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No One Lives on this Earth without Tribulation–Life is Lived Forwards, but Understood Backwards!
Are lives are defined by our choices. Paths taken and worlds explored. But once we commit, we can never go back, or can we? Bondage of the will is an essential foundation for the doctrine of grace. By ourselves, we are unable to act righteously, to have faith, or to contribute to our own salvation. All credit belongs to God. What then is left to free will? “Nothing! In truth!” insisted Marlin Luther. John Calvin was just as forceful: because the term free will “cannot be retained without great peril, it will…be a great boon for the church if it is abolished.” The divine determinism assumed by the doctrines of God’s foreknowledge, sovereignty, and grace is not identical to naturalistic cause-effect determinism. Yet biblical faith assumes that God works through the created order. Thomas Aquinas argued (in the words of Michael Novak) that “grace operates (except in the rarest cases) through the ordinary contingencies and processes of nature…The whole environment, the whole ‘schedule of contingencies’ that constitutes history is graced.” Believing in God opens one to the possibility of miracles; yet if we accept that all nature is from moment to moment sustained, ordered, and upheld by God, then we no longer need miracles in order to “make room for God.” Whatever their differences, the concepts of absolute determinism and absolute divine sovereignty converge in affirming our dependence on forces beyond our conscious knowledge. Thus they share the problem of how to accommodate ultimate more responsibility. If a superhypnotist were to plant an irresistible suggestion that you should commit a crime, which you then did with a sense of having chosen to do it, surely no one who knew the hidden cases of your behaviour would hold you responsible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Likewise, if we understand the conditions that triggered someone’s acting desirably, we tend to credit the conditions rather than the person. It is only when we are surprised by a person’s heroism—when we do not expect people to behave o nobly under such circumstances—that we give special credit and honour to the hero. In a deterministic World we can judge any behaviour as worthy of praise or blame, but it becomes more difficult to hold the person as ultimately responsible. One is therefore tempted to create a gap in the schemes of natural and divine determination—to open the door to just a dash of ultimate free will, however much is needed to restore our accountability before God and before our human judicial system. God’s sovereignty, we may tell ourselves, does not extend all the way down to the little things, such as what I ate for breakfast this morning. God is concerned only with big events, the ultimate ends. However, as Jonathan Edwards and the other theological masterminds recognized, this assumption of agent causation creates as many problems as it solves. A God who is detached from what you ate for breakfast (or whether you ate breakfast) is not a God who is continuously involved with all events of the creation. And consider: How are the big ends in life achieved apart from the little means? Looking back on our lives, we see our path winding through countless little event and chance encounters, from our initial conception right up to the present. At any decision point we feel free, but looking back, we see causation. “What I so proudly call ‘myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never stared and which I cannot stop,” suggested C.S. Lewis. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Or as Soren Kierkegaard noted, “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.” Thus the apostle Paul could sense, “I yet not I, but the grace of God.” So both the absolute determinist and the one who believes in God’s utter sovereignty (perhaps the same person) are left baffled. To limit natural and divine powers makes little sense and only opens that door for pride in self and a judgmental attitude toward others. Yet somehow human accountability must be affirmed. Faced with this paradox of faith, we can take comfort in remembering that we cannot expect to comprehend fully this wisdom and justice of a being whose cognitive stage is infinitely beyond our own. Our situation is like that of someone stranded in a deep well with two ropes dangling down. If we grab either one alone, we sink still deeper into the well. Only when we hold both ropes at once can we climb out, because at the top, beyond where we can see, they come together around a pulley. Grabbing only the rope of determinism or the rope of human responsibility plunges us to the bottom of a well. So instead we grab both ropes, without yet understanding how they come together. In doing so, we may also be comforted that in science as in religion, a confused acceptance of irreconcilable principles is sometimes more hones than a tidy oversimplified theory that ignores evidence. (Remember that advocates of agent causation have no trouble explaining our responsibility, but do face a different mystery—how God could accomplish divine purposes while granting us freedom to do as we choose.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
We also do well to remember both ropes in our everyday attitudes—by viewing ourselves as free and responsible agents and others as influenced by their biology, their past experience, and their current situation. Such a view has the effect of cultivating within us the practical fruits of self-discipline and self-initiative, while being more understanding of the forces that constrain others. Scripture, too, tends to adopt the perspective of self as free and other as caused. When the Bible addresses us directly, it emphasizes our responsibility for our failings. When talking to us about others, especially the poor and disadvantaged, it frequently advocates the complementary perspective: do not judge; act with compassion toward the oppressed; take the beam out of your own eye before worrying about the motes in others; let judgment begin with the house of the Lord. Are we determined or free? Christian psychologists who assume absolute determinism struggle to rationalize human responsibility; those who assume self-causation have solved the problem of human responsibility butt struggle to accommodate natural causation and divine sovereignty in human affairs. Nevertheless, on this much both camps agree: in the fabric of contemporary psychology and Christian doctrine, natural order and human responsibility are the interwoven threads. The new enlightenment which resulted from this development increased human superiority over others terrestrial beings by making them aware that they are from a divine being and created in His image. “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground,’” reports Genesis 1.26. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
And because humans learned they were superior to animals, they trained themselves to set traps for them; they tricked them in a thousand different ways. And although several surpassed them or hurt them, humans became the master of the former and the scourge of the latter. Thus the first glance they directed upon themselves produced within them the first string of pride; thus, as yet hardly knowing how to distinguish the ranks, and contemplating themselves in the first rank by virtue of their species, they prepared themselves from afar to lay claim to it in virtue of their individuality. Although their fellow humans were not for one what they are for us, and although they had hardly anything more to do with them than with other animals, they were not forgotten in their observations. The conformities that tie could make one perceive among the, their female, and oneself, made the human beings judge of those they did not perceive. And seeing that they all acted as one would have done under similar circumstances, one concluded that their way of thinking and feeling was in complete conformity with their own. And this important truth, well established in their mind, made them follow, by a presentiment as sure as dialectic and more prompt, the best rules of conduct that it was appropriate to observe toward them for their advantage and safety. Taught by experience that love of well-being is the sole motive of human actions, one found oneself in a position to distinguish the rare occasions when common interest should make one count on the assistance of their fellow humans, and those even rarer occasions when competition ought to make one distrust them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
In the first case, humans untied with them in a herd, or at most in some sort of free association, that obligated no one and that lasted only as long as the passing need that hard formed it. In the second case, if one believed that one could, everyone sought to obtain one’s own advantage, either by overt force. Of it one felt oneself to be weaker, one sought to obtain advantage by cleverness and cunning. This is how humans could imperceptibly acquire some crude idea of mutual commitments and of the advantages to be had in fulfilling them, but only insofar as present and perceptible interests could require it, since foresight meant nothing to them, and far from concerning themselves about a distant future, they did not even give a thought to the next day. Were it a matter of catching a deer, everyone was quite aware that one must faithfully keep to one’s post in order to achieve this purpose; but if a hare happened to pass within reach of one of them, no doubt one would have pursued it without giving it a second thought, and that, having obtained one’s prey, one cared very little about causing one’s companions to miss theirs. It is easy to understand that such intercourse did not require a language much more refined than that of crows or monkeys, which flock together in practically the same way. Inarticulate cries, many gestures, and some imitative noises must for a long time have made up the universal language. By joining to this in each country a few articulate and conventional sounds, whose institution, as I have already said, is not too easy to explain, there were individual languages, but crude and imperfect ones, quite similar to those still spoken by carious savage nations today. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
