and institutes, or opera and the theater, on the grounds that these institutions are intrinsically valuable, and that those who engage in them are to be supported even at some significant expense to others who do not receive compensating benefits. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Taxation for these purposes can be justified only as promoting directly or indirectly the social conditions that secure the equal liberties and as advancing in the appropriate way the long-term interests of the least advantaged. This seems to authorize those subsidies the justice of which is least in dispute, and so in these cases anyway there is no evident need for a principle of perfection. The contract doctrine may serve well enough as an alternative moral conception. When we check its consequences for institutions, it appears to match our common sense convictions more accurate than its traditional rivals, and to extrapolate to preciously unsettled cases in a reasonable way. Outreach is one essential task of Christ’s people, and among them there will always be those especially gifted for evangelism. However, the most successful work of outreach would be the work of inreach that that turns people, wherever they are, into lights in the darkened World. A simple goal for the leaders of a particular group would be to bring all those in attendance to understand clearly what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and to be solidly committed to discipleship in their whole life. That is, when asked who they are, they first words out of their mouth would be, “I am an apprentice of Jesus Christ.” This goal would have to be approached very gently and lovingly and patiently with existing groups, where the people involved have not understood this to be part of their membership commitment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
We are not talking about purifying the church, by getting all the “tares” or (Matthew 13). Even tares, real or apparent, are to be loved and served—and called to apprenticeship to Jesus. “Purifying” the church, on the other hand, has always been part of the illusion of being perfectly “right.” Instead of pursing that illusion, we are trying to clarify the local congregation itself in the light of Christ’s call to it. We are trying to make clear what it is that even a false professor must profess in order to participate fully in the congregation. They would, namely have to profess to be disciples or apprentices of Jesus. However, the Lord is the only purifier of groups, and one has one’s own schedule for it. Our task is to be fruitful wheat and to cultivate others to be so. Who we are in our inmost depths is the most basic issue. God’s first concern is not what the church does, it is what the church is. Being must always precede doing, for what we do will be according to what we are. To understand the moral character of God’s people is a primary essential in understanding the nature of the church. As Christians we are to be a moral example to the World, reflecting the character of Jesus Christ. In our present context, to be sure, serious work will have to be done, and there is a strong likelihood of failure. The genuine intuition gets mixed up with guesses and speculations about the matter, with reasonings and ruminations about it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
One’s intuition is unavoidably condition by one’s own personality, inevitably shaped as it is because one is the kind of human one is. It is not only one’s wishes and hopes which interfere with correct receptivity to intuition but also one’s fears and suspicions. One’s normal everyday mind is slow to heed the Higher Power of God and confused in interpretation of the prompting received. One whose mind is too sharply critical to be sensitive to finer mental radiations may fail to recognize the inner happening. This may be because one oneself is not sufficiently in tune with the high frequency represented by God, or it may be because one is too impatient and wants something which in one’s case can only be had with sufficient time. When intuition points to something unwelcome to the ego, the intellect looks for and usually finds an excuse to reject it. A human who really and sincerely wants to find the Truth should be on the lookout for hints, clues, and signs which would be useful to one’s Quest, for they constitute the response from God to one’s aspiration. God can furnish one with the Truth and puts these signals in one’s way. Manifestation implies the necessity of manifesting. However, it might be objected that any sort of necessity existing in the divine equally implies its insufficiency. The answer is that the number One may become aware of itself as being one only be becoming aware of the presence of Two—itself and another. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
However, the figure Nought is under no compulsion. Here we have a mathematical hint towards understanding the riddle of manifestation. Mind as Void is the supreme inconceivable unmanifesting ultimate whereas the World-Mind is forever throwing forth the Universe-series as a second, an “other” wherein it becomes self-aware. God-active, the Unseen Power, is (for us humans) the World-Mind. God-in-repose is Mind. The creative power or energy which comes from World-Mind is not the ultimate essence-consciousness which is God. It is needful to point out the difference between the divine essence and the divine energies. The latter may be several and varied, but the former is always single. It is the difference between Mind as it is in itself, and Mind as it expresses through the cosmos. It would, however, be a mistake to consider the World-Mind as one entity and Mind as another separate from it. It would be truer to consider World-Mind as the active function of Mind. Mind cannot be separated from its powers. The two are one. In its quiescent state it is simply Mind. In its active state it is World-Mind. Mind is in it inmost transcendent nature is the inscrutable mystery of Mysteries but when expressing itself in act and immanent in the Universe, it is the World Mind. We may find in the attributes of the manifested God—that is, the World-Mind—the only indications of the quality, existence, and character of the unmanifest Godhead that it is possible for human to comprehend all. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
All this is a mystery which is perhaps forever will remain an incomprehensible paradox. Mind is active and mind is quiescence are not two separate beings, but two aspects of one and the same being as they appear to human inquiry. Mind active expressed itself in the heart of humans as one’s higher self and in the Universe as the World-Mind. The World-Mind is a radiation of the forever incomprehensible Mind. It is the essence of all things and all beings, from the smallest to the largest. Mind id the Real; matter is the appearance it takes on. The Universe comes by degrees out of the ultimate Being, beyond which nothing is or could possibly be. It is Mind, measureless, with a Power equally measureless. World-Mind is this power in operation, creating, maintaining, and in the end destroying what it has brought forth. If it be true that absolute divine Mind knows nothing of the Universe, nothing of mortal humans, then it is also true that the World-Mind, which is its other aspect, does know them. May God of my people hear my prayers; as we go to the polls to choose our leaders, may it be with wisdom. Lord, please bless my country. Please guide its governors, show them the path to take, make their actions conform to the way of nature. Please knit together the many peoples into one tribe; unite us, make us a family, as indeed we are under your loving gaze. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
God’s chief hosts are holy beings that exalt the Almighty and continually declare God’s glory and holiness. Be Thou praised, O Lord our God, for the excellence of Thy handiwork and for the luminaries which Thou hast made and which render Thee glory. The Heavens are envisioned as the scene of a symphony of worship and song in which all the celestial beings, obedient servants of the divine will, join in a harmonious melody of praise to the Creator. Be Thou blessed, O our Rock, our King and Redeemer; praised by Thy name forever, Creator of ministering beings who stand in the heights of the Universe and with awe proclaim in unison the words of the living God and everlasting King. All of them act with harmonious accord, with purity of purpose and with united strength to perform reverently the will of their Creator. They all break forth into song of pure and holy praise, while they bless, glorify, and proclaim the sovereignty of the name of God, the great, mighty, awe-inspiring King; holy is He. They all pledge before one another to accept willingly the rule of the Kingdom of God. Each grants leave to the other to join in hallowing their Creator. In tranquil spirit with pure speech and sacred melody, they all exclaim in unison and reverently declare: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of His glory. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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The Quality of Mercy is Not Strained, it Drops as the Gentle Rain from Heaven!
I only wish that I could take the entire United States of America into the locker room at half time. I would simply say that we must look not at the points we have lost but at the point we can gain. Currently, it is easier for those with the stronger social positions to advance their interests unjustly without being shown to be clearly out of bounds. Of course all this is obvious, and it has always been recognized that ethical principles are vague. Nevertheless they are not all equally imprecise, and the two principles of justice have an advantage in the greater clarity of their demands in what needs to be done to satisfy them. Each person has an equal right to the most extensive liberties compatible with similar liberties for all. Also, social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that they are both to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged persons, and attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of equality of opportunity. Much new knowledge is admittedly remote from the immediate interests of the ordinary person in the street. One is not intrigued or impressed by the fact that a noble gas like xenon can form compounds—something that until recently most chemists swore was impossible. While even this knowledge may have an impact on one when it is embodies in new technology, until then, one can afford to ignore it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Individuals do not enjoy the experience of risk, the actual process of gambling, the resulting measure is nevertheless influenced by attitudes toward uncertainty as defined by the overall probability distribution. However, a good bit of new knowledge, on the other hand, is directly related to one’s immediate concerns, one’s job, one’s politics, one’s family life, even one’s behaviour involving pleasures of the flesh. Interpersonal comparisons depend upon value judgments. While it is obvious that the acceptance of the principle of utility is a matter for moral theory, it is less evident that the very procedures for measuring well-being raise similar problems. A poignant example is the dilemma that parents find themselves in today as a consequence of successive radical changes in the image of the child in society and in our theories of childrearing. At the turn of last century in the United States of America, for example, the dominant theory reflected the prevailing scientific belief in the primacy of heredity in determining behaviour. Mothers who had never heard of Dr. Darwin or Dr. Spencer raised their babies in ways consistent with the World views of these thinkers. Vulgarized and simplified, passed from person to person, these World views were reflected in the conviction of millions of ordinary people that “bad children are a result of bad stock,” that “crime is hereditary,” et cetera. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
In the early decades of the twentieth century, these attitudes fell back before the advance of environmentalism. The belief that environment shapes personality, and that the early years are the most important, created a new image of the child. The work of Dr. Watson and Dr. Pavlov began to creep into the public ken. Mothers reflected the new behavourism, refusing to feed infants on demand, refusing to pick them up when they cried, weaning them early to avoid a prolonged dependency. A study by Martha Wolfenstein has compared the advice offered parents in seven successive editions of Infant Care, a handbook issues by the United States Children’s Bureau between 1914 and 1951. She found distinct shifts in the preferred methods for dealing with weaning, thumb-sucking, masturbation, bowel and bladder training. It is clear from this study that by the late thirties still another image of the child had gained ascendancy. Freudian concepts swept in like a wave and revolutionized childrearing practices. Suddenly, mothers began to hear about “the rights of infants” and the need for “oral gratification.” Permissiveness became the order of the day. Parenthetically, at the same time that Freudian images of the child were altering the behaviour of parents in Dayton, Dubuque and Dallas, the images of the psychoanalyst changed, too. Psychoanalysts became culture heroes. Movies, television scripts, novels and magazine stories represented them as wise and sympathetic souls, wonder-worker capable of remaking damaged personalities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
From the appearance of the movies Spellbound in 1945, through the late fifties, the analyst was painted in largely positive terms by the mass media. By the mid-sixties, however, one had already turned into a comical creature. Peter Sellers in What’s New Pussycat? played a psychoanalyst much crazier than most of his patients, and “psychanalyst jokes” began to circulate not merely among New York and California sophisticates, but through the population at large, helped along by the same mass media that created the myth of the analyst in the first place. I guess that is why the news is labeled “fake news,” they often contradict themselves for ratings and revenue, swaying viewers in the more popular direction, instead of figuring out what is true and just. This sharp reversal in the public image of the psychoanalyst (the public image being no more than the weighted aggregate of private images in the society) reflected changes in research as well. For evidence was piling up that psychoanalytic therapy did not live up to the claims made for it, and new knowledge in the behavioural sciences, and particularly in psychopharmacology, made many Freudian therapeutic measures seem quaintly archaic. At the same time, there was a great burst of research in the field of learning theory, and a new swing in childrearing, this time toward a kind of neo-behaviourism, got under way. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
At each stage of this development a widely held set of images was attacked by a set of counter-images. Individuals holding one set were assailed by reports, articles, documentaries, and advice from authorities, friends, relatives, and even casual acquaintances who accepted conflicting views. The same mother, turning to the same authorities at two different ties in the course of raising her child, would receive, in effect, somewhat different advice based on different inferences about reality. While for the people of the past, childrearing patterns remained stable for centuries at a time, for the people of the present and the future, it has, like so many other fields, become an arena in which successive waves of images, many of them generated by scientific research, do battle. In this way, new knowledge alters old. The mass media instantly and persuasively disseminate new images, and ordinary individuals, seeking help in coping with an ever more complex social environment, attempt to keep up. At the same time, events—as distinct from research as such—also batter our old image structures. Racing swiftly past our attention screen, they wash out old images and generate new ones. After the freedom rides and the riots in America only the pathological could hang on to the long-cherished notion that underrepresented people are “happy children” content with their poverty. And after the conflicts in the Middle East and America, how many still cling to the image of people as cheek-turning pacifists or a battlefield coward? #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
In education, in politics, in economic theory, in medicine, in international affairs, wave after wave of new images penetrate our defenses, shake up our mental models of reality. The result of this image bombardment is the accelerated decay of old images, a faster intellectual through-out, and a new, profound sense of the impermanence of knowledge, itself. However, with an insufficiently facilitating environment there may be fatal breaks in the sequence of connecting processes which link the infant’s earliest and most physical experiences of needs and their satisfactions—at the very core of the self—to its later experiences of the World of other people and things. Where, for whatever reasons, the environment is less facilitating, there is not s smooth a sequence of connections and so these integrating links are less strong, or absent. The infant may even come to associate its needs with distress and inadequacy, and not with satisfaction and well-being. In such circumstances—the infant may feel compelled to shift away from an interest in one’s own needs to an interest in the (m)other, before it is developmentally ready to do so. The child then mises out on the idea what when it experiences a need, then is the time to satisfy it. The link is missing. The infant has gratifications but does not connect them with the needs it has experienced. Similarly, the infant at times has deprivations, and these are not connected with their source either. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
When the link is missing, even if there are no other ill effect, there is no cathexis to the arousal of needs: a person will not experience the arousal of a need as a pleasurable or desirable experience, since satisfaction has never become directly associated with excitement or arousal. At worst, the deprivation maybe so intense that the whole biologically-based personality is dissociated, the whole conscious personality may break away from the experience of arousal and interest. This kind of breakaway split is called a Basic Fault (or, at least, one kind of Basic Fault). The infant’s needs, biologically associated with the earliest mapping and the original homunculus, become a matter of emotional indifference or even, in severe cases, the cause of panic fear because they are experienced as dangerous intrusions. Meanwhile, emotional attachments do develop. Through these, arousals and interest come to be connected, not with the needs the infant experiences, but with the perceived or imagined needs of those who bring the infant its gratifications—at times which are connected not to the infant’s biological clock but to the (m)other’s ideas. The (m)other must therefore be watched and taken notice of. Attachments made on this basis will be strong but anxious: insecurity is built in. An anxious infant has to stop “being,” in order to deal with distress and in order to deal with the needs of the (m)other from whom help is needed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Unlike the more relaxed infant, who will eventually start an interest in the (m)others because it begins to explore the interesting environment at the biologically appropriate developmental stage, the more needy and distressed infant will begin to be interested in the environment for what it can get out of it. This infant needs to start doing things. The premature shift from being to doing may mark another point of development which would locate a Basic Fault. For the infant is at the developmental stage at which it needs to feel in tune with the World. It needs to feel confirmed as a secure, interesting, and interested self, in a secure relationship with the interested and interesting World of others. However, the need to survive may make it fearful about the World, and interested mainly in seeing where distress and the alleviation of distress may come from. The question ceases to be “Who am I?” “Who are we?” “Who are you?”, and becomes “What are you good for?”, “How do I have to behave to get what I need from you?” The environment become something to be exploited. So children learn how to hustle, scheme and manipulate as infants and it becomes part of their character. The environment becomes something to be exploited. The self and the other stand over against each other, and the primary relationship is not unified but exploitative. What does such a child see when one looks into the face of the mother? Of course nothing can be said about the single occasions on which the mother could not respond. Many babies, however, have to have a long experience of not getting back what they are giving. They look and they do not see themselves. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
When mirroring is disabled, of course there are consequences. First, the baby’s own creative capacity beings to atrophy, and in some way or other they look around for other ways of getting something of themselves back from the environment. Second, the baby gets settled in to the idea that when one looks, what is seen is the mother’s face. The mother’s face is not then a mirror. So perception takes the place of what might have been the beginning of a significant exchange, a two-way process in which self-enrichment alternates with the discovery of meaning in the World of seen things. Naturally, there are half-way stages in this scheme of things. Some babies do not quite give up hope and they study the object and do all that is possible to see in the object some meaning that ought to be there if only it could be felt. Some babies, tantalized by this type of relative maternal failure, study the variable maternal visage in an attempt to predict mother’s mood, just exactly as we all study the weather. The suppositions and anticipations, the attractions and repulsions of the ego enter into one’s intuitive experiences and impede or change them. Most inner guidance is rarely purely intuitive but more often a mixture of genuine intuition with wishful thinking. Hence it is right in parts and wrong in others. The original intuition itself may be a correct one but its reception is so inexpert and so biased that the version accepted in consciousness has deformed and somewhat falsified it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The intuitive is so fine and sensitive a faculty that the emanations of another mind may well disturb its activity or distort its truth. The intuitive approach is the most effective of all, provided it is not clouded by suggestion from outside sources or blurred by bias from inside ones. Suffering from the awareness of one’s powerlessness and separateness, humans can try to overcome one’s existential burden by achieving trancelike state of ecstasy (“to be beside oneself”) and thus to regain unity within oneself and with nature. There are many ways to accomplish this. A very transitory one is provided by nature in the act of pleasures of the flesh. This experience may be said to be the natural prototype of complete concentration and momentary ecstasies; it may include the intimate partner but too often remains a narcissistic experience for each of the two, who perhaps share mutual gratitude for pleasure they have given each other (conventionally felt as love). We Other symbiotic, more lasting and intense ways to arrive at ecstasy are found in religious cults, such as ecstatic dances, the use of mind-altering substances, hortatory practices, or self-induced states of trance. The expression of hate, destructiveness, and aggression is actually rooted in some modern cultures are a rite of passage. Therefore, we must guard against the feeling that there is “safety in numbers.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
It is natural to feel that if all humans are bas bad as the Christians say, then badness must be very excusable. If all the boys plough in the examination, surely the papers must have been too hard? And so the masters at that school feel till they learn that there are other schools where ninety percent of the boys passed on the same papers. Then they begin to suspect that the fault did not lie with the examiners. Again, many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of human society—some particular school, college, regiment or profession where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were regarded as merely normal (“Everyone does it”) and certain others as impracticably virtuous and Quixotic. However, when we emerge from that bad society we made the horrible discovery that in the outer World our “normal” was the kind of thing that no decent person ever dreamed of doing, and our “Quixotic” was take for granted as the minimum standard of decency. What had seemed to us morbid and fantastic scruples so long as we were in the “pocket” now turned out to be the only moments of sanity we there enjoyed. It is wise to face the possibility that the whole human race (being a small thing in the Universe) is, in fact, just such a local pocket of evil—an isolated bad school or regiment inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Inside the pocket we do not say that justice, mercy, fortitude, and temperance are of no value, but only that the local custom is as just, brave, temperate and merciful as can reasonably be expected. It begins to look as if the neglected school rules even inside this bad school were connected with some larger World—and that when the terms ends we might find ourselves facing the public opinion of that larger World. However, the worst of all is this: we cannot help seeing that only the degree of virtue which we now regard as impracticable can possibly save our race from disaster even on this planet. The standard which seems to have come into the “pocket” from outside, turns out to be terribly relevant to conditions inside the pocket—so relevant that a consistent practice of virtue by the human race even for ten years would fill the Earth from pole to pole with peace, plenty, health, merriment, and heartsease and that nothing else will. I may be the custom, down here, to treat the regimental rules as a dead letter or a counsel of perfection: but now, everyone who stops to think can see that when we meet the enemy this neglect is going to cost every person of us one’s life. It is then that we shall envy the “morbid” person, the “pedant” or “enthusiast” who really has taught one’s company to shoot and dig in and spare their water bottles. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
According to some people, the larger society to which I here contrast the human “pocket” may not exist, and at any rate we have no experience of it. We do not meet Angels, or unfallen races. However, we can get some inkling of the truth even inside our own race. Different ages and cultures can be regarded as “pockets” in relation to one another. Different ages excelled in different virtues. If, then, you are ever tempted to think that we modern people in the Old World and the New World cannot really be so bad because we are, comparatively speaking, humane—if, in other words, you think God might be content with us on that ground—ask yourself whether you think God ought to have been content with the cruelty of cruel ages because they excelled in courage of chastity. You will see at once that this is an impossibility. From considering how the cruelty of our ancestors looks to us, you may get some inkling how our softness, Worldliness, and timidity would have looked to them, and hence how both must look to God. Before humans complain that they are unable to get intuition, one should remember that one’s own moral fault may be responsible for this. It can prevent one not only from receiving true intuitions but also from responding to them in action. Amid the general rush of today’s events, it is easy to miss an intuitive feeling. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Nor when the answer first comes, may we understand it aright. We may mix it up with out own ideas or wishes, our own expectations or fancies, and the result will be that the help received will not work out quite as it should have done. We may have to spend further years straightening out the message and, incidentally, ourselves. However, again, it is worth doing and nothing else is so much worth doing. One will come to find that the guidance one receives is perfect but one’s reception of it may still be imperfect. Perhaps harping on the word “kindness” has already aroused a protest in some reader’s minds. Are not really an increasingly cruel age? Perhaps we are: but I think we have become so in the attempt to reduce all virtues to kindness. For Plat rightly taught that virtue is one. You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues. If, being cowardly, conceited and slothful, you have never yet done a fellow creature a great mischief, that is only because your neighbour’s welfare has not yet happened to conflict with your safety, self-approval, or ease. Every vice leads to cruelty. Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty. Most atrocities are stimulated by accounts of the enemy’s atrocities; and pity for the oppressed classes, when separated from the moral law as a whole, leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a region of terror. #RandolphHarris 14 of #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Their problem is that they have rejected God, for whatever reason, and have chosen to live life of their own. They have not surrendered their will to Him. They do not want to do what God says to do, but what they think is best. And they are lost because of that. They do not know what their real needs are and do not think of themselves as rebels and outlaws who must radically change because they are not acceptable to God. They do not think they need the grace of God for radical transformation of what they are, but that they just need a little help. They are good people. Or so it seems to them. It might be easy to lose faith, but sometimes, mysteriously, one feels one is not alone. One has family, friends, and church members praying for them. Some modern theologians have, quite rightly, protested against an excessively moralistic interpretation of Christianity. The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfect: His claim upon us is something more and other than the claim of moral duty. I do not deny it: but this conception, like that of corporate guilt, is very easily used as an evasion of the real issue. God ay be more than moral goodness: He is not less. The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending for it for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them, and then tried with all their strengths to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The church of Jesus Christ is vital and alive and changing the World—whether individual believers obey Him, live out His Word, and love Him. The Lord does give us the desires of our heart. Becoming a disciple is a matter of giving up your life as you have understood it to that point. Jesus made this starkly clear in Luke 14 and elsewhere. And without that “giving up,” you cannot be his disciple, because you will still think you are in charge and just in need of a little help from Jesus for your project of a successful life. However, our idea of a successful life is precisely our problem. The groups and times where individual and social transformation unto Christlikeness have manifestly taken place and have shaken the human order to its foundations all verify this completely: the early Christians, the early monastic, the early Franciscans or Dominicans, the early Quakers and early Methodists, for example. Note how in all these cases the word “early” has to be used. This is because the “vessel” that emerges in the course of a particular outbreak of radical discipleship gradually overwhelms the Heavenly “treasure” it initially served to convey. That is a primary satanic energy in defeating the cause of Christ on Earth. Then we have yet another tradition on exhibit in the museum of Christian history. Usually that means an institution of some sort, perhaps a local church or a denomination, whose perpetuation and survival becomes the main concern of the people associated with it. Discipleship to Christ is either dropped altogether from the basic objectives or is redefined as devotion to the institution. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Spiritual formation then in some cases is actually and explicity understood as the process of conforming to the tradition. Being disciples and making disciples in the obvious sense of the New Testament is omitted from the local congregations and their higher groupings. Clearly, then, the first stage of Jesus’ plan for spiritual formation in local congregations, as stated in Matthew 28.18-20, has to do with the vision and intention in our Vision, Intention, Mission (VIM) pattern of spiritual growth. If spiritual formation is to be the central focus of the local congregation, the group must be possessed by the vision of apprenticeship to Jesus in kingdom living as the central reality of salvation and as the basic good news, and they must have formed the clear intention to be disciples and to make disciples, as the central protect of their group. It is not enough to know what World-Mind has put forth in this Universe by its presence. We must also know, intellectually at least, what it is in itself. Out of this vast void comes the Universe. What then must be the ineffable and incredible Mystery hidden behind it from our sightless eyes? Take the beginning and the end of the Greek alphabet and suppose that the first letter, Alpha, is the first faint stirring of the Universe. And take the last letter, Omega, to be the last vanishing trace of that Universe. Imagines that Alpha is the reincarnation of the previous Omega, and you will have a key to what is really happening. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
However, what is this mysterious invisible intangible source whence all this is derived into which all this passes. The notion of a Personal God includes truth and an error. So far as there is a World-Mind, manifesting along with a World itself, the notion is true. However, so far as there is only the Unique, the One without a Second, both are appearances, phenomena out of the Noumenon. In the case of the World, it appears in time out of the Timeless; but in the case of the World-Mind, all times are embraced in its Duration. Yet it too withdraws into its other aspect, Mind—only. There has been so much friction and clash between the difference religions because of this idea: whether God is personal or impersonal—so much persecution, even hared, so unnecessarily. I say unnecessarily because the difference between the two conceptions is only an apparent one. Mind is the course of all; this is Mind inactive. Mind as World-Mind-in-manifestation is the personal God. Between essence and manifestation the only difference is that essence is hidden and manifestation is known. World-Mind is personal; Mind is totally impersonal. Basically, the two are one. On the two view of God—transcendence and immanence: One view conditions your conception of God, the other sets limits to Him. However, if you simultaneously affirm both one and the other point of view, you will be exempt from error. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
As Mind, it is beyond all the relativities of this World, beyond time and space, human thought and human imagination. As World Mind it is immanent in the World itself, the Lord of All, the God whom human worship, yet cyclic in Its existences. The World-Mind, however, has a double life. As Mind, it is eternally free but as the World-Mind, it is eternally crucified, as Plato said, on the cross of the World’s body. “Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages. Who will not fear you, O Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed,” reports Revelation 15.3-4. As citizens of a country that supports religious freedom, we should take our religion into our civic duties, and we should gladly seek to support and to guide our country’s institutions with prayer. I pray to the God of my people, and I ask this: May what is done be done well. May what is done be done rightly. May what is done be done according to justice. May truth prevail, may falsehood fail, may words and deeds and thoughts be just. O Lord of our strength, sheltering Rock, Shield of our salvation, Thou art a stronghold unto us. The blessed God, great in knowledge, designed and made the radiance of the Sun. The beneficent One thus wrought glory unto His name. He set luminaries round about His strength. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Cresleigh Homes
Some dream of getting lost in a daydream, others in a book, but one thing we can all agree on: getting lost in this #MillsStation Residence 4 Great Room would be the comfiest afternoon of our lives. 😌
They Provide Bed and Bath, but Something Deeper—The Certainty that Someone Cares!