Constrained by the passing of time, the abundance of things I have to say, and the practically imperceptible progress of the beginnings, I am flying like an arrow over the multitudes of centuries. For the slower events were in succeeding one another, the quicker they can be described. These first advantages enabled humans to make more rapid ones. The more the mind was enlightened, the more industry was perfected. Soon they ceased to fall asleep under the first tree or to retreat into caves, and found various types of hatches made of hard, sharp stones, which served to cut wood, dig up the soil, and make huts from branches they later found it useful to cover with clay and mud. This was the period of a first revolution which formed the establishment of the distinction among families and which introduced a kind of property, whence perhaps there already arose many quarrels and fights. However, since the strongest were probably the first to make themselves lodgings they felt capable of defending, presumably the weak found it quicker and safer to imitate them than to try to dislodge them; and as for those who already had huts, each of them must have rarely sought to appropriate that of one’s neighbour, less because it did not belong to one than because it was of no use to one, and because one could not seize it without exposing oneself to a fierce battle with the family that occupied it. The first development of the heart were the effect of a new situation that united the husbands and wives, fathers and children in one common habitation. The habit of living together gave rise to the sweetest sentiments known to humans: conjugal love and parental love. “God blessed them and said to them ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it,’” reports Genesis 1.28. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Each family became a little society all the better united because mutual attachment and liberty were its only bonds; and it was then that the first difference was established in the lifestyle of the two genders, which until then had had only one. Women because more sedentary and grew accustomed to watch over the hut and the children, while the man went to seek their common subsistence. With their slightly softer life the two genders also began to lose something of their ferocity and vigour. However, while each one separately became less suited combat savage beasts, on the other hand it was easier to assemble in order to jointly to resist them. In this new state, with simple and solitary life, very limited needs, and the tools they had invented to provide for them, since humans enjoyed a great deal of leisure time, they used it to procure for themselves many types of conveniences unknown their fathers; and that was the first yoke they imposed on themselves without realizing it, and the first source of evils they prepared for their descendants. For in addition to their continuing thus to soften body and mind (those conveniences having through habit lost almost all their pleasures, and being at the same time degenerated into true needs), being deprived of them because much more cruel than possessing hem was sweet; and they were unhappy about losing them without being happy about possessing them. At this point we can see a little better how the use of speech was established or imperceptibly perfected itself in the bosom of each family; and one can further conjecture how various particular causes could have extended the language and accelerated its progress by making it more necessary. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Great floods or earthquakes surrounded the inhabited areas with water or precipices. Upheavals of the globe detached parts of the mainland and broke them up into islands. Clearly among humans thus brought together and forced to live together, a common idiom must have been formed sooner than among those who wandered freely about the forests of the mainland. Thus it is quite possible that after their first attempts at navigation, the islanders brought the use of speech to us; and it is at least quite probable that society and languages came into being on islands and were perfected there before they were known on the mainland. Everything begins to take on a new appearance. Having previously wandered about the forest and having assumed a more fixed situation, humans slowly came together and united into different bands, eventually forming in each country a particular nation, united by mores and characteristic features, not by regulations and laws, but by the same kind of life and foods and by the common influence of the climate. Eventually a permanent proximity cannot fail to engender some intercourse among different families. Young people of difference genders live in neighbouring huts; the passing intercourse demanded by nature soon leads to another, through frequent contact with one another, no less sweet and more permanent. People became accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparison. Imperceptibly they acquire the ideas of merit and beauty which produce feelings of preference. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer get along without seeing one another again. A sweet and tender feeling insinuates itself into the soul and at the least opposition becomes an impetuous fury. Jealousy awakens with love’ discord triumphs, and the sweetest passion receives sacrificed of human blood. In proportion as ideas and sentiments succeed one another and as the mind and heart are trained, the human race continues to be tamed, relationships spread and bonds are tightened. People grew accustomed to gather in front of their huts or around a large tree; song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle humans who had flocked together. Each one began to look at the others and to wan to be looked at oneself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly regarded. And this was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born vanity and contempt on the one hand, and shame and envy on the other. And the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. On 8 August 1960, a West Virginia-born chemical engineer named Monroe Rathbone, sitting in his office high over Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, New York United States of America, made a decision that future historians might someday choose to symbolize the end of the Second Wave era. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Few paid any attention when Mr. Rathbone, chief executive of the giant Exxon Corporation, took steps to cut back on the taxes Exxon paid to the oil-producing countries. His decision, though ignored by the Western press, struck like a thunderbolt at the governments of these countries, since virtually all their revenues derived from oil company payments. Within a few days the other major oil companies had followed Exxon’s lead. And one month later, on 9 September, in the fabled city of Baghdad, delegates of the hardest-hit countries met in emergency council. Backed to the wall, they formed themselves into a committee of oil-exporting governments. For fully thirteen years the activities of this committee, and even its name, were ignored outside the pages of a few petroleum industry journals. Until 1973, that is, when the Yom Kippur War broke out and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) suddenly stepped out of the shadows. Chocking off the World’s supply of crude oil, it sent the entire Second Wave economy into a shuddering down-spin. What OPEC did, apart from quadrupling its oil revenues, was to accelerate a revolution that was already brewing in the Second Wave techno-sphere. In the earsplitting clamour over the energy crisis that has since followed, so many plans, proposals, arguments, and counterarguments have been hurled at us that it is difficult to make sensible choices. Governments are just as confused as the proverbial human in the streets. One way to cut through the murk is to look beyond the individual technologies and policies to the principles underlying them. Once we do, we find that certain proposals are designed to maintain or extend the Second Wave energy base as we have known it, while others rest on new principles. The result is a radical clarification of the entire energy issue. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The Second Wave energy base, we saw earlier, was premised on non-renewability; it drew from highly concentrated, exhaustible deposits; it relied on expansive, heavily centralized technologies; and it was nondiversified, resting on a relatively few sources and methods. These were the main features of the energy base in all Second Wave nations throughout the industrial era. Bearing these in mind, if we now look at the various plans and proposals generated by the oil crisis we can quickly tell which ones are mere extensions of the old and which are forerunners of something fundamentally new. And the basic question becomes not whether oil should sell at forty dollars (2021 inflation adjusted $363.78) per barrel or whether a nuclear reactor should rise at Seabrook or Grohnde. The larger question is whether any energy base deigned for industrial society and premised on these Second Wave principles can survive. Once asked in this form, the answer is inescapable. Through the past half-century, fully two thirds of the entire World’s energy supply has come from oil and gas. Most observers today, from the most fanatic conservationists to the deposed Shah of Iran, from solar freaks and Saudi sheikhs to the button-down, brief-case-carrying experts of many governments, agree that this dependency on fossil fuel cannot continue indefinitely, no matter how many new oil fields are discovered. Statistic vary. Disputes rage over how long World has before the ultimate crunch. The forecasting complexities are enormous and many past predications now look silly. Yet one thing is clear: no one is pumping gas oil back to replenish the supply. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Whether the end comes in some climatic gurgle or, more likely, in a succession of dizzyingly destabilizing shortages, temporary gluts, and deeper shortages, the oil epoch is ending. Iranians know this. Kuwaitis and Nigerians and Venezuelans know it. Saudi Arabians know it—which is why they are racing to build an economy based on something other than oil revenues. And although we are having issues supplying electricity to major cities in America, and an element used to create batteries in electric cars is expected to run out in the near future, this is why leaders are pushing to increase the demand of electric cars. Petroleum companies know it—which is why they are scrambling to diversify out of oil. (One president of a petroleum company told me at a dinner in Tokyo not long ago that, in his opinion, the oil giants would become industrial dinosaurs, as the railroads have. His time frame for this was breathtakingly short—years, not decades. Perhaps in the next ten years.) However, the debate over physical depletion is almost beside the point. For in today’s World it is price, not physical supply, that has the most immediate and significant impact. And here, if anything, the facts point even more strongly to the same conclusion. The suburban ideology fits somewhat uncomfortably into the urban dichotomy. Suburbs are neither one nor the other. Proponents of suburban living historically have resolved this by emphasizing how suburbs ideally combine the best features of urban and rural living. Opponents stress that they contain the worse of both Worlds. The argument that suburbs have best of both is not new. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