Every soul speaks that same language. Know that language of love that swells within the human temple. Our presence in a place of need is more powerful than a thousand sermons. Being there is our witness. As we love God through our love for others, seemingly insurmountable barriers fall before us. When we are at perfect peace with God, our warm smiles show it. It is a reflection of our one hope for breaking down barriers and for restoring the sense of community, of caring for one another, that our decadent, impersonalized culture has sucked out of us. It is the most urgent challenge for the holy nation, perhaps the most important principle. It is the nature of human beings to organize. Probably since the Tower of Babel we have been setting up hierarchies, organizational flow charts, orders of authority, and all the other structural schemes dreamed up through the ages. The more advanced the civilization, the more refined the organizational schemes. However, though structures are essential to hold society together, they are there to serve, not be served. The marvels of modern technology have produced a sophistication in systems and structures that encourage the political illusion, the misguided belief that all problems can be solved by structures—namely, institutions. So for each new problem, a new institution is created. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
However, the church is a living organism and its function is to love the God who created it—to care for others out of obedience to Christ, to heal those who hurt, to take away fear, to restore community, to belong to one another, to proclaim the Good News while living it out. The church is the invisible made visible. In happy circumstances, the baby sees its own charm, worth, and lovability when one looks into the (m)other’s face. The first definitions of the self are influenced on the one hand by the internal climate and, on the other, by what you discover about yourself from the mirror of the other. All this is very relevant to the process of psychotherapy, in which people discover parts of themselves which hitherto had been hidden. This uncovering makes people feel unsure and vulnerable. They are not as they thought they were. How will other people react now? Can they accept their new discoveries? The recognition and acceptance found in other people’s eyes (in some circumstances the psychotherapist’s) may make all the difference between renewed defensiveness and a change for the better. When (m)others are sensitive and living, the infant sense of the love of God and is able to experience a smooth sequence from feeling-a-need to having-that-need-met. This smooth sequence makes for the integration in at least three way. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The smooth sequence welds the arousal of the infant’s needs strongly to the satisfaction to an idea of the World as a-place-where-needs-are-met. So the satisfaction of experienced needs contributes to the infant’s expanding imagery of itself and of the World. The child who has been fortunate in its parents is supported by the confidence that one can do the things which-it-and-the mother did while they were at one, and that the environment is benevolent and not frustrating or hostile. Such a child’s self-imagery is replete with confident self-congratulatory feelings, such as some socially successful parents’ children have who—although they themselves have not yet achieved anything—nevertheless feel that they are somehow more meritorious than the children of parents who are less well off. At a later stage, good parenting brings about not only the infant’s experience that it can cope, but also the experience that it can cope with occasional times when it either is not getting that gratification it is looking for, or is not getting it straight away or not so well. If things have gone well, the child can absorb a certain amount of strain of this kind and can put up with the discovery that the World is sometimes less than entirely beneficent. The “right” amount of anxiety has been generated for the child one’s own powers. Not too little, not too much, but just the right: “optimal” frustration. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Learning to deal with frustrations early on is very important. Most of us feel bad about inflicting hurt. However, some people go through life causing a great deal of hurt to other people, including their romantic partners and even their own children. They might fall under the label of narcissistic or borderline personality disorder. When one is on the receiving end of dealing with a person’s ill will, it can be extremely frustrating. When people do not like themselves—no matter how good of a front they put on—they are likely to project this self-dislike onto others. Particularly if this self-dislike stems from abusive behaviour which they have experiences in their past, they will engage in hurtful behaviours towards those people they love—replicating their own lived experiences. They may be driven by a desire to hurt you in the same way they have been hurt, to bring you down and cause you pain in the same way they have experienced it. These individuals need to seek help, but often will not and no one will usually point out to them that they have a problem and hurting others gives them the energy they need to boost their own self-esteem. Hurting others can be part of a strategy to weaken another individual. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Very different from destructiveness are certain deeply buried archaic experiences that often appear to the modern observer as proof of human’s innate destructiveness. Yet a closer analysis can show that while they result in destructive acts, their motivation is not the passion to destroy. One should be warned against the hasty interpretation of all destructive behaviour as the outcome of a destructive instinct, rather one must reorganize the frequency of religious and nondestructive motivations behind such behaviour. Destructiveness, however, can be spontaneous, or bound in the character structure. By the former I refer to the outburst of dormant (not necessarily repressed) destructive impulses that are activated by extraordinary circumstances, in contrast to the permanent, although not always expressed, presence of destructive traits in the character. However, these destructive explosions are not spontaneous in the sense that they break out without any reason. In the first place, there are always external conditions that stimulate them, such as wars, religions or political conflicts, poverty, extreme boredom and insignificance of the individual. Secondly, there are subjective reasons: extreme group narcissism in national or religious terms, as in India, a certain proneness to a state of trance, as in parts of Indonesia. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
It is not human nature that makes a sudden appearance, but the destructive potential that is fostered by certain permanent conditions and mobilized by sudden traumatic events. Without these provoking factors, the destructive energies in these population seems to be dormant, and not as with the destructive character, a constantly flowing source of energy. Vengeful destructiveness is a spontaneous reaction to intense and unjustified suffering inflicted upon a person or the members of the group with whom one is identified. It differs from normal defensive aggression in two ways: It occurs after the damage has been done, and hence is not a defense against a threatening danger. It is of much greater intensity, and is often cruel, lustful, and insatiable. Language itself expresses this particular quality of vengeance in the term “thirst for vengeance.” It hardly needs to be emphasized how widespread vengeful aggression is, both among individuals and groups. All forms of punishment—from primitive to modern—are an expression of vengeance. The Bible continually mandates restitution for property offenses. The Old Testament in the Christian Bible contains repeated references; and in the New Testament is found the example of Zacchaeus giving back fourfold what had been wrongly taken. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Nowhere in Scripture are prisons instituted as punishment for crimes, however. They are referred to as place for detaining people and for political purposes. The use of prisons for rehabilitation or punishment following conviction is a very recent invention, the result of Quaker-initiated reforms two centuries ago. The word “penitentiary” comes from the Quaker idea that the criminal needed to be penitent and repent and reform themselves. The first state prison in American was the Walnut Street jail in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, opened in 1790. The program drew national attention and has been duplicated many times since. However, punishment as an expression of vengeance, the classic example is the lex talionis of the Old Testament. The threat to punish a misdeed up to the third and fourth generation must also be considered an expression of revenge by a God whose commands have been disobeyed, even though it seems that the attempt was made to weak the traditional concept by adding “and who will be merciful until the thousandth generation.” The same idea can be found in many primitive societies—for instance, the law of the Yakuts which says events which cause the loss of life require atonement. The atonement was attached to the aggressor’s descendants for nine generations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
It cannot be denied that criminal law has a certain social function in upholding social stability. However, why is vengeance such a deep-seated and intense passion? I can only offer some speculations. Let us consider first the idea that vengeance is in some sense a magic act. By destroying the one who committed the atrocity one’s deed is magically undone. (However, that is not very rational and one never wants another person to suffer the same as one did. That is why we have the justice system.) Yet, the former is still expressed today by saying that “the criminal has paid one’s debt”; at least in theory, one is now like someone who never committed a crime. Vengeance may be said to be a magic reparation; but even assuming that this is so, why is this desire for reparation so intense? Perhaps humans are endowed with an elementary sense of justice; this may be because there is a deep-rooted sense of “existential equality”: we all are born from mothers, we were once powerless children, and we shall one day return to Heaven. Although no human can often not defend oneself against the harm others inflict upon one, in one’s wish for revenge one tries to wipe the sheet clean by denying, magically, that the damage was ever done. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
It seems that envy has the same root. Cain could not stand the fact that he was rejected while his brother was accepted. The rejection was arbitrary, and it was not in his power to change it; this fundamental injustice aroused such envy that the score could only be evened out by terminating Abel. However, there must be more to the cause of vengeance. When God and secular authorities fail, humans seem to take justice into their own hands. It is as if in one’s passion for vengeance one elevates oneself to the role of God, and of the Angels of vengeance. The act of vengeance may be one’s greatest hour just because of this self-elevation. While vengeance is indeed widespread there are great differences in degree, up to the point that certain cultures and individuals seem to have only minimal traces of it. There must be factors that explain the difference. One such factor is that of scarcity versus abundance. The person—or group—who has confidence in life and enjoys it, whose material resources may not be ample but sufficient not to elicit stinginess, will be less eager for the reparation of damage than an anxious, hoarding person who is afraid that one can never made up for one’s losses. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
This much can be stated with some degree of probability: the thirst for revenge can be plotted on a line at ne end of which are people in whom nothing will arouse a wish for revenge; these are humans who have reached a degree of development which in Buddhist or Christian terms is the ideal for all humans. On the other end would be those who have an anxious, hoarding, or extremely narcissistic character, for whom even a slight damage will arouse an intense craving for revenge. This type would be exemplified by a human from who a thief has stolen a few dollars and who wants one to be severely punished; or a professor who has been slighted by a student and therefore writes a negative report on him when he is asked to recommend the student for a good job; or a customer who has been treated “wrongly” by a salesperson and complains to the management, wanting the individual to be fired. In these cases we are dealing with a character in which vengeance is constantly present trait. The spontaneous outbreak of lust for revenge, with which we are here mainly concerned, occurs in people who do not have a vengeful character, but in whom extraordinary provocations can whip up intense and sometimes almost compulsive vengefulness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Of course, we do not want to be vengeful, nor do we want to hurt others. The goal is to be law abiding citizens, express the love of Christ, and allow the law to enforce the rules of the land. When humans attempt to be Christian without this preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment as to one who is always inexplicably angry. Every human, not very holy or very arrogant, has to live up to the outward appearance of other humans: one knows there is that within one which falls far below even one’s most careless public behaviour, even one’s loosest talk. In an instant of time—while your friend hesitates for a word—what things have passed through your mind? We have never told the truth. We may confess ugly fact—the meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurity—but the toke is false. The very act of confessing—an infinitesimally hypocritical glance—a dash of humour—all this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. No one could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they turned into words. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls one’s normal form one’s “bad days” and mistakes one’s rare success for one’s normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. However, the important thing is that we should not mistake out inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside. A reaction—it itself wholesome—is not going on against purely private or domestic conceptions of mortality, a reawakening of the social conscience. We feel ourselves to be involve in an iniquitous social system and to share a corporate guilt. This is very true: but the enemy can exploit even truths to our deception. Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those humdrum, old-fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with “the system” and which can be dealt with without waiting for the future. For corporate guilt perhaps cannot be, and certainly is not, felt with the same force as personal guilt. For most of us, as we now are, this conception is a mere excuse for evading the real issue. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
When we have really learned to know our individual corruption, then indeed we can go on to think of the corporate guilt and can hardly think of it too much. However, we must learn to walk before we run. We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. As if they were no concern of the present speaker’s and even with laughter, I have heard myself recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood. However, mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the prince of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the fact of a sin, is it probably that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. It is not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the playing with your cute little toes and singing a song, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a schoolboy or schoolgirl, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the Universe. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Perhaps in that eternal moment St. Peter—he will forgive me if I am wrong—forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, “an acquired taste”—and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public place. Of course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is worth keeping in mind. Here we are learning to understand and do the things Jesus gave us in specific commandments and teachings. We are studying his words and deeds in the four gospels. This “learning” is primarily developed through the teaching ministry of our church as we gather. We must learn to trust ourselves wholly to Christ. It is necessary to attribute providence to God. For all the good that is in created things has been created by God. In created things good is found not only as regards their substance, but also as regards their order towards an end and especially their last end, which, is the divine goodness. This good of order existing in things created, is itself created by God. Since, however, God is the cause of things by His intellect, and this it behooves that the type of every effect should pre-exist in Him, as is clear from what has gone before, it is necessary that the type of the order of things towards their end should be pre-exist in the divine mind: and the type of things ordered towards an end is, properly speaking, providence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
For it is the chief part of prudence, to which two other parts are directed—namely, remembrance of the past, and understanding of the present; inasmuch as from the remembrance of what is past and the understanding of what is present, we gather how to provide for the future. Now it belongs to prudence, according to the Philosopher, to direct other things towards an end whether in regard to oneself—as for instance, a human is said to be prudent, who orders well one’s own acts towards the end of life—or in regard to others subject to one, in a family, city or kingdom; in which sense it is said, “a faithful and wise servant, whom one’s lord hath appointed over one’s family,” reports Matthew 24.45. In this way prudence or providence may suitably be attributed to God. For in God Himself there can be nothing ordered towards an end, since He is the last end. This type of order in things towards an end is therefore in God called providence. Whence Boethius says (De Consol. Iv, 6) that {Providence is the divine type itself, seated in the Supreme Ruler; which disposeth all thing”; which disposition may refer either to the type of the order of things towards an end, or to the type of the order of parts in the whole. The intuitive feeling or the seminal idea may be planted in a human’s heart today but it may need twenty to thirty years before it comes to sufficient growth in one’s conscious mind. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Providence resides in the intellect; but presupposes the act of willing the end. Nobody gives a precept about things done for an end; unless one will that end. Hence prudence presupposes the moral virtues, by means of which the appetitive faculty is directed towards good. Even if Providence has to do with the divine will and intellect equally, this would not affect the divine simplicity, since in God both the will and intellect are one and the same thing. No one was or could have been present at creation. Moreover, while we have an idea of who God is and wants, He wants, He is utterly incomprehensible to finite humans. The World-Mind is forever attempting to reflect its qualities and attributes in the Universe. The Universe is already and eternally within God. No decision was needed nor could there have been one, any ore than a human may decide to be kind. Bringing the Universe out of Himself is a function, quality, or attribute—none of these terms is quite correct but a better is hard to find—an obedience to the law of God’s own being. The movement which brings the Universe into being out of the World-Mind’s stillness is a spontaneous, not a deliberate, one. It just happens because it is the very nature of the World-Mind to make this movement. It is an inner compulsion rather than an inner necessity that moves the World-Mind to bring about these repeated reincarnations of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