An 1873 promotional tract pushing development of the North Shore of Chicago proclaims, “The controversy which is sometimes brought, as to which offers the greater advantage, the country of the city, finds a happy answer in the suburban ideal which says both—the combination of the two—the city brought to the country. This is a practical and valuable reply. The city has its advantages and conveniences, the country its charm and health; the union of the two (a modern result of the railway), gives to humans all they could ask in this respect.” As the earlier section on romantic suburbs indicates, the suburb was to allow the nineteenth-century city man of business to have it both ways. One would make one’s fortune during the day in the dynamic and vita industrial city and then retire by commuter railroad to the health and domestic tranquility of the picturesque suburb. Although homes in turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs were far less grand and often occupied minimal size lots, the imagery of suburbs being at least surrounded by country persisted. Sometimes the open spaces lasted only until all the planned housing was constructed. Automobile suburbs built prior to the second World War, if anything, accentuated and sharpened the image of suburbs as being distinct from the city. Real estate developers and realtors found it was good for business to foster the image of both spatial and social distance from the central city. The mass suburbanization during the postwar years may have changed the reality, not the ideology, of suburban exclusivity. Builders and developers continued to advertise based upon the image of suburbia as an exclusive enclave where one’s fellow suburbanites would all be upwardly mobile and community involved. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Advertisements spoke less about square footage than about “moving up” and the “quality of life.” Nonetheless, the reality was that suburbia was now open to virtually all. Exclusively had come down to the basics of being employed and European American. Some of the postwar criticisms by cultural elites of the new suburbs were, in fact, a recognition of his change. Literary and cultural criticisms of standardized subdivision housing as an aesthetic wasteland, and the attacks on the middle-brow values of those inhabiting such housing, were in part an elitist response to rapid social change. This “there goes the neighbourhood” response, combined with a glorification of the past, was clearly evident in the comments of influential intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford. One can feel the disdain when he described postwar suburbia as “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at unform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group…conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold.” To many of the urban critics of the 1950s and 1960s, the major crime of the new suburbs was that they were common. Unlike the affluent and exclusive suburbs of earlier decades, the new suburbs, and suburbanites, were seen as lacking the true urbanite’s sense of good taste. Underlying the criticisms is the assumption that the new suburbanites went to the wrong schools, read the wrong books, and even bought the wrong furniture. It was as if former workers and service help had aspired to rise above their true station in life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
There is a World of other people and things—the point of individuation. At this point, there may be either a more home-loving or a more space-loving orientation, but either way, if all goes well, a person will emerge with an integrated personality. However, all may not go well. A person may be struck by a trauma, after which development will be fundamentally influenced by the method which that person invented to cope with the trauma. The Basic Fault is at the point at which people begin to have to “cope.” Use of the English “coping” refers to ego-function! It gives recognition to our ability to survive and to deal with people and things in order to survive, not necessarily with much regard to the moral dimension. “Coping” has two independent and equally relevant root, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: A. Form the Old French coper, Modern French couper, to strike (a blow), to cut. From this root we get our meanings (1) to strike; to come to blows; encounter; engage; (2) to be or prove oneself a match for, content successfully with; (3) to have to do with; (4) to meet, to come in contact (hostile and friendly) with; (5) to match a thing with another equivalent. B. From Middle English Kopen – to buy (cf. cheap). From this root we get (1) to buy; (2) to exchange, barter; (3) to make an exchange, bargain. There is even a third root, from cope meaning cape: to cover with a cope, to hang over like a coping. All very appropriate. To return to our theme after this linguistic digression, trauma is not necessarily a single even. Trauma is more likely to be caused by a long-standing situation in which there was some painful misunderstanding—a lack of fit—between the child and the adults around it. #RandolphHarrs 16 of 25
True, despite the general lack of fit, in some cases some adult may be on the child’s side, but much more often, immature and weak individuals have to cope on their own with traumatic situations: either no help is available, or the only help is of a kind that is hardly more than a continuation of the misunderstand, and thus useless. For lack of the right support, the individual is forced to find its own method of coping, a method hit upon a time of despair or thrown at it by some un-understanding adult who may be a well-wisher, or just indifferent, or negligent, or even careless or hostile. This method will be incorporated in the individual’s personality, and thereafter anything beyond or contrary to this method will strike the person as a frightening and more or less impossible proposition. The individual’s further development will then be prescribed or at least limited by this method which, although helpful in some respects, is often costly, and above all, alien. Most patients cannot tell us what causes their resentment, lifelessness, dependence, what the fault or the defect in them is…some can express it by phantasies about perfect partners, perfect harmony, untroubled contentment….Over and over they repeat that they feel let down, that nothing in the World can ever be worth while unless something hey were deprived of is restored to them. Sophisticated patients may express this something irretrievably lost or gone wrong as the male organ or the breast, usually felt to have magical qualities, and speak of male organ or breast, or castration fear. However, in nearly all cases this is coupled with an unquenchable and incontestable feeling that if the loss cannot be made good, the patient oneself will remain no go. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
It is always a dry season until you give way to the sorrowing of the heart. Only then will the drops of devotion come. Heart-felt sorrow opens many a door. Deep-down compulsion slams the door in your face every time. We may stumble onto happiness, but, remember, we are exiles and the World is alive with peril. You laugh at the defects of the World, but your own spiritual defects you shrug off. Yet hey bedevil your soul, and what do you do about it? You laugh. Nobody laughs in public these days, expect you. You laugh uproariously, but the joke is on you. It is the other way around. Your peccadillos are laughing at you when you should be weeping uncontrollably where no one can see. What is missing is the fear of God and a working conscious. If we do not feel the pain of reformation in our souls, Joy or Liberty cannot be true and good. Happy the self-actualized who can scatter one’s distractions and collect oneself into holy sorrowing of the heart! Happy is the self-actualized who can shield one’s snow-white conscience from bilious gray pigeons! That is to say, from the dropping of one’s own inordinate affections. Face it! When it comes to power, it takes a good habit to whip a bad habit. If you do not care a fig for the World, the World will not care a farthing for you. Do not inundate yourself with the affairs of the low and unlovely, and do not insinuate yourself into the affairs of the high and mighty. Remember, you are a member of a holy company dedicated to spiritual progress. Hence, keep a steely eye on yourself. When necessary, unbraid yourself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
If you cast a knowing wink at the World and the World does not return the wink, do not tear up, do not waste a single tear of your own. Give serious thought to this possibility. You may not have the right stuff to be a servant of God and live the devout life. After all, we do not have many consolations in this sort of life; at least as Flesh counts them. That is what our experience tells us. And rarer still, at least as the Soul counts them, are the Divine Consolations. There has go to be a reason, and it is sin. We just do not seek the sorrowing of the heart hard enough. The least we could is throw our vanities to the wind. Are you worth Divine Consolation? Face it, all you are worth is a bundle of snakes! When you are contrite to the point of perfection, the face your present to the World is never cheerful, always chary. The good person has more than enough to be sorrowful for, to weep for. No matter how you look at it—and your neighbour will confirm it—no one lives on this Earth without tribulation. The more you eye the condition of your own soul, the more openly you weep. The causes of just sorrow and internal contrition are our sins and the vice that lead to our sins. And is it not true that we spend so much time on Earthly grapplings that we have almost no time to give to celestial contemplations? Death is approaching more quickly than life is unfolding. Think about that now, and put more shoulder into your reformation of life. We are on the near side of death now, but on the far side await he pains of Hell or Purgatory. Weigh that in your heart, and maybe now you will be willing to undertake the laborious program of reform, readying yourself for the Final Rigour. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