If we try to consider the inner necessity which makes the World-Mind manifest Itself to Itself through an other, a cosmos, we find ourselves on the threshold of a mystery. How could compulsion, limit, or desire arise in the desireless one? Human intellect can only formulate such a question, but cannot answer it. The moment we assert that this infinite Power has a motive in making the cosmos, a purpose in creating the World, in that moment we limit it and ascribe need or want or lack to it. The World-Mind has the power of vigorous creativeness as an essential attribute of its nature. It will stop its work of sustaining the Universe when it stops being what it is. There is no other purpose behind creation than that of continuing its own existence. To understand this is to understand that the question as to purpose is not at all applicable to the World-Mind but only to an imagined and inferior being, one which could start or discontinue. We know that the mask of the unconscious is not rigid—it reflects the face we turn towards it. Hostility lends it a threatening aspect, friendliness softens its features. It is not a question of mere optical reflection but of an autonomous answer which reveals the self-sufficing nature of that which answers. Christian symbolism is particularly concerned with healing, or attempting to heal the wound of the gaping rift in this World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
It would be more correct to take the open conflict as a symptom of the psychic situation of humans in the New World, and to deplore their inability to assimilate the whole range of the Christian symbol. As a doctor I cannot demand anything of my patients in this respect, also I lack the Church’s means of grace. Consequently I am faced with the task of taking the only path open to me—bringing the hidden into consciousness. At the same time I must leave my patient to decide in accordance with one’s assumptions, one’s spiritual maturity, one’s education, origins, and temperament, so far as this is possible without serious conflicts. As a doctor it is my takes to help the final decisions, because I know from experience that all coercion—be it suggestion, insinuation, or any other method of persuasion—ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and most decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with one’s own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. If one is to find out what it is that supports one when one can no longer support oneself, the patient must be alone. I would be only too delighted to leave this anything but easy task to the theologian, were it not that it is just from the theologian that many of my patients come. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
They ought to have hung on to the community of the Church, but they were shed like dry leaves from the great tree and now find themselves “hanging on” to the treatment. As if they or the thing they cling to would drop off into the void the moment they relaxed their hold, something in them clings, often with the strength of despair. They are seeking firm ground on which to stand. Since no outward support is of any use to them they must finally discover it in themselves—admittedly the most unlikely place from the rational point of view, but an altogether possible one from the point of view of the unconscious. We can this this from the archetype of the “lowly origin of the redeemer.” The way to the goal seems chaotic and interminable at first, and only gradually do the signs increase that it is leading anywhere. The way is not straight but appears to go round in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals: the dream-motifs always return after certain intervals to definite forms, whose characteristic is to define a center. And as a matter of fact the whole process revolves about a certain point or some arrangement round a center, which may in certain circumstances appear even in the initial dreams. As manifestations of unconscious processes the dreams rotate or circumambulate round the center, drawing closer to it as the amplifications increase in distinctness and in scope. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Owning to the diversity of the symbolical material it is difficult at first to perceive any kind of order at all. Nor should it be taken for granted that dream sequences are subject to any governing principle. However, as I say, the process of development proves on closer inspection to be cyclic or spiral. We might draw a parallel between such spiral courses and the processes of growth in plants; in fact the plant motif (tree, flower, et cetera) frequently recurs in these dreams and fantasies and is also spontaneously drawn or painted in Mandala symbolism. In alchemy the tree is the symbol of Hermetic philosophy. Harmonicists believe that true theology exists in all religions, and that it was given by God to humans in antiquity. When the inner voice says what we do not like to hear, we are apt to ignore it in modern times. However, in its manifestation, an intuitive idea is too often such a tiny spark that we are more likely to miss it than not. It is prudent to obey warning premonitions than to ignore them. Take time over problems, let your final decisions wait until they are fully ripe. Where is the wisdom in forcing a quick decision, which could easily be a wrong one, merely to get a decision at all? Intuition is the voice which is constantly calling one to this higher state. However, if one seldom or never pauses amid the press of activity to listen for it, one fails to benefit by it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Such intuitions manifest themselves only on the fringe of consciousness. They are tender shoots and therefore need to be tenderly nurtured. The more one follows a course contrary to intuitive leading, the more will errors of mishaps follow one. These feelings may be cultivated as a gardener cultivates flowers. Their visitation may be brought on again, their delight renewed. If one listens humbly, in the end one will rely on this little inner voice which speaks and tells one which way to turn. Do not deny your intuitive self as Judas denied his master, as Peter denied him. There is also one’s subconscious mind, one’s brilliant and seemingly effortless hunches. One’s judgements come forth spontaneously like lightning, with no supporting brief of argument. One follows one’s own subconscious with blind faith but insists that to have a hunch, one must first have all the facts at one’s command, and one’s intelligence must be working at full speed. Then suddenly and without conscious effort you think of a solution which is really based on facts, but is not achieved by deliberate cerebrations. With it comes an unexampled feeling of well-being. One will learn sooner or later by the test of experience to defer to this intuitive feeing whenever its judgement, guidance, or warning manifests itself. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Thomas Alva Edison, an American inventor and businessman who has been described as America’s greatest inventor developed many devices such as the phonograph and incandescent electric light and power, telephony and telegraphy sound recording. He said that all his inventions grew out of initial flashes which welled up from within. The rest was a matter of research. The intuitive element has to be awaited wit much patience and vigilant attention. Is one fully open to intuitive feelings that originate in one’s deeper being, one’s sacred self? Or does one’s ego get in the way by its rigidities, habits, and tendencies? The importance of these feelings is that they are threadlike clues which need following up, for they can lead one to a blessed renewal or revelation. The capacity to respond to spiritual intuitions is latent in all humans but trained and developed in few humans. From this hidden source comes at times guidance, warnings, attractions, or aversions which ought to be construed as intuitive messages. However, for this they must first best recognized and believed: they pass too quickly. It is not that one put out the antenna of one’s intuition, so much as that one insulates its end and thus provides clear receptivity. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
We may not forecast how quickly or how well every student will progress in this art. For one may naturally possess much sensitivity but another may posses little. And even when an intuition is recognized immediately, the will may respond to it very slowly. It is true that conscious is the voice of God in the moral life of humans, but it is also true that one seldom hears its pure sound. Most often one hears it mixed with much egotism. Do you hear me, Earth spirits, as I go walking? Do you hear my footfalls, drumming on the dirt? Do you hear my breathing, mixing with the air? Do you hear my heart beating, weaving in the rhythms? Do you hear my words of prayer, asking your attention? Do you hear me, Earth Spirits? Please hear me, please hear me, please hear my voice. Please hear the one who walks among you. Please hear my words of peace and friendship. Please hear my plea, please grant my wish. In mercy Thou bringest light to the Earth and to those who dwell thereon, and in Thy goodness renewest continually each day the work of creation. How great are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom has Thou made them all; the Earth is full of Thy creatures. O King, Thou alone hast been exalted from the days of old, praised, glorified and extolled from of yore. O everlasting God, in Thine abundant mercy, please have compassion on us. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse. The homes are all large and range from 2,054 to some of the largest homes on the market at approximately 3,700 square feet.
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Any Hypnotist May Invent a Seeming World for You but it Will be Gone in a Few Minutes or Hours!
You can say this for these ready-mixes—the next generation is not going to have any trouble making pies exactly like mother makes. In a society in which instant food, instant education and even instant cities are everyday phenomena, no product is more swiftly fabricated or more ruthlessly destroyed than the instant celebrity. Nations advancing toward super-industrialism sharply step up their output of these “psycho-economic” products. Instant celebrities burst upon the consciousness of millions like an image-bomb—which is exactly what they are. Within less than one year from the time a graceful girl named Paris Hilton took her first walk down the red carpet, millions of human beings around the globe stored mental images of her in their brain. A platinum blonde with dripping wet blue eyes that look like the Arctic Ocean, soft pillow lips, amazing cheek bones, and legs longer than your marriage, exploded into instant celebrityhood circa 2001. Her winsome face and beautiful malnourished figure suddenly appeared on covers of magazines in Britain, American, France, Italy, Japan, China, Africa and other countries. Overnight, Paris eyelashes, mannikins, perfumes, clothes, jewelry, movies, music, real estate and her custom Barbie BMW began to gush from the fad mills. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Critics pontificated about her social significance. News anchors accorded her the kind of coverage normally reserved for a peace treaty or a papal election. By now, however, many would expect our stored mental images of Paris to have been largely erased. Yet, she has not vanished from public view. She defines reality where celebrity status only lasts for six months nowadays. Her images still grace the New York Times, she has even been featured in Ebony and Vibe, Paris is breaking records and shattering boundaries, she may even take over the World! Not long ago I asked a highly intelligent teenager whether she and her classmates had any heroes. I said, “Do you regard Justin Timberlake, for example, as a hero? (Justin being a singer and actor and a former boyfriend of Britney Spears, I was sure she had heard of him.) The child’s response was revealing. “No,” she said, “he’s too old.” At friend I thought she regarded a man in his forties as being too old to be a hero. Soon I realized this was mistaken. What she meant was that Justin Timberlake’s career had peaked too long ago to be of interest. He has no new exploits. Today Justin Timberlake has receded from the foreground of public attention. In effect, his image has decayed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Celebrityhood is a transient state. To be relevant, one has to become a mega star like Reese Witherspoon, Tom Brady, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Sean Mendez, Beyonce, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry and even Aaliyah is still trending on Twitter and remember in countless new songs. Thousands of “personalities” parade across the stage of contemporary history. Real people, magnified and projected by the mass media, they are stored as images in the millions of peoples or billions of people who have never met them, never spoken to them, never seen them “in person.” They take on a reality almost as (and sometimes even more) intense than that of many people with whom we do have “in-person” relationships. We form relationships with these “vicarious people,” just as we do with friends, neighbours and colleagues. And just as the through-put of real, in-person people in our lives is increasing, and the duration of our average relationship with them decreasing, the same is true of our ties with the vicarious people who populate our mines, but have not become mega celebrities. Their rate of flow-through is influenced by the real rate of change in the World, we find that the British prime ministership has been turning over since 1922 at a rate some 13 percent faster than in the base period of 1721-1922. In sports, the heavyweight boxing championship now changes hands twice as fast as it did during our father’s youth. Events, moving faster, constantly throw new personalities into the charmed circle of celebrityhood, and old images in the mind decay to make way for the new. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The same might be said for the fictional characters spewed out from the pages of books, from television screens, from digital streaming, theaters, movies, and magazines. No previous generation in history has had so many fictional characters flung at it. We may not even get used to Super-Hero, Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific before they fly off our television screens forever. These vicarious people, both live and fictional, play a significant role in our lives, providing models for behaviour, acting out of us various roles and situations from which we draw conclusions about our own lives. We deduce lessons from their activities, consciously or not. We learn from their triumphs and tribulations. They make it possible for us to “try on” various roles or life styles without suffering the consequences that might attend such experiments in real life. The accelerated flow-through various people cannot contribute to the instability of personality patterns among many real people who have difficulty in finding a suitable life style. These vicarious people, however, are not independent of one another. They preform their roles in a vast, complexly organized “public drama” which is largely a product of the new communications technology. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
This public drama, in which celebrities upstage and replace celebrities at an accelerating rate, has the effect of making leadership more unstable than it would be otherwise. Contretemps, upsets, follies, contests, scandals, make a feast of entertainment or a spinning political roulette wheel. Fads come and go at a dizzying pace. A country like the United States of America has an open public drama, in which new faces appear daily, there is always a contest to steal the show, and almost anything can happen and often does. What we are observing is a rapid turnover of symbolic leaders, which may make incumbent leaders less attractive, especially if the people are not happy with public policy, the jobs report, the economy, housing costs, health care cost, the price of food, utilities, insurances, tax rates, transportation costs, and performance in the stock market. This can be extended, however, into a far more powerful statement: what is happening is not merely a turnover of real people or even fictional characters, but a more rapid turnover of the images and image-structures in our brains. Our relationships with these images of reality, upon which we base our behaviour, are growing, on average, more and more transient. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
If we do not wish to lose it, the intuition first presents itself to us as a fine delicate filament which we must treat tenderly. The entire knowledge system in society is undergoing violent upheaval. The very concepts and codes in terms of which we think are turning over at a furious and accelerating pace. We are increasing the rate at which we must form and forget our images of reality. The fact is that with the knowledge and actual experience of these inner images a way is opened for reason and feeling to gain access to those other images which the teachings of religion offer humankind. Psychology thus does just the opposite of what it is accused of: it provides possible approaches to a better understanding of these things, it open people’s eyes to the real meaning of strict doctrines, and, far from destroying, it throws open an empty house to new inhabitants. I can corroborate this from countless experiences: people belong to creeds of all imaginable kinds, who had played the apostate or cooled off in their faith, have found a new approach to their old truths, not a few Catholics among them. Even a Parsee found the way back to the Zoroastrian fire-temple, which should bear witness to the objectivity of my point of view. However, this objectivity is just what my psychology is most blamed for: it is said not to decide in favour of this or that religious doctrine. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Without prejudice to my own subjective convictions I should like to raise the question: Is it not thinkable that when one refrains from setting oneself up as an arbiter mundi and, deliberately renouncing all subjectivism, cherishes on the contrary the belief, for instance, that God has expressed Himself in many languages and appeared in divers forms and that all these statements are true—is it not thinkable, I say, that this too is a decision? The objection raised, more particularly by Christians that it is impossible for contradictory statements to be true, must permit itself to be politely asked: Does one equal three? How can three be one? Can a mother be a virgin? And so on. Has it not yet been observed that all religious statements contain logical contradictions and assertions that are impossible in principle, that this is in fact the very essence of religious assertion? As witness to this we have Tertullian’s avowal: “And the Son of God is dead, which is worthy of belief because it is absurd. And when buried He rose again, which is certain because it is impossible.” If Christianity demands faith in such contradictions it does not seem to me that it can very well condemn those who asset a few paradoxes more. Oddly enough the paradox is one of the most valuable spiritual possessions, while uniformity of meaning is a sign of weakness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Hence when it losses or waters down its paradoxes, a religion becomes inwardly impoverished; but their multiplication enriches because only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fulness of life. Non-ambiguity and non-contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to express the incomprehensible. Not everyone possesses the spiritual strength of a Tertullian. It is evident not only that one had the strength to sustain paradoxes but that they actually afforded one the highest degree of religious certainty. The inordinate number of spiritual weakliness makes paradoxes dangerous. So long as the paradox remains unexamined and is taken for granted as a customary part of life, it is harmless enough. However, when it occurs to an insufficiently cultivated mind (always, as we know, the most sure of itself) to make the paradoxical nature of some tent of faith the object of its lucubrations, as earnest as they are impotent, it is not long before such a one will break out into iconoclastic and scornful laughter, pointing to the manifest absurdity of the mystery. Things have gone rapidly downhill since the Age of Enlightenment, for, once this petty reasoning mind, which cannot endure any paradoxes, is awakened, no sermon on Earth can keep in down. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
A new task then arises: to lift this still undeveloped mind step by step to a higher level and to increase the number of persons who have at least some inkling of the scope of paradoxical truth. If this is not possible, then it must be admitted that the spiritual approaches to Christianity are as good as blocked. We simply do not understand any more what is meant by the paradoxes contained in the strict doctrines; and the more external our understanding of them becomes the more we are affronted by their irrationality, until finally they become completely obsolete, curious relics of the past. The human who is stricken in this way cannot estimate the extent of one’s spiritual loss, because one has never experienced the sacred images as one’s inmost possession and has never realized their kindship with one’s own psychic structure. However, it is just this indispensable knowledge that the psychology of the unconscious can give one, and its scientific objectivity is of the greatest value here. Were psychology bound to creed it would not and could not allow the unconscious of the individual that free play which is the basic condition for the production of archetypes. It is precisely the spontaneity of archetypal contents that convinces, whereas any prejudiced intervention is a bar to genuine experience. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
If the theologian really believes in the almighty power of God on the one hand and in the validity of strict doctrines in the other, why then does one not trust God to speak in the soul? Why this fear of psychology? Or is, in complete contradiction to strict doctrines, the soul itself is hell from which only demons gibber? Even if this ere really so it would not be any the less convincing; for as we all know the horrified perception of the reality of evil has led to at least as many conversations as the experience of good. The archetypes of the unconscious can be shown empirically to be the equivalents of strict religious doctrines. In the hermeneutic language of the Fathers the Church possesses a rich store of analogies with the individual and spontaneous products to be found in psychology. What the unconscious expresses is far from being merely arbitrary or opinionated; it is something that happens to be “just-so,” as is the case with every other natural being. It stands to reason that the expressions of the unconscious are natural and not formulated dogmatically; they are exactly like the patristic allegories which draw the whole of nature into the orbit of their amplificants. If these present us with some astonishing allegoriae Christi, we find much the same sort of thing in the psychology of the unconscious. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The only difference is that the patristic allegory as Christum spectat—refers to Christ—whereas the psychic archetype is simply itself and can therefore be interpreted according to time, place, and milieu. In the New World the archetype is filled out with the dogmatic figure of Christ; in the Old World, with Purusha, the Atman, Hiranyagarbha, the Buddha, and so on. The religious point of view, understandably enough, put the accept on the imprinter, whereas scientific psychology emphasizes the typos, the imprint—the only thing it can understand. The religious point of view understands the imprint as the working of an imprinter; the scientific point of view understands it as the symbol of an unknown and incomprehensible content. Since the typos is less definite and more variegated than any of the figures postulated by religion, psychology is compelled by its empirical material to express the typos by means of terminology not bound by time, pace, or milieu. If, for example, the typos agreed in every detail with the dogmatic figure of Christ, and if it contained no determinant that went beyond that figure, we would be bound to regard the typos as at least a faithful copy of the dogmatic figure, and to name it accordingly. The typos would coincide with Christ. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
However, as experience shows, this is not the case, seeing that the unconscious, like the allegories employed by the Church Fathers, produces countless other determinants that are not explicitly contained in the dogmatic formula: that is to say, non-Christian figures such as those mentioned above are included in the typos. However, neither do these figures comply with the indeterminate nature of the archetype. It is altogether inconceivable there could be any definite figure capable of expressing archetypal indefiniteness. For this reason I have found myself obliged to give the corresponding archetype the psychological name of the “self” – a terms on the one hand definite enough to convey the essence of human wholeness and on the other hand indefinite enough to express the indescribable and indeterminable nature of this wholeness. The paradoxical qualities of the term are a reflection of the fac that wholeness consist partly of the conscious human and partly of the unconscious human. However, we cannot define the latter or indicate one’s boundaries. Hence in its scientific usage the term “self” refers neither to Christ not to the Buddha but to the totality of the figures that are its equivalent, and each of these figures is a symbol of the self. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
This mode of expression is an intellectual necessity in scientific psychology and in no sense denotes a transcendental prejudice. On the contrary, as we have said before, this objective attitude enables one human to decide in favour of the determinant Christ, another in favour of the Buddha, and so on. Those who are irritated by this objectivity should reflect that science is quite impossible without it. Consequently by denying psychology the right to objectivity they are making an untimely attempted to extinguish the life-light of a science. Even if such a preposterous attempt were to succeed, it would only widen the already catastrophic gulf between the secular mind on the one hand and Church and religion on the other. One’s need is to recognize these half-formed intuitions for what they are, to rescue them from their vagueness, develop, nurture, and formulate them. When this first faint intrusion is sensed, the need is for utter relaxation, for becoming passive and yielding. Only so can the aspirant follow intuitive prompting more and more inwards until it becomes stronger and stronger, clearer and clearer. One’s early development of intuition is largely a matter of confused and uncertain impressions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
When seeking intuitional light upon a subject, the aspirant is advised to put one’s body in a recumbent position. This, passive as it is, will correlate with the passivity of the mind that one should cultivate at such a time. Because an intuitive feeling is usually soft and delicate where egoistic ones are often strong and passionate, it is too many times not recognized for what it is, until someone else formulates it and offers it from outside, as a statement of truth or a suggestion for action. If allowed to grow, an intuition which is vague and weak in the beginning may become clear and certain in the end. With this beginning of the momentary “catch” in attention, one must follow by waiting with much patience, listening inwardly all the while. Have faith in your inner promptings and accept their guidance. When you are uncertain about them, wait and they will gradually clarify themselves. One is to defend oneself against false intuitions, not only by silencing wishful thoughts, but also by purifying the personal emotions. They are messages brought from the infinite for the blessing and guidance of finite humans. However, one must recognize their value and esteem their source. What we see here is not an impossible dream, a hopeless idealization. If we turn our efforts under God in the right direction, it can be done and has been done. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
And that direction would be one that makes spiritual formation in Christlikeness the exclusive primary goal of the local congregation. That is what one would natural expect after having read what Saint Paul says—and, indeed, after having read what Jesus sent his World revolutionaries out to do. “And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in Heaven and on Earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you,” reports Matthew 28.18-20. Pay attention to the “principle and absolutes” of the New Testament church and, one might suppose, everything else will fall into place—in large part because “everything else” really does not matter much one way or the other. To fail to put the focus on those principles and absolutes, on the other hand, is to wander off into a state of distraction, which is where most of our local congregations actually are. They wind up majoring on minors and allowing the majors, from the New Testament point of view, to disappears. “For God said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. However, we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves,” reports 2 Corinthians 4.6-7. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Some people feel like they are lost to the World, hidden from sight and memory. However, the love of Jesus Christ is unconditional, caring love. Humans are not separate from their Creator, nor can God misunderstand them. The place for which He designs them in His scheme of things is the place they are made for. When they reach it their nature is fulfilled and their happiness attained: a broken bone in the Universe has been set, the anguish is over. When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. God demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. Do we suppose that they can do Him any good, or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring about “His glory’s diminution”? A human can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of one’s cell. However, God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (wit that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
If we do not fall on our faces, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God—though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain. Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to “put on Christ,” to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little. Yet perhaps even this view falls short of the truth. It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may very with the creature’s nature: but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream. You must be strong with God’s strength and blessed with God’s blessedness, for He has no other to give us. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
To be God—to be like God and to share His goodness is humanly response—to be miserable—these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the Universe grows—the only food that any possible Universe ever can grow—then we must starve eternally. Mercy is especially to be attributed to God, as seen in its effect, but not as an affection of passion. In proof of which it must be considered that a person is said to be merciful, as being, so to speak, sorrowful at heart; being affected with sorrow at the misery of another as though it were one’s own. Hence it follows that one endeavours to dispel that misery, whatever be the defect we call by that name. Now defects are not removed, except by the perfection of some kind of goodness; and the primary source of goodness is God. It must, however, be considered that to bestow perfection appertains not only to the divine goodness, but also to His justice, liberality, and mercy; yet under different aspects. The communicating of perfections, absolutely considered, appertains to goodness; in so far as perfections are given to things in proportion, the bestowal of them belongs to justice, as has already been said; in so far God does not bestow them for His own use, but only on account of His goodness, it belongs to liberality; in so far as perfections given to things by God expels defects, it belongs to mercy. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Mercy is regarded as an affection of passion. God acts mercifully, not indeed by going against His justice, but by doing something more than justice; thus a human who pays another two hundred pieces of money, though owing one only one hundred, des nothing against justice, but acts liberally or mercifully. The case is the same with one who pardons an offence committed against one, for in remitting it one may be said to bestow a gift. Hence the Apostle calls remission a forgiving: “Forgive one another, as Christ has forgiven you,” report Ephesians 4.32. Hence it is clear that mercy does not destroy justice, but in a sense is the fulness thereof. And thus it is said: “Mercy exalteth itself above judgement,” reports James 2.13. Since in the beginning God alone is, there is no second substance that can be used for such “creation.” God is forced to use His own substance for the purpose. God is Infinite Mind, so he uses mental power—Imagination—working on mental substances—Thought—to produce the result which appears to us as the Universe. Therefore existence cannot be derived from non-existence. If the Universe exists today, then its essence must have existed when the Universe itself had not been formed. This essence needed no “creation” for it was God, World-Mind, Itself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The Universe is the World-Mind coming out of itself and therefore making its manifestation out of its own substance—that is, Mind—just as the spider spins out a web from itself. The visible cosmos has come into being out of the invisible absolute by a process of emanation. That is why the relation between them is not only pantheistic but also transcendent. The creation is inseparable from its creator; indeed, they are but two names for one and the same thing, for God has objectified part of His own being as the Universe which we see. The World-Mind, limiting itself, shutting down its cous, produces what we know as the physical Universe. The fact that the cosmic existence is a beginningless and endless one eliminates the need of finding a Creator. It is itself a manifestation of an eternal principle, which is its own divine soul and not a second and separate thing Prospero says, in Shakespeare’s play, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” he implies the existence of some greater Mind in which we are the dreams. Any hypnotist may invent a seeming Word for you but it will be gone in a few minutes or hours. Only the World-Mind can invent one that will last and outlast the whole human race. When will the cosmic dream come to an end? If one’s personal life is a dream for humans, is the Universe a dream for God? The answer is that the World-Mind controls its dream, humans do not. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Mind is the first and last Real, the Doer Maker and Destroyer. It imagines the World even as it creates it. The Universe is the imaginative construction of the World-Mind. The core and the surface of life are essentially the same. Every form of existence can be reduced to a form of consciousness. The final essence of all these consciousnesses is God. The tree of mental ideas raise from a common but unknow root—God. One who knows God as the root and the Universe as the branch of the tree of life fears not. As spears, as swords, as arrows, the Sun sends out its rays, as weapons from the hands of a mighty warrior, to strike down falsehood and untrue ways. As spears, as swords, as arrows, send out your rays, as weapons from the hands of a might warrior, to strike down falsehood and untrue ways. In mercy God gives light to the Earth and to those who dwell thereon. In His goodness, God renewest each day the work of creation. O King, God alone is exalted of yore, glorified and extolled from the days of old. O everlasting God, in Thine abundant mercy, have compassion upon us. Lord of our strength, Rock of our stronghold, please Shield our salvation, Thou art a stronghold unto us. There is none to be compared to Thee, neither is there any besides Thee; there is none but Thee. Who is like unto Thee? There is none like unto Thee, O Lord our God, in this World, neither is there any besides Thee, O our King in the World to come. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Cresleigh offers charming architecture with generous home sites at Mills Station. Enjoy a prime location with access to amenities, award-winning schools, and easy commuter routes. This luxury community offers modern single-family homes in a truly picturesque location.