Why is it that considerations like these do no hit the target? Why are we as blind to the blandishments banded about us? Are we as lazy and loutish as that? What spirit is left in that wretched body of yours? A whistle? A whimper? A whisper? Pray, therefore, humbly to the Lord that He give your spirit of contrition. Say as the Psalmist said (80.5), “With the bread of tears satisfy my hunger, Lord, and with a measure of tears satisfy my thirst.” The number of the predestined is certain, and can neither be increased nor diminished. The number of predestine is certain. Some have said that it was formally, but not materially certain; as if we were to say that it was certain that a hundred or a thousand would be saved; not however these or those individuals. However, this destroys the certainty of predestination; of which we spoke of above. Therefore we must say that to God the number of predestined is certain, not only formally, but also materially. It must, however, be observed that the number of the predestined is said to be certain to God, not by reason of His knowledge, because, that is to say, He knows how many will be saved (for in this way the number drops of rain and the sands of the sea are certain to God); but by reason of His deliberate choice and determination. For the further evidence of which we must remember that every agent intends to make something finite, as is clear from what has been said above when we treated of the infinite. Now whosoever intends some definite measure in one’s effect thinks out some definite number in the essential parts, which are by their very nature required for the perfection of the whole. For of those things which are required not principally, but only account of something else, one does not select any definite number “per se”; but one accepts and uses the in such numbers as are necessary on account of that other thing. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
For instance, a builder thinks out the definite measurements of a house, and also the definite number of rooms which one wishes to make in the house; and definite measurements of the walls and roof; one does not, however, select a definite number of stones, but accepts and uses just so many as are sufficient for the required measurements of the wall. So also must we consider concerning God in regard to the whole Universe, which is His effect. For He pre-ordained the measurements of the whole of the Universe, and what number would befit the essential parts of that Universe—that is to say, which have in some way been ordained in perpetuity; how many spheres, how many stars, how many elements, and how many species. Individuals, however, which undergo corruption, are no ordained as I were chiefly for the good of the Universe, but in a secondary way, inasmuch as the good of the species is preserved through them. Whence, although God knows the total number of individuals, the number of oxen, flies and such like, is not pre-ordained by God “per se”; but divine providence produces just so many as are sufficient for the preservation of the species. Now of all creatures the rational creature is chiefly ordained for the good of the Universe, being as much incorruptible; more especially those who attain to eternal happiness, since they more immediately reach the ultimate end. Whence the number of the predestination is certain to God; not only by way of knowledge, but also by way of a principal pre-ordination. It is not exactly the same thing in the cause of the number of the reprobate, who would seem o be pre-ordained by God for the good of the elect, in whose regard “all things work unto good” Romans 8.28. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Concerning the number of all the predestined, some say that so many human will be saved as Angels fell; some so many as there were Angels left; others, as many as the number of Angels created by God. It is, however, better to say that, “to God alone is known the number for whom is reserved eternal happiness [From the ‘secret’ prayer of the missal, “pro vivis et defunctis.’]” These words of Deuteronomy must be taken as applied to those who are marked out by God beforehand in respect to present righteousness. For there is increased and diminished, but not the number of the predestined. The reason of the quantity of any one part must be judged from the proportion of that part of the whole. Thus in God the reason why He has made so many stars, or so many species of things, or predestined so many, according to the proportion of the principal parts to the good of the whole Universe. The good that is proportionate to the common state of nature is to be found in the majority, and is wanting in the majority. Thus is clear that is the majority of humans have a sufficient knowledge for the guidance of life; and those who have not this knowledge are sad to be half-witted or foolish; but they who attain to a profound knowledge of things intelligible are a very small minority in respect to the rest. Since their eternal happiness, consisting in the vision of God, exceeds the common state of nature, and especially in so far as this is deprived of grace through the corruption of original sin, those who are saved are in the minority. In this especially, however, appears the mercy of God, that He has chosen some for that salvation, from which very many in accordance with the common course and tendency of nature fall short. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
All thinking keeps one’s awareness out of the Overself. That is why even thinking about the Overself merely produced another thought. Only in the case of the self-actualized, who has established oneself in the Overself, is thinking no barrier at all. In this case, thinking may coexist with the larger awareness. So it is not enough to be a good thinker; one also has to learn how to be a good non-thinker. Of course, the way to do this is through the practice of deep and meaningful prayer. Appetite has really become an artificial and abnormal thing, having taken the place of true hunger, which alone is natural. The one is a sign of bondage but the other, of freedom. It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life uncecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of one’s ethical standard. If the body is intolerant of particular treatments and allergic to particular foods, it should not be forced to accept them. When either faith healing or naturopathic treatment is too passive, when it refrains from timely co-operation with nature by the use of positive means, by they nontoxic medicines or essential operations, it becomes guilty of sacrificing the patient to its own narrowness. No healer’s treatment is always successful nor is the cure always permanent. Failures are many and relapses are common. Those who shout and splutter from evangelistic public platforms exhibit the ego’s arrogance, not the Overself’s quiet humility. They hold the view which conforms with their presuppositions, their inborn tendencies and governing prejudices, in short, with their little ego, not their impersonal higher Self. This is why there are so many contesting theories, why the body’s ill health may cause the mind to be governed by negative thoughts, why this conflict of authorities shows their worthlessness. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
All these cults and groups which acknowledge the power of mind over body but which leave out the acknowledgment of the body’s power over the mind, are out of balance and so out of truth to that extent. This statement may be a matter of arguable theory partisan adherents of either side, but it is a mater of tested fact with creative leaders who consciously exercise both powers. If mental and spiritual healing agents are also joined in, the physical cure will surely be accelerated and the physical therapy will surely be helped. In this way the individual limitations of the method of treatment being used will be overcome and each healing agent will contribute to bringing about a complete and successful result. It is foolish to believe that there is any particular healing method which has only to be applied for it to be universally and equally successful or that there is any particular human healer who has only to be visited for one to be cure. If we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed, something will have gone out of us as people; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the World, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural World and competent to belong in it. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
And a redeemer shall come to America and to those in Jacob who turn from transgression, saith the Lord. And as for Me, this is My covenant with them, saith the Lord: My spirit that is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth shall not depart out of your mouth, nor out of the mouth of your children nor your children’s children henceforth and forever. Thou art holy, O Thou that art enthroned upon the praises of America. And one called to another and said: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of His glory. [And they receive sanction one from the other, and say: Holy upon Earth, the works of His mighty power; Holy forever and to all eternity is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of the radiance of His glory.] And a wind lifted me up, and I heard behind me a mighty chorus proclaiming: Blessed be the glory of the Lord everywhere. [Then a wind lifted me up, and I heard behind me the mighty moving sound of those who uttered praises and said: Blessed be the glory of the Lord from the place of His abode.] The Lord shall reign for ever and ever. [Then Kingdom of the Lord is established forever and to all eternity.] The time has come to arouse the conscience of all those who sincerely the Good and the Right to their duty in the matter of harming innocent terrestrial beings and the environment and vehicles, a conscience which, if it could speak unperverted by racial habits, would emphatically repeat the Mosaic commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” These are cruelties practiced on objects to gain wealth and pleasures for others, sometimes clothes, entertainment and medicinal drugs. The human claim of necessity as a justification is a mistake one. Whether forged of metal or born of flesh, every form of life has one unquenchable thirst, the urge for freedom. Christianity is not something to be endured, but something to be treasured. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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Here Rests in Honoured Glory an American Soldier Known but to God!