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If there is Laughter in the Morning, there Will be Tears Before Bedtime!
I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better. Rage and envy and the feelings of persecution which go with humanity impairs the ability to be fully human. Feeling persecuted by others is not very compatible with find them wonderful and taking easy uncomplicated pleasure in the company. People who have been insufficiently mirrored, admired, and confirmed may go in for rather idealized hierarchical leadership-structures and hero-worship. Conversely, people who had lot of confirmation but lacked the opportunity to create and copy admired figures are more liable to sit around like garden gnomes being agreeable and democratic and lovable and cosy—even while Rome burns. The grandiose self and the wretched self correspond rather closely. A split of this kind is also more likely when an individual discovers too abruptly and unexpectedly the limitations to which one is subject. For instance, if one has been your source of support beyond an appropriate time, this in turn is more likely because an attachment figure sees you as an extension of one’s own self-esteem and one’s own grandiose phantasies, so that there is a merging beyond the time when this was necessitated by the individual’s weakness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
When people are too supportive of an individual, it is often because they are anxious phobic caregivers also, and this obstructs the individual’s normal development, which would otherwise has taken one beyond a desire to be merged in a selfobject state. Fixation in the selfobject state interferes with the development, which would otherwise have taken one beyond a desire to be merged in a selfobject state. Fixation in the selfobject state interferes with the development of identification with an admired figure who does things. We then get the kind of person who, smugly or desperately, conveys the impression “I am wonderful because I am so lovable.” Such individuals may have had the opportunity for gradually developing the skills needed for a more independent exercise of their functions. So, the individual will discover its lack of power. One will discover the extent to which one is defenceless and subject to intrusion, and that will be a terrible blow. Just going off to school or work for some people in the morning can be a terrible experience because they may not yet be psychologically individuated. Splits are due to inadequate recognition and confirmation: inadequate mirroring. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Splits are due to things going wrong in the development of appropriate integrations and individuations. One has not been appreciated in the right way for what one is and what one can become. One’s grand and one’s wretched self are isolated from one another. Repression is different. It puts the lid on certain experiences and feelings. Repression creates a horizontal split. This is a later development, when a more realistic self is beginning to be formed. Neither wretched nor grandiose self are very realistic: elements of both will be integrated in more realistic self-structures when development does as it should. With a more realistic self, the individual becomes able to take pride and pleasure in what one is and what one can do. This process is called the natural self-assertion, in contrast to the unrealistic grandiosity attributable to unresolved selfobject merging. When the lid is put on the individual’s sense of being grans, when its natural excitement and self-assertion, in contrast to the unrealistic grandiosity attributable to unresolved selfobject merging. When the lid is put on the individual’s sense of being grand, when one’s natural excitement and self-assertion are met with disapproval, the individual feels bad, and in some circumstances one may become anxious whenever one thinks of doing anything unbidden that might be fun or feel good. This is a repressed, guilty individual. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
In some strata of British life, and probably elsewhere, people are shamed as a matter of routine at the very moments when they feel they have done something good or done something well—jokingly, of course, so that the ill-will can be disowned. There appears to be a determination that no one shall feel “bigheaded” or forget for a moment that “if there is laughter in the morning, there will be tears before bedtime.” Even the very possibility of someone achieving something has to be counteracted by “taking them down a peg or two.” No wonder that individuals brought up in this atmosphere avoid being noticed as far as they can, and are quietly angry: “sullen.” Whereas splitting has to do with defects in mirroring, repression has more to do with identification with admired figures, and especially with the idealization of rather ungiving and unforgiving figures—the dour, the jealous, the exhausted. Such people can confirm the fears and phantasies of weakness and inadequacy which the individual has necessarily accumulated already. A strong sense of self-esteem brings not only a sense of well-being, but also generally improved functioning. As, though the right therapeutic approach, patients feel better about themselves, their capacity for work improves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Conversely, many of the most severe work-disturbances are due to a decline in self-esteem and subsequent fear of fragmentation. People will often attempt to counteract painful feelings of unreality or fragmentation by forcing themselves into activities, ranging from the physical (in sports) to overwork. Their work (or their sport) is made the isolated activity of an isolated self-structure, a pocket lacking pleasant associated connections. Such people engage in their activities in an “automatic” way, passively, without pleasure or initiative, simply responding to cues or demands. If things go well in therapy, individuals will one day report that their work has changed, that they are now enjoying it, that they now have the choice of whether to work or not, that they now undertake it on their own initiative rather than by passive obedience. Last but not least, they find that their approach has now some originality rather than being humdrum and routine. A living self in depth has become the organizing center of the ego’s activities. Takes which we set ourselves, and to which we feel committed, can play an important role in giving meaning and validity to what might otherwise be a rather more fragile personality-structure. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
A skill is a good example of a compensatory structure. I may not be lovable or interesting to people, but I know I can design the best residential architecture than anyone in my town, or come first in exams, or tell fascinating stories about history, or impress others with my charm. Compensatory developments add to self-respect by achievements which are generally respected, and other more defensive manoeuvres which can do no more than serve to hide the pain suffered through lack of self-respect: unrealistic values, hostile phantasies, perversions. Clearly this is a tricky area in which to make pronouncements, since it depends so much on what is admired in the culture. To make yourself the most outstanding competitor would normally be seen as compensatory in our culture, but it might be seen as a defensive perverted individualism in a more collectively minded culture. If one is not careful, however, compensatory methods can lead to a “False Self.” It is a loss, and a grave one, to let oneself remain torpid to intuitive feeling so much of the time, while alert and alive to every lesser and lower feeling. There are times, however, when, in a hard problem, reason will come into conflict with intuition but when the later is so overwhelmingly strong that it seems one must perforce yield to it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
In the times when these are difficult, we have to do what it takes to survive. Time alone can show the truth of such a matter. Let one therefore not fall into the peril of strict ideas about it. Let one rather withhold judgment and await its issue patiently. Intuition does not always flash suddenly out of the depths of the mind into consciousness: quite often if forms itself very slowly over a period of hours, days, or even weeks. Who hears this quiet whisper of intuition? Who, hearing, obeys? Not only is it most unnoticed but its guidance is also unsought; humans prefer and follow, the ego’s direction. It begins as an uncertain and intermittent feeling: it ends as a definite and persistent intuition. If humans followed their intuition more there would be fewer tragedies that could have been prevented or regrets that could have been avoided. The student should make one’s own research and observation on the need of accepting first intuitive impressions and being the best guidance. The undegraded feeling which first comes when an object, a person, or an event confronts one is mostly the correct intuition about it. However, it must be caught on the wing or it will be gone. If we understood this capacity to receive first impressions better, we should value them accordingly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The subtlety and depth of one’s intuitions will increase with quickness, readiness, and obedience of one’s response to them. If they are to remain and not vanish away, intuition must be caught quickly and inspiration must be followed up at once. If we respectfully meet each intuitive feeling and give it our trusting collaboration, it will little by little become a frequent visitor. First, we have to become willing to receive these divine intuitions. These intuitive feelings do not respond to direct frontal demands for their appearance. They must be gently coaxed out of their deeper levels where they reside, quietly lured out of their shy seclusion. To open ourselves and receive an intuition we must surrender the ego and submit the intellect to it. If one is to interpret it aright and not miss its importance, one should let oneself go when one feels this inner prompting. Let it absorb one’s being, draw one inwards to a deepening sense of itself. The deeper mind is so close to the source of our karma that we may at times get its right guidance not only intuitively from within but also circumstantially from without. The interval between the coming and the going of an intuitive thought is so short that one must immediately and alertly respond to it. If one misses it, one will find that the mind can go back to it only with difficulty and uncertainty. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
We can receive a new truth more easily in the mind’s quietude than in the mind’s agitation. When thinking is stilled, intuiting begins. Such internal silence is not useless idleness, it is creative experience. God may use some event, some person, or some book as a messenger to Him. It may make any new circumstance act in the same way. However, one must have the capacity to recognize what is happening and the willingness to receive the message. To let the intuitive feelings come through requires an inner passivity which meditation fosters but which extroversion inhibits. Submit yourself as an empty vessel to be filled with the intuitive leading of God. Do not stop short of this goal, do not be satisfied with a half-and-half sort of life. We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Love between the father and son, is a symbol, means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make the son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, want him to be. Even in our own days, though a man might say it, he could mean nothing by saying, “I love my son but do not care how great a blackguard he is provided he has a good time.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The Church is the Lord’s bride whom he so loves that in her no spot or wrinkle is endurable. For the truth which this analogy serves to emphasize is that Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere “kindness” which tolerates anything expect suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love. When we fall in love with another human being, do we crease to care whether she or he is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care? Does anyone regard it as a sign of love in another human being that one neither knows nor cares how he or she is looking? Love may, indeed, love the beloved when one’s beauty or handsomeness is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved; one’s feeling is more soft and sensible than are the tender horns of cockled snails. Of all powers one forgives most, but one condones least: one is pleased with little, but demands all. When Christianity says that God loves humans, it means that God loves human: not that He has some “disinterested,” because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the lord of terrible aspect, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of one’s guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the Worlds, persistent and the artist’s love for one’s work and despotic as a human’s love for one’s garden, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between intimate partners. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring; we are inclined, like the maidens in the old play, to deprecate the love of Zeus. However, the fact seems unquestionable. The Impassible speaks as if it suffered passion, and that which contains in Itself the cause of its own and all other bliss talks as though it could be in want and yearning. The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love,” and look on things as if human are the center of them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Humans are not the center. God does not exist for the sake of humans. Humans do not exist for their own sake. “Thou has crated all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created,” reports Revelation 4.11. We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest well pleased. To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us God must labour to make us lovable. We cannot even wish, in our better moments, that God could reconcile Himself to our present impurities—no more than the beggar maid could wish the King Cophetua should be content with her rags and dirt, or a dog, once having learned to love humans, could wish that humans were such as to tolerate one’s house the snapping, verminous, polluting creature of the wild pack. What we would here and now call our “happiness” is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The body of believers called the church is to grow from the inside out in response to the Spirit. Built that way, the church prevails against anything. The church comes together on Saturday or Sunday mornings principally to be prepared to carry out its ministry the rest of the week in every walk of life. And the church must equip the humans to take the church into the World. The believer’s ministry is being Christ’s person right where one is, in the marketplace or the home, every moment of every day. This is part of the everyday business of holiness. This is the very nature of loving God. Therefore spiritual discipline is very important. We must practice fervent prayer and serious study of God’s Word. This is the life-or-death principle, churches that exercise spiritual discipline can be mightily used. The great revivals have been born in times when Christians were intent on prayer. The evidence also makes clear that revivals are not confined geographically. For the church of Jesus Christ is not confined to one area. It is one church, one body, one holy nation transcending human’s arbitrary geographic and political boundaries. As one holy nation, we must break free of any provincialism and work for unity in Christ. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
In my travels as a believer among fellow believers of other races and nationalities, the Lord has given me some of His richest fellowship in those very countries. The Holy Spirit can break down every barrier. However, the requirement for individual cells within God’s holy nation goes far beyond sharing financial resources; the church is called to give itself, to share in the hunger and pain of those in need. Jesus Himself shared the pain of the less affluent; He suffered for the entire World. As God’s visible presence in the World today, should not His people also participate in the suffering of the World? Most empathically, yes. Not until we go where need is and share in the suffering of the less affluent, alienated, isolated, and downtrodden will the holy nation of God’s people also become the loving nation. With the methods employed hitherto we have not succeeded in Christianizing the soul to the point where even the most elementary demands of Christian ethics can exert any decisive influence on the main concerns of the Christian European and American. The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor and naked heathen, but the spiritual who populate the Old World and the New World have as yet heard nothing of Christianity. If it is to meet its high educative task, Christianity must indeed begin again from the beginning. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
So long as religion is only faith and outward form, and the religious function is not experienced in our own souls, nothing of any importance has happened. It has yet to be understood that the mysterium magnum is not only an actuality but is first and foremost rooted in the human psyche. The human who does not know this from one’s own experience may be a most learned theologian, but one has no idea of religion and still less of education. Yet when I point out that the soul possesses by nature a religious function, and when I stipulate that it is the prime task of all education (of adults) to convey the archetype of God-image, or its emanations and effects, to the conscious mind, then it is precisely the theologian who seizes me by the arm and accuses me of “psyhchologims.” However, were it not a fact of experience that supreme values reside in the soul (quite apart from the holy ghost who is also there), psychology would interest me in the least, for the soul would then be nothing but a miserable vapour. I know, however, from hundredfold experience that it is nothing of the sort, but on the contrary contains the equivalents of everything that has been formulated in stick doctrines and a good deal more, which is just what enables it to be an eye destined to behold the light. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The beholding of the light requires limitless range and unfathomable depth of vision. I have been accused of “deifying the soul.” Not I but God Himself has defied it! I did not attribute a religious function to the soul, I merely produced the facts which prove that the soul is naturaliter religiosa, id est, possess a religious function. I did not invent or insinuate this function, it produces itself of it own accord without being prompted thereto by any opinions or suggestions of mine. With a truly tragic delusion these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time that we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing. For it is obvious that far too many people are incapable of establishing a connection between the sacred figures and their own psyche: they cannot see to what extent the equivalent images are lying dormant in their own unconscious. In order to facilitate this inner vision we must first clear the way for the faculty of seeing. How this is to be done without psychology, that is, without making contact with the psyche, is frankly beyond my comprehension. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Another equally serious misunderstanding lies in imputing to psychology the wish to be a new and possibly heretical doctrine. If a visually impaired man can gradually be helped to see it is not to be expected that one will at once discern new truths with an eagle eye. If he sees anything at all, one must be glad, and if he begins to understand what he is seeing, that is a blessing. Psychology is concerned with the act of seeing and not with the construction of new religious truths, when even the existing teachings have not yet been perceived and understood. In religious matters it is a well-known fact that we cannot understand a thing until we have experienced it inwardly, for it is in the inward experience that the connection between the psyche and the outward image or creed is first revealed as a relationship or correspondence like that of sponsus and sponsa. Accordingly when I says as a psychologist that God is an archetype, I mean by that the “type” in the psyche. The word “type” is, as we know, derived from “blow” or “imprint”; thus an archetype presupposes an imprinter. Psychology as the science of the soul has to confine itself to its subject and guard against overstepping its proper boundaries by metaphysical assertions or other professions of faith. Should it set up a God, even as a hypothetical cause, it would have implicitly claimed the possibility of proving God, thus exceeding its competence in an absolutely illegitimate way. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Science can only be science; there is no “scientific” professions of faith and similar contradictiones in adiecto. We simply do not know the ultimate derivation of the archetype any more than we know the origin of the psyche. The competence of psychology as an empirical science only goes so far as to establish, on the basis of comparative research, whether for instance the imprint found in the psyche can or cannot reasonably be termed a “God-image.” Nothing positive or negative has thereby been asserted about the possible existence of God, and more than the archetype of the “hero” posits the actual existence of a hero. Now if my psychological researches has demonstrated the existence of certain psyche types and their correspondence with well-known religious ideas, then we have opened up a possible approach to those experienceable contents which manifestly and undeniably form the empirical foundations of all religious experience. The religious-minded human is free to accept whatever metaphysical explanations one pleases about the origin of these images; not so the intellect, which must keep strictly to the principles of scientific interpretation and avoid trespassing beyond the bounds of what can be known. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Nobody can prevent the believer from accepting God, Purusha, the Atman, or Tao as the Prime Cause and thus putting an end to the fundamental disquiet of humans. The scientist is a scrupulous worker; one cannot take Heaven by storm. Should one allow oneself to be seduced into such an extravagance one would be sawing of the branch on which one sits. God, please open the way for me. God, please remove my obstacles. God, please carry me on your back, bringing me through difficulties to success. Heavenly God, please rain your blessings down on your people, like milk pouring from above. Unto Thee we offer blessings and thanksgiving from this time forth and forevermore. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, exalted in praises, God of thanksgiving, Lord of wonders, who takest delight in songs and psalms, Thou God and King, the life of the Universe. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, son; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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For Thou Shall Hear this Secret–Mathematics Possesses Not Only Truth, but Supreme Beauty!
United States policy on the World scene is viewed as being neutral toward our enemy, friendly toward the neutrals, and unfriendly toward our friends. Geography of super industrial society can be expected to become increasingly kinetic, filled with turbulence and change. The more rapidly the environment changes, the shorter the life span of organization forms. In administrative structure, just as in architectural structure, we are moving from long-enduring to temporary forms. From permanence to transience. We are moving from bureaucracy to Ad-hocracy. In this way, the accelerative thrust translates itself into organization. Permanence, one of the identifying characteristics of bureaucracy, one of the identifying characteristics of bureaucracy, is undermined, and we are driven to a relentless conclusion: human’s ties with the invisible geography of organization turn over more and more rapidly, exactly as do one’s relationships with things, places, and the human beings who people these ever-changing organizational structures. Just as the new nomads migrate from place to place, humans increasingly migrate from organizational structure to organizational structure. Something else is happening, too: a revolutionary shift in power relationships. Not only are large organizations forced to create temporary units, but they are also finding it increasingly difficult to maintain their traditional chains-of-command. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
It would be pollyannish to suggest that workers in industry or government today truly “participate” in the management of their enterprises—either in capitalist or, for that matter, in socialist and communist countries. Yet there is evidence that bureaucratic hierarchies, separating those who “make decisions” from those who merely carry them out, are being altered, side-stepped or broken. This process is noticeable in industry where irresistible pressures are battering hierarchical arrangements. The central, crucial and important business of organizations is increasingly shifting from up and down to sideways. What is involved in such a shift is a virtual revolution in organizational structure—and human relations. For people communicating in sideways—id est, to others at approximately the same level of organization—behave differently, operate under very different pressures, than those who must communicate up and down a hierarchy. To illustrate, let us look at a typical work setting in which a traditional bureaucratic hierarchy operates. While still a young man, I worked for a couple of years as a millwright’s helper in a foundry. Here, in a great dark cavern of a building, thousands of men laboured to produce automobile crankcase castings. The scene was Dantesque—smoke and soot smeared our faces, soot covered the floors and filled the air, the pungent, choking smell of sulphur and burnt sand seared our nostrils. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Overhead a creaking conveyor carried red hot castings and dripped hot sand on the men blow. There were flashes of molten iron, the yellow flares of fires, and a lunatic cacophony of noises: men shouting, chains rattling, pug mills hammering, compressed air shrieking. To a stranger the scene appeared chaotic. However, those inside knew that everything was carefully organized. Bureaucratic order prevailed. Men did the same job over and over again. Rules governed every situation. And each man knew exactly where he stood in a vertical hierarchy that reached from the lowest-paid core paster up to the unseen “they” who populated the executive suits in another building. In the immense shed where we worked, something was always going wrong. A bearing would burn out, a belt snap or a gear break. Whenever this happened in a section, work would screech to a halt, and frantic messages would begin to flow up and down the hierarchy. The worker nearest the breakdown would notify his foreman. He, in turn, would tell the production supervisor. The production supervisor would send the word to the maintenance supervisor. The maintenance supervisor would dispatch a crew to repair the damage. Information in this system is passed by the worker “upward” through the foreman to the production supervisor. The production supervisor carries it sideways to a man occupying a niche at approximately the same level in the hierarchy (the maintenance supervisor), who, in turn, passes it downward to the millwrights who actually get things going again. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The information thus must move a total of four steps up and down the vertical ladder plus one step sideways before repairs can begin. The process is a lot like taking a tour through the Winchester mansion. This system is premised on the unspoken assumption that the dirty, sweaty men down below cannot make sound decisions. Only those higher in the hierarchy are to be trusted with judgment or discretion. Officials at the top make the decisions; men at the bottom carry them out. One group represents the brains of the organization; the other, the hands. This typically bureaucratic arrangement is ideally suited to solving routine problems at a moderate pace. However, when things speed up, or the problems cease to be routine, chaos often breaks loose. It is easy to see why. First, the acceleration of the pace of life (and especially the speed-up of production brought about by automation) means that every minute of down time cost more in lost output than ever before. Delay is increasingly costly. Information must flow faster than ever before. At the same time, rapid change, by increasing the number of novel, unexpected problems increases the amount of information needed. It takes more information to cope with a noel problem than one we have solved a dozen or a hundred times before. It is this combined demand for more information at faster speeds that is now undermining the great vertical hierarchies so typical of bureaucracy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
A radical speed-up could have been effected in the foundry described above simply by allowing the worker to report the breakdown directly to the maintenance supervisor or even to a maintenance crew, instead of passing the news along through his foreman and production supervisor. At least one and perhaps two steps could have been cut from the four-step communication process in this way—a saving of from 25 to 50 percent. Significantly, the steps that might be eliminated are the up-and-down steps, the vertical ones. Today such savings are feverishly sought by managers fighting to keep up with change. Shortcuts that by-pass the hierarchy are increasingly employed in thousands of factories, offices, laboratories, even in the military. The cumulative result of such small changes is a massive shift from vertical to lateral communication systems. The intended result is speedier communication. This leveling process, however, represents a major blow to the once-sacred bureaucratic hierarchy, and it punches a jagged hole in the brain and hand analogy. For as he vertical chain of command is increasingly by-passed, we find “hands” beginning to make decisions, too. When the worker by-passes his foreman or supervisor and calls in a repair team, he makes a decision that in the past was reserved for these higher ups. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This silent but significant deterioration of hierarchy, now occurring in the executive suite as well as at the ground level of the factory floor, is intensified by the arrival on the scene of hordes of experts—specialists in vital fields so narrow that often the men on top have difficulty understanding them. Increasingly, managers have to rely on the judgment of these experts. Solid state physicists, computer programmers, systems designers, operation researchers, engineering specialists—such humans are assuming new decision-making function. At one time, they merely consulted with executives who reserved unto themselves the right to make managerial decisions. Today, the managers are losing their monopoly on decision-making. The specialists do not fit neatly together into a chain-of-command system and cannot wait for their expert advice to be approved at a higher level. With no time for decisions to wend their leisurely way up and down the hierarchy, advisors stop merely advising and begin to make decisions themselves. Often they do this in direct consultation with the workers and ground-level technicians. As a result, you no longer have the strict allegiance to hierarchy. You may have five or six different levels of the hierarchy represented in one meeting. You try to forget about salary level and hierarchy, and organize to get the job done. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Such facts represent a staggering change in thinking, action, and decision-making in organizations. Quite possibly, the only truly effective methods for preventing, or coping with, problems of coordination and communication in our changing technology will be found in the new arrangements of people and tasks, in arrangements which sharply break with the bureaucratic tradition. It will be a log time before the last bureaucratic hierarchy is obliterated. For bureaucracies are well suited to task that require masses of moderately educated humans to perform routine operations, and, no doubt, some such operations will continue to be performed by humans in the future. It is clear that in super-industrial society many such tasks will be performed by great self-regulating systems of machines, doing away with the need for bureaucracy on civilization more tightly than before, automation leads to its overthrow. As machines take over routine tasks and the accelerative thrust increases the amount of novelty in the environment, more and more of the energy of society (and its organizations) must turn toward the solution of non-routine problems. This requires a degree of imagination and creativity that bureaucracy, with its human-on-a-slot organization, its permanent structures, and its hierarchies, is not well equipped to provide. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Thus it is not surprising to find that wherever organizations today are caught up in the stream of technological or social change, wherever research and development is important, wherever humans must cope with first-time problems, the decline of bureaucratic forms is most pronounced. In these frontier organizations a new system of human relations is springing up. To live, organizations must cast off those bureaucratic practices that immobilize them, making them less sensitive and less rapidly responsive to change. We are moving toward a working society of technical co-equals in which the line of demarcation between the leader and the led has become fuzzy. Super-industrial Humans, rather than occupying a permanent, cleanly-defined slot and performing mindless routine tasks in response to orders from above, finds increasingly that one must assume decision-making responsibility—and must do so within a kaleidoscopically changing organization structure built upon highly transient human relationships. Whatever else might be said, that is not the old, familiar Weberian bureaucracy at which so many of our novelists and social critics are still, belatedly, hurling their rusty javelins. The sum of transfers and benefits from essential public goods should be arranged so as to enhance the expectations of the least favoured consistent with the required saving and the maintenance of equal liberties. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