Wars can be won or lost, but the battlefields waged inside a human’s soul, only love can heal those wounds. Without the right people in our life, we will never fulfill God’s purpose. Succeeding at any endeavour is dependent on the nature and quality of your relationships. The scriptures tells us the Lord “established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 101.80. The land was “redeemed” indeed by thousands killed and wounded along the way at Germantown, at Bemis Heights and Charleston, and so many other places in the American Revolution. The singers of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the Constitution were inspired from on high to do that work. An objective study of the delegates involved—their fears, their limitations, vested interests, and the like—makes it clear that they were not the sort of men we usually think of as prophets. Nonetheless they were inspired, and the Constitution they provided can be designated accurately as a divine document. However, even a divine constitution required something further; it demands a kind of people who will, by their very natures, receive and respect such a constitution and function well within the conditions it establishes. Where indeed shall we find such people today? I recall one. It was in a concentration camp I helped liberate during the American revolution in the 18th century. There were thousands of American prisoners held by the British during the war. Of all the prisoners held in captivity, 80 percent of them died. New York City was the main city were prisoners were held. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
As we blew the lock off the door and tried to assist the miserable and the painful inside, I was interrupted by a tap on my boot and found, wallowing in the mud, a Protestant minister. One of his first request was, “Soldier, do you have a flag?” Later when we retrieved one from the saddle on one of the horses, I gave it to him on a stretcher and with tears in his eyes he said, “Thank God, you came.” Again the Lord said, “Wherefore, this land is consecrated unto him who he shall bring. And if it so be that they shall serve him according to the commandments which he hath given, it shall be a land of liberty unto them,” reports 2 Nephi 1.7. As Christian’s then, we know why some people came to America and others did not. We have done as well as could be expected, and are richly blessed despite our shortcoming because the Lord has thus far held us in His hands and worked His purposes, His ultimate purposes, through us. During the war, as many of 8,000 soldiers were killed, approximately 20,000 died from illness or starvation. An estimated 25,000 were wounded. Nearly 30 percent of the army was killed, wounded or captured. Can you understand, this is what America is all about? Standing up for your freedom and honor and being willing to risk your life. You and I know, and you and I alone really know, the reason for this blessed and beautiful land. In a World where men have given up on this most vital question, we know the purpose of America. Can you understand the way God has worked?? And if you do, will you join me in this day to committing yourself to preach the message of the Lord’s glorious achievement in America? #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
This is a time when you and I can afford to be patriotic, in the best sense of that term. There is a reason to be proud that we live in an established land that has been conditioned by the Lord so that His gospel could be restored. The purpose of American was to provide a setting wherein that was possible. All else takes its power from that one great, central purpose. Anti-God is Anti-American. By striving to make our citizenry the righteous people the Lord required of us. And by telling the story of what the Lord has done for us is how we make a great church. “Oh beautiful for patriot dreams, that seed beyond the years. Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears. America! America! God shed His grace on thee. And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.” (Katherine Bates, “Oh Beautiful for Spacious Skies,” Hymns, no. 126.) May that be the song of our heart and prayer for fulfillment, I humbly pray as I bear witness to these truths and add my testimony that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, and that here sits his prophet, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Unless a civilization has some explanation for why things happen—even if its explanation is nine parts mystery to one part analysis—it cannot program lives effectively. People, in carrying out the imperatives of their culture, need some reassurance that their behaviour will produce results. And this implies some answer to the perennial why. Second Wave civilization came up with a theory so powerful it seemed sufficient to explain everything. A sock smashes into the surface of a pond. Ripples swiftly radiate out across the water. Why? What causes this event? Chances are that children of industrialism would say, “because someone threw it.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
An educated European gentleman of the twelfth or thirteenth century, in attempting to answer this question, would have had ideas remarkably different from our own. He probably would have relied on Aristotle and searched for a material cause, a formal cause, an efficient cause, and a final cause, no one of which would, by itself, have been sufficient to explain anything. A medieval Chinese sage might have spoken about the yin and yang, and the force-field of influences in which all phenomena were believed to occur. Second Wave civilization found its answer to the mysteries of causation in Newton’s spectacular discovery of the universal law of gravitation. For Newton, causes were “the forces impressed upon the bodies to generate motion.” The conventional example of Newtonian cause and effect is the billiard balls that strike one another and move in response to one another. This notion of change, which focused exclusively outside forces that are measurable and readily identifiable, was extremely powerful because it dovetailed perfectly with the new indust-real notions of linear space and time. Indeed, Newtonian or mechanistic causation, which came to be adopted as the industrial revolution spread over Europe, pulled indust-reality together into a hermetically sealed package. If the World consisted of separate particles—miniature billiard balls—then all causes arose from the interaction of these balls. One particle or atom struck another. The first was the cause of the movement of the next. That movement was the effect of the movement of the first. There was no action without motion in space, and no atom could be in more than one place at one time. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Suddenly a Universe that had seemed complex, cluttered, unpredictable, richly crowded, mysterious, and messy, began to look neat and tidy. Every phenomenon from the atom inside a human cell to the coldest star in the distant night sky could be understood as matter in motion, each particle activating the next, forcing it to move in an endless dance of existence. For the atheist this view provided an explanation of life in which, as Pierre-Simon Laplace later put it, the hypothesis of God was unnecessary. For the religious, however, it still left room for God, since He could be regarded as the Prime mover who used the cue stick to set the billiard balls in motion, then perhaps retired from the game. This metaphor for reality came like a shot of intellectual adrenalin into the emerging indust-real culture. Of the French Revolution, the Baron d’Holbach, exulted, “The Universe, that vast assemblage of everything that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation nothing but in immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects.” It is all there—all implied in that one short, triumphant statement: the Universe is an assembled reality, made of discrete parts put together into an “assemblage.” Matter can only be understood in terms of motion—id est, movement through space. Events occur in a [linear] succession, a parade of event moving down the line of time. Human passions like hatred, selfishness, or love, d’Holbach went on, could be compared to physical forces like repulsion, inertia, or traction, and a wise political state could manipulate them for the public good just as science could manipulate the physical World for the common good. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
It is precisely from this indust-real image of the Universe, from the assumptions buried within it, that some of the most potent of our personal, social, and political behaviour patterns have come. Buried within them was the implication that not only the cosmos and nature but society and people behaved according to certain fixed and predictable laws. Indeed, the greatest thinkers of the Second Wave were precisely those who most logically and forcefully argued the lawfulness of the Universe. Newton seemed to have discovered the laws that programmed the Heavens. Darwin had identified the laws that programmed social evolution. And Freud supposedly laid bare the laws that programmed the psyche. Others—scientists, engineers, social scientists, psychologist—pressed the search for still more, of different, laws. Second Wave civilization now has at its command a theory of causality that seemed miraculous in is power and wide applicability. Much that hitherto had seemed complex could be reduced to simple explanatory formulae. Nor were these laws or rules to be accepted simply because Newton or Marx or someone laid them down. They were subject to experiment and empirical test. They could be validated. Using them, we could build bridges, send radio waves into the sky, predict and retrodict biological change; we could manipulate the economy, organize political movements or machines, and even—so they claimed—foresee and shape the behaviour of the ultimate individual. All that was needed was to find the critical variable to explain any phenomenon. If and only if we could find the appropriate “billiard ball” and hit it from the best angle, we could accomplish anything. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
This new causality, combined with the new images of time, space, and matter, liberated much of the human race from the tyranny of ancient mumbo jumbo. It made possible triumphant achievements in science and technology, miracles of conceptualization and practical accomplishment. It challenged authoritarianism and liberated the mind from millennia of imprisonment. However, indust-reality also created its own new prison, an industrial mentality that derogated or ignored what it could not quantify, that frequently praised critical rigor and punished imagination, that reduced people to oversimplified protoplasmic units, that ultimately sought an engineering solution for any problem. Nor was indust-reality as morally neutral as it pretended to be. It was, as we have seen, the militant super-ideology of Second Wave civilization, the self-justifying source from which all the characteristic left-wing and right-wing ideologies of the industrial age sprang. Like any culture, Second Wave civilization produced distorting filters through which its people came to see themselves and the Universe. This package of ideas, images, assumptions—and the analogies that flowed from them—formed the most powerful cultural system in history. Indust-reality, the cultural face of industrialism, fitted the society it helped to construct. It helped create the society of big organizations, big cities, centralized bureaucracies, and the all-pervasive marketplace, whether capitalist or socialist. It dovetailed perfectly with new energy systems, family systems, technological systems, economic systems, political and value systems that together formed the civilization of the Second Wave. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
It is that entire civilization taken together, along with its institutions, technologies, and its culture, that is now disintegrating under an avalanche of change as the Third Wave, in its turn, surges across the planet. We live in the final, irretrievable crisis of industrialism. And as the industrial age passes into history, a new age is born. The myth of suburbia, like all myths, contained elements of fact. That the new suburbs were architecturally similar was beyond dispute. However, the claim commonly made that this conformity also included all cultural tastes, child-rearing practices, levels of social activity, and patterns of neighbouring carried the argument to caricature. While the image of compulsive conformity and socialization was caricature, it is true that people in the suburbs were more socially homogeneous and more likely to engage in social interaction. There was general agreement that there were some differences, but their consequences were minimal. Nor was there any consensus on why, in suburbs, there was greater involvement with neighbours. Part of the difference, doubtlessly, can be explained by the presence of young children and higher family incomes, but even with these variables taken into account, differences remain. The more localized in nature of suburban friendship networks might simply reflect the relative isolation of the suburb and the greater difficulty of maintaining ties with those more distant. It also was suggested that suburbanites self-select for personality traits favouring sociability. In this view those who opt for the suburbs have chosen a lifestyle emphasizes “familism” over alternatives such as “careerism” and “consumership.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
However, the data do not appear to support this explanation. Research does suggest that the suburban neighbourhood does foster somewhat greater political participation. Suburbanites as a group tend to be somewhat more affluent than city dwellers and desire a more familistic lifestyle. It appears that those living in suburbs have some minor differences in tastes from city dwellers, for example, preferring gardening and rating cultural affairs lower. However, there is no evidence that suburban living changes tastes. Rather, those who value nature tend to gravitate toward suburbs, just as those who prefer easy access to a full cultural life tend to prefer the city. There is no evidence that suburbanites make less use of museums, concert, and art galleries than do otherwise equivalent city dwellers. Expressways allow suburbanites to get to many events as fast as those living in outer-city neighbourhoods. In recent years popular culture, such as first-run movies or sports events, have occurred outside the central city. For example, the Detroit Pistons’ basketball stadium is outside Detroit, and the New York Giants play their football in New Jersey. Needless to say, postwar suburbanites did not view themselves as living lives devoid of culture or as being excessively conforming, hyperactive joiners. They already knew what researcher such as Bennett Berger and Herbert Gans would confirm. That is, the new suburbanites had not given up their individuality, political affiliation, ethnic identity, or religious heritage as they moved houses. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
For good or ill, studies from the era of the 1950s achieved widespread popular as well as professional attention. The Organization Man was a widely read and discussed best-seller. It and its ilk helped set out contemporary view of suburbia suffered from sone serious limitations. One of the most obvious problems was rooted in the authors having preset expectations. Additionally, questions can be asked about how and why the various study sites were chosen. Rather than being “typical” suburbs, it is clear today that the sites were chosen precisely because hey were “interesting.” That is, they were selected because they were in some respects atypical, not because they were just like everyplace else. This approach to selection of a community may lead to more interesting reading, but it by definition limits generalization. The suburbs written about, for example, were almost invariably new, large-scale developments sprouting at the urban periphery. Little or no attention was paid to other types of suburbs, such as industrial suburbs, working-class suburbs, or even old established WASP suburbs. The focus of the studies was on the new middle-class subdivisions built to house young ex-GIs, their wives, and their children. Although it was not scientifically, or even logically, valid to generalize from these new suburbs to all suburbs, this was commonly done. Additionally, many of the studies fell into the so-called ecological fallacy of trying to generalize from the characteristics of an area to the characteristics of all individuals who live in that area. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Furthermore, their observations of supposedly typical suburban lifestyles were based on a single look at a new suburb immediately following the first wave of settlement. We know that a mature community viewed ten or twenty years later shows a different pattern. For example, the supposed social ability of postwar suburbia can be attributed in good part to that fact that because of the limited housing type in each subdevelopment, most of the new inmovers were approximately the same age, had the same aged children, and had the common experience of all moving into similar new houses at the same time. Most of the men also shared common experience of military service. If there was not a high degree of social interaction under such circumstances, it would be unusual. However, when most of life is frightening, and I usually feel inadequate, I may decide that being an onlooker is safer than being a doer: it is less obtrusive and hence less likely to attract hostile notice in my direction. When watching “I” is out of touch with emotions, feelings, and impulses, I develop something like Fairbairn’s Central Ego, one of whose functions is to keep me out of situations so painful that I cannot cope. Being wounded and terrified, people may withdraw into themselves in order to avoid further hurt. The danger is that they will withdraw so far that they will be left totally bereft, and get so far out of touch with their needs and feelings that they get no signals from them: it appears to such people that they have no needs—they do not feel anything. Paradoxically that may be a terrible feeling! #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The memory of