When the basic structure takes this form the distribution that results will be just (or at least not unjust) whatever it is. Each receives that total income (earnings plus transfers) to which one is entitled under the public system of rules upon which one’s legitimate expectations are founded. A central feature of this conception of distributive justice is that it contains a large element of pure procedural justice. If the notion of pure procedural justice is to succeed, it is necessary to set up and to administer impartially a just system of surrounding institutions. The reliance on pure procedural justice presupposes that the basic structure satisfies the two principles. The first principle of justice is that: Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same arrangement of liberties for all; the second principle of justice is: Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions—they are to be attached to offices and position open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle). This account of distributive shares is simply an elaboration of the familiar idea that income and wages will be just once a (workably) competitive price system is properly organized and embedded in a just structure. These conditions are sufficient. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The distribution that results is a case of background justice on the analogy with the outcome of a fair game. However, we need to consider whether this conception fits our intuitive ideas of what is just and unjust. Consider the case of wages in a perfectly competitive economy surrounded by a just basic structure. Assume that each firm (whether publicly or privately owned) must adjust its rates of pay to the long-run forces of supply and demand. The rates of pay cannot be so high that they cannot afford paying those rates or so low that a sufficient number will not offer their skills in view of the other opportunities available. In equilibrium the relative attractiveness of different jobs will be equal, all things considered. It is easy, then, to see how the various precepts of justice arise. They simply identify features of jobs that are significant on either the demand or the supply side of the market, or both. A firm’s demand for workers is determined by the marginal productivity of labour, that is, by the net value of the contribution of a unit of labour measured by the sale price of the commodities that it produces. The worth of this contribution to the firm rests eventually on market conditions, on what households are willing to pay for various goods. Experience and training, natural ability and special know-how, tend to earn a premium. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Firms are willing to pay more to those with special skills, knowledge, talent and ability because these characteristics mean their productivity is greater. This fact explains and gives weight to the precept to each according to one’s contribution, and as special cases, we have the norms to each according to one’s training, or one’s experience, and the like. However, also, viewed from the supply side, a premium must be paid if those who may later offer their services are to be persuaded to undertake the costs of training and postponement. Similarly jobs which involve uncertain or unstable employment, or which are performed under hazardous and unpleasantly strenuous conditions, tend to receive more pay. Otherwise humans cannot be found to fill them. From this circumstance arise such precepts as to each according to one’s effort, or the risk one bears, and so on. Even when individuals are assumed to be of the same natural ability, these normal will still arise from the requirement of economic activity. Given the aims of productive units and of those seeking work, certain characteristics are singled out as relevant. At any time the wage practices of firms tend to recognize these precepts and, allowing time for adjustment, assign them the weights called for by market conditions. All of this seems reasonably clear. At the height of the energy crisis in 1977, the governor of Virginia ordered energy use restricted in non-essential buildings. No one seemed particularly surprised that churches headed his list. In the eyes of the World, as well as many church-goers, the church is only a building, and an expensive, under-used one at that. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The only time the church is used is usually on Saturday or Sunday, for a few hours, and an occasional mid-week service or function, the temple of God sits empty. SO why use scarce resources to heat it? These same people consider the church just another institution with its own bureaucracy, run by ministers and priests who, like lawyers and doctors, are members of a profession (though not so well-paid). And while this parochial institution fulfills a worthwhile social and inspirational function, rather like an arts society or civic club, most people could get along fine without it. In many ways, of course, the church has allowed itself to become what the World says it is. (This seems to be a common human bent—to become what others consider us to be.) However, that sad fact has not dulled or changed God’s definition of, and intention for, His church. For biblically the church is an organism not an organization—a movement, not a monument. It is not a part of the community; it is a whole new community. It is not an orderly gathering; it is a new order with new values, often in sharp conflict with the values of the surrounding society. The church does nor draw people in; it sends them out. It does not settle into a comfortable niche, taking its place alongside the Rotary, the Elks, and the Hilton country club. Rather, the church is to make society uncomfortable. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Like yeast, the temple of God unsettles the masses around it, changing it from within. Like salt, it flavours and preserves that into which it vanishes. However, as yeast is made up of many particles and salt composed of multiplied grains, so the church is many individual believers. For God has given us each other; we do not live the Christian life alone. We do not love God alone. To believe Jesus means we follow Hum and join what He called the “kingdom of God” which He said was “at hand.” This is a new commitment…a new companionship, new community established by conversion. The young church, made up of believers of every country, race, and language of the World as a Holy Nation. Being part of the Holy Nation requires an understanding and practice of certain truths. When I came first to the University, I fell among a set of young men and women, who believed in chastity, truthfulness, self-sacrifice. We were sufficiently close in intellect and imagination, which allowed us to secure immediate intimacy and they taught me to obey the moral law. God’s goodness differs from ours; but one needs have no fear that, as one approached it, one will be asked simply to reverse one’s moral standards. Christ calls humans to repent—a call which would be meaningless if God’s standards were sheerly different from that which they already knew and failed to practise #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
God appeals to our existing moral judgments. By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness—the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness. There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object—we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to give animals homes so they do not suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our relationships, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, God has never regarded us with contempt. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense. The relation between Creator and creature is, of course, unique, and cannot be paralleled by any relations between one creature and another. God is both further from us, and nearer to us, than any other being. He is further from us because the sheer difference between that which has Its principle of being in Itself and that to which being is communicated, is one compared with which the difference between an archangel and a worm is quite insignificant. God makes, we are made: God is original, we derivative. However, as the same time, and for the same reason, the intimacy between God and even the meanest creature is closer than any that creatures can attain with one another. Our life is, at every moment, supplied by God: our tiny, miraculous power of free will only operates on bodies which God’s continual energy keeps in existence—our very power to think in His power communicated to us. Such a unique relation can be apprehended only by analogies: from the various types of love known among creatures we reach an inadequate, but useful, conception of God’s love for humans. MIND is the Real, Energy is tis appearance. Matter is the form taken by radiation or energy. It is not that the truth lies between two extremes but that it lies above both. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
It is not a miracle that physical objects, minerals like coal and oil, can be turned into heat and light and power, that is, into energies, as humans are doing today?—that matter can be transmuted into electrical energy, which can be turned into sounds, pictures, sounds, and words as it is thrown across the World? However, what is the essence of this energy, whence does it come ultimately? Where else but from the Great Mind which activated the Universe? Physics derives the World of continents and creatures from energies; these in turn derive from a mysterious No-thing. There is no room here for materialism. For if nothing material can be found at that deep level, mathematical evidence points to Mind. The substance of matter has shifted from the visible World to an invisible one but precise, if difficult, mathematical formulas tell us that it is there, while exploding atomic bombs demonstrate its power. At this point matter disappears; its substance becomes its source. All things and all energies come from this source. It is the ONE, unique. It is life for us all and death for us all. Mind has its own energy, which mysteriously constructs forms in space and time, forms of planets, sun galaxies, the cosmos. Energy is expression in movement of the unseen substance. Matter is its apparent form. All things are made from it. We are a part of it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
At the very end of all their explorations of the atom, what do the scientists find? Empty space, no thing-in-itself, a gap out of which pour flashes of energy. The World-Mind acts by its own power, underived from any other source. This entire Universe is a tremendous manifestation—the One turned into the Many—of a single Energy, which in its turn is an aspect of a single Mind. Whatever its nature, every other force derives from this Energy, as every other form of consciousness derives from this Mind. The statement “Light is God” is meant in two sense: first, as the poetical and a physical fact that, in the present condition of the human being, one’s spiritual ignorance is equivalent to darkness and one’s discovery of God is equivalent to light; second, as the scientific fact that has verified in light, and since God has made the Universe out of His own substance, the light-waves are ultimately divine. The Light is World-Mind’s active and creative force. The Light of the World-Mind is the Source of the physical Universe; the Love of the World-Mind is its structural basis. All the forces of the physical World are derived from a single source—the solar energy. This energy which is within the cosmos, from which it is drawn by humans, this Life-Force, may be called “bio-electric” for its shows itself on one level as light, on another as the whole spectrum of colours. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Biology does not know or explain Life-Power, only its manifestations. What the scientist formerly called “radiant light” became the stuff of which Worlds are made; what the mystic visionary called “the body of God” and actually saw a mysterious light, is still present in the World in hence in all terrestrial life forms. If we seek an origin for the consciousness, however small finite and limited it may be, that a human possesses, none other can be found except the universal consciousness which informs the entire Universe and guides its development. All the different kinds of consciousness come from this Universal Mind. All the highest ideals and virtues of human consciousness come from it too. Even the simple religious faith indirectly has its rise there. It is the mysterious essence of all things and of nothing, the infinite presence that is everywhere and yet nowhere. Above all, it is at the very root of human’s inward being. Our roots are in the World-Mind. In that sense, our whole life is born and grows from it—physical and non-physical alike. There is our true Parent. Without this constant listening for intuitive guidance, and submission to it, we waste much time putting right the mistakes made or curing the sickness which could have been prevented or bemoaning the calamity which willpower could have averted. None of these are God’s will, but our own causation. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Being guided intuitively does not mean that every problem will be solved instantly as soon as it appears. Some solutions will not come into consciousness until almost the very last minute before they are actually needed. One learns to be patient, to let the higher power take its own course. We can thank intuition for many of the inventions that surround us every day. I know that intuition has invariably set me on the right track. My hunches come to me most frequently in bed, in a plane, or while staring out of a pullman window. When a problem really has me stumped I am apt to write down all the details as far as I can go, then put it aside to cool for forty-eight hours. At the end of that time I often find it’s solved itself….In any case, the most interesting sensations are the elation that accompanies the hunch and the feeling of certainty it inspires that the solution which has been glimpsed is right. Learn to relax. Intuition cannot operate when your conscious mind is tied up in knots. Among the best ways to relax are hobbies, provided they are not taken too seriously. These intrusions from a realm beyond conscious thinking may be Heavenly ones. If so, to resist them would be to lose much and to accept them would be to fain much. However, they have to be caught on the wing. Their delicate beginnings must be recognized for what they are—precious guides. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The more one follows this intuitive leading the more one not only learns to trust it but also develops future response to it. Truth consists in the equation of mind and things. Now the mind, that is the cause of the thing, is related to it as its rule and measure; whereas the converse is the case with the mind that receives its knowledge from things. When therefore things are the measure and rule of the mind, truth consists in the equation of the mind to the thing, as happens in ourselves. For according as a thing is, or is not, our thoughts or our words about it are true or false. However, when the mind is the rule or measure of things, truth consists in the equation of the thing to the mind; just as the work of an artist is said to be true, when it is in accordance with one’s art. Now as work of art are related to art, so are works of justice related to the law with which they accord. Therefore God’s justice, which establishes things in the order conformable to the rule of His wisdom, which is the law of His justice, is suitably called truth. Thus we also in human affairs speak of the truth of justice. Justice, as to the law that governs, resides in the reason or intellect; but as to the command whereby our actions are governed according to the law, it resides in the will. Virtue whereby a human shows oneself in word and deed such as one really is. Thus it consists in the conformity of the sign with the thing signified; and not in that of the effect with its cause and rule: as has been said regarding the truth of justice. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
God Almighty, Lord, sitter in the doorway, God of equilibrium, lovingkindness, and mercy: Thy who hold the opposites apart, Thy in whom all opposites unite, my prayer goes to Thy to open the passage, to clear the threshold, to make the way clear. Please, with the next turn on the wheel of, Fortuna, bring me luck. “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the Earth will bring their splendour into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honour of the nations will be brought into it. Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life,” reports Revelation 21.22-27. It is the duty of all creatures towards Thee, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to give thanks unto Thee, to laud, adore and praise Thee, even beyond all the words of song and praise uttered by David, the son of Jesse, Thine anointed servant. Praise by Thy name forever, O our King, Thou God and King, great and holy, in Heaven on Earth. For unto Thee, O Lord our God and God of our father, it is fitting to render song and praise, hymn and psalm, ascribing unto Thee power and dominion, victory and glory, holiness and sovereignty. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 