having had feelings once, the capacity for which seems now lost, can fill a person with distress and longing. And in the present, I may want to keep in touch with the signals which come to me, yet be afraid of being overwhelmed by them if I do not attend to them. I may oscillate in and out of my feelings because I do not have the energy or strength to contain them at a practical level. There are other examples of the kind of people, people to whom messages from the World of others come only in very shadowy form, people not much in touch with what happens in the World of living-rooms, streets, or media. At first sight, this may not be obvious. However, slowly we realize that we are listening to someone who is not talking about people as we know them, in the round, but about “them.” We are listening to someone who can perceive only a few highly selected aspects of the World of people and things. “They,” the others, are not realistically perceived, but are experienced only in terms of their imagined capacity to assist, threaten, or frustrate. Sometimes, “they” are selectively perceived in such a way that the speaker can be both in touch with feelings, and yet able to keep them remote. “Do not be silly” or “Do not be so depressing” are examples of people speaking repressively to another person, while perhaps at the same time also disowning their own unacceptable notions. “He is out for what he can get” or “She sets her sights too high” may be said principally to enable the speaker to keep his or her own ideas isolated and disowned. Such people sometimes give us the impression that we and others are no experienced as independent people who existed before they walked into the room and who will continue to exist after they are out of sight; we are known only as experiences which must be controlled and kept away from contact with the self-image. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
“Patient: I am very depressed. I had just been sitting and could not get out of the chair. There seems no purpose anywhere: the future is blank. I am very bored and want to change but I feel stuck…
Therapist: Your solution is to damp everything down, do not feel anything, give up all real relationships to people at an emotional level and just ‘do things’ in a meaningless way, like a robot.
Patient: Yes, I felt I did not care, did not register anything. Then I felt alarmed, this was dangerous. If I had not made myself do something, I would just have sat, not bothered, not interested.
Therapist: That is your reaction in analysis to me. Do not be influenced, do not be moved, do not be lured into reacting to me.
Patient: If I were moved at all, I would feel very annoyed with you. I hate and detest you for making me feel like this. The more I am inclined to be drawn to you, the more I feel a fool, undermined.”
Keep in mind that God is restoring to you the years the enemy devoured. And it may not be good to act like a robot, to not have feeling. It could cause you to have an accident. I was doing that one day, while ironing a pillow case and burned it because I was not in touch with what I was doing. It is always import to feel. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
How long with humankind have to go before they realize the only solution to self-annihilation is trust? Cut off from the external World and living in my own phantasy, I cannot feel others, for they are not real to me. My therapist and the other people around me are more than stick figures or balloons which enable me to act according to the phantasies in my head which do seem real to me, regardless of if they open their doors. I can imagine some of them to be so powerful that I must keep an eye on them and manipulate the to keep things smooth for myself, even if they are not knocking on my doors. Or I may act compliant and behave nicely to them because I imagine that is what they want, and I imagine that I must do what they say because they are always right and may feel threatened otherwise. Or I may imagine them as needing my consideration and concern so they will not take their insecurities out of my vehicle, causing me pain and costing me thousands upon thousands of dollars. What I fear to do is to know them as they are, to “discover” them so they do not try to poison me. So I am left with the choice of either feeling well but unreal, or feeling real but terrible and wondering if they are trying to set me up in a clandestine manner. I may veer between these two in an attempt to get some relief from each in turn. Bad relationships may be better than none. Even though they may wish you harm and frustrate, and have no regard for your life, it is hard to do without other people altogether, but it may be a way to say alive. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Yet, I may cling compulsively (and to others eyes tiresomely) to a loved person or valued idea, in order to keep unconscious my feelings about some of their more hateful aspects. Worse, I may cling to a relationship with an unloving or hating or unloved person, in order to keep at bay the sense of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and futility which would result from giving them up and being without anyone at all. Some people may be able to keep anxieties at bay by relating mainly to causes and ideas, and interacting with other people mainly through these. “If I stop believing in what holds me together and gives meaning to my life, only constant and unremitting self-monitoring will keep me from falling apart. I shall believe in psycho-analysis or monetarism or Adam and the Ants—they make life work living.” Somewhat better off are those people who can relate to others more directly, provided everyone’s duties and roles are carefully and minutely defined. They relate to others mainly in the meticulous execution of tasks, not risking more unpredictable and spontaneous contacts. Then there are people who prefer some kind of in/out compromise. However weakened they may be by the continual advance and retreat, it is better than nothing. Yet others may be able to make relationships, albeit tainted by fear and suspicion because they cannot help feeling that people are dangerous and easily cruel or mean. It is hard to do without people and relationships. When I fear and avoid them, something happens to myself, the self which needs to be attached to and in touch with others. Void and emptiness threaten me. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
My very identity feels as though it is disintegrating—it lacks boundaries where I should be in touch with others. I mobilize a host of defences. I look depressed, I feel depressed. However, this depression may be what I hold on to as a defence against feeling overwhelmingly anxious. And indeed, the anxieties which a person is willing to know about may be a cover to conceal anxieties about falling apart or ceasing to be a person at all. The defences against falling apart may be strong enough to be called False Selves; they may be the only parts of the personality that a terrified person dare show. One of the attractive things about this insistence on a person’s defences, is we do not speak of the False Self in condemnatory terms; we see it as a necessary defensive organization, a survival kit, a caretake self, the means by which a threatened person has managed to survive. It is worth reminding oneself, when exasperated by someone who acts flighty, irresponsible, dishonest, evasive, or snooty, that these are all defensive plays. A frightened person may make a show of anger as a way of hiding weak, scared feelings. It is easy for others to see such a person as an angry person (and to attempt a therapy on the basis of the hidden anger and the guilt which goes with it—after all, hidden anger and guilt form par of the psychoneurotic personality which was the first to be analysed and restored to relative well-being by Dr. Freud nearly a hundred years ago). However, anger and hidden guilt are not at the root of all distress, and it is possible to use the appearance of hidden anger as a defence against even ore unacceptable feelings. Our culture has a preference for these “strong” feelings. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In a word, the core of psychological distress is not guilt but fear. Guilt is itself a form of fear, but it arises at he stage when the child is becoming socialized and capable of realizing the effect of actions on other person, and the nature of their reactions of anger and condemnation. The individual feels ashamed, sad and frightened to find that one has hurt those one loves and needs. There are much more primitive fears than that, fears not the effect of our strong and dangerous needs and impulses, but of our infantile weakness, littleness, and helplessness in the face of an environment which either fails to give the support we needed as infants or else was positively threatening. Human beings all prefer to be bad and strong rather than weak. The diagnosis of guilt allows us to feel that the course of our troubles with ourselves and others is possession of mighty and powerful instinctive forces in our make-up, which take a great deal of controlling and civilizing. The philosophies of Nietzsche and Machiavelli, and the “power politics” of the present age, all make it plain that human beings feel at least a secret and often openly admitted admiration for the ruthless strong human, however bad one’s ideas and actions may be. In our competitive New World culture (including communism which is every bit as competitive as capitalism) contempt is felt for weakness. We have always known that sympathetic care for the weak and suffering, fostered by Christianity, had to fight its way forwards, and survive on the basis of much compromise; s in the often cited cases of Victorian capitalist who made fortunes by the most ruthless business methods on the one hand, and endowed churched, charities and hospitals on the other. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The main stream of the World’s active life has been carried on in the tradition of the struggle for power in which the weakest go to the wall. The superman is the criminal who has the courage to fight and does not mind hurting other people. The Christian with one’s slave-morality of self-sacrifice to save others is weak and gets crucified. A diagnosis which traced psychological troubles to our innate strength supports our self-respect and is what is called today an ego-booster. A diagnosis which traces our troubles to deep-seated fears and feelings of weakness in the face of life has always been unacceptable. To protect against occurrences like these, we have to take some positive steps. If we do not, they will continue to trip us up. Scrutinize our Externals and Internals, that is what we have to do, and make whatever realignments are necessary. Why? Because properly pave, both speed the journey toward perfection. You cannot keep yourself in a continuous state of recollection in the monastic life. You know that already, but know also that recollect you must. When? Not les than once a day. Morning or evening? In the morning make a plan; in the evening, check how you did, that is to say, what and how you did in word, deed, and thought. Why? More often than you would like to thin, you have offended God and neighbour in one manner or another. No droopy drawers here! Cinch up that cinture! Be a self-actualized being and face the diabolical onslaught head on! That is what St. Paul exhorted the Ephesians to d (6.11-17). Rein in your gluttony, and you will find it easier to bridle every others inclination of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Never drop your guard. Read or write or pray or meditate, but whatever you do, busy yourself at all time with some form of labour for the community. When it comes to corporal austerities, forget what everybody else does. Use your head. Sting, do not wound. No more. No less. Personal prayers inside the walls should not be paraded around outside the walls. The reason for that is simple. When you pray by yourself, you can hurt only yourself; that is to say, no damage is done to others. As for your own spiritual life, do not become a pig about it, too lazy to come to chapel, yet strong enough to wallow through your own peculiosities. The community’s regular spiritual exercise, participate in them wholeheartedly and single-mindedly. Beyond that—and God forbid there is any time left over!—you can pray yourselves silly. Let devotion be your guide. All spiritual exercise are suitable for all self-actualized. Sadly, not all these exercises are equally profitable to each self-actualized. Happily, no two self-actualized have the same taste. As the year passes, the many varietals of spiritual exercise are always welcomed by a monastic community. Some are good on feasts; others, no ferials. Temptation requires one sort; peace and quiet, quite another. And so on, from the times of spiritual sadness, when the dry tears sting, to the sweet weepiness of True Spiritual Joy. Any say is a hard day to renew our spiritual exercises, but when the principal feast days roll around, it all seems so easy. And, only if the are asked, the Saints, they are waiting to help; they only pretend to be hard of hearing. From one feast day to the next, we ought o make resolutions as if they will be our last. However, how can we do this? We could imagine we are about to take wing from this World to a perch in the next. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
And so we should make these times devout times, preparing ourselves carefully, passing our time prayerfully, and guarding our every observance of the Holy Rule more strictly. What is the rush? In no time we will be brough before the Final Bar, attempting to cash in on our life of spiritual labour. If we mistook the time of departure, let us put the blame on ourselves. From our point of view, we were not all that well enough prepared; from God’s point of view, we are not yet ready for glory. St. Paul described that state in his Letter to the Romans (8.18). As for the next date of departure, who knows? Whenever it is, let us strive to prepare better for the trip out there. “Blessed is the servant,” wrote the Evangelist Luke (12.37, 42), “who, when his Lord came, was found awake. Amen I say to you, all God’s goods will be put under his servant’s watchful eye.” Llanda Villa, Beautiful Victorian. Perfect Grand Queen Anne Victorian Manion by the last Bay in the World. None more beautiful. Today we kneel at Thy feet and cruse the humans who have misused you. Dear Lord in the Shining Heaven, please bless us with insight in this hour of grief, that from the depths of suffering may come a deepened sympathy for all who are bereaved, that we may feel the heart-break of our fellow humans and spirits and find our strength in helping them. Heartened by this hymn of praise to Thee, we bear our sorrow with trustful hearts, and knowing Thou art near, shall not despair. With faith in Thine eternal wisdom, we who mourn, rise to sanctify Thy name. A wise system of healing would coordinate physical and psychological, artificial and natural, dietary and spiritual treatments, using some or all of them as a means to the end—cure. However, as the spiritual is the supreme therapeutic agent—if it can be touched—it will always be the one last resort for the desperate and chronic sufferers when all other agents have had to accept defeat. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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The Earth Dries Up and Withers, the World Languishes and Withers!
They say what you send around, comes around. Perhaps that is true, even if it takes a thousand years. Everyone is born. Everyone will die. This is the short summary of life. Although it is accurate, the story certainly leaves out a lot, does it not? How might we develop a fuller picture of what happens during a lifetime? Perhaps we can begin by studying interesting lives. We are all affected by the same universal principles that guide human development. Each of us will face problems on the path to healthy development. Some obstacles, such as learning to walk of finding a personal identity, are universal. Others are unusual or specialized. The challenges of development extend far beyond childhood and into old age. There really is no such thing as a “typical person” or a “typical life.” Nevertheless, broad similarities can be found in the life stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood, and old age. Each stage confronts a person with new developmental tasks that must be mastered for optimal development. The spread of industrialism was dependent upon the synchronization of human behaviour with the rhythms of the machines. Synchronization was one of the guiding principles of Second Wave civilization, and everywhere the people of industrialism appeared to outsiders to be time-obsessed, always glancing nervously as their watches. To bring about this time-consciousness and achieve synchronization, however, people’s basic assumptions about time—their mental images of time—had to be transformed. A new “software of time” was needed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Agricultural populations, needing to know when to plant and when to harvest, developed remarkable precision in the measurement of long spans of time. However, because they did not require close synchronization of human labour, peasant peoples seldom developed precise units for measuring short spans. They typically divided time not into fixed units, like hours or minutes, but into loose, imprecise chunks representing the length of time needed to perform some homely task. A farmer might refer to an interval as “a cow milking time.” In Madagascar, an accepted unit of time was called “a rice cooking”; a moment was known as “the frying of a locust.” Englishmen spoke of a “pater noster wyle”—the time needed for a prayer—or, more earthily, of a “pissing while.” Similarly, because there was little exchange between one community or village and the next, and because work did not require it, the units in which time was mentally packaged varied from place to place and season to season. In medieval northern Europe, for example, daylight was divided into equal hours. However, since the interval between dawn and sunset varied from day to day, an “hour” in December was shorter than an “hour” in March or June. Instead of vague intervals like a pater noster wyle, industrial societies needed extremely precise units like hour, minute, or second. And these units had to be standardized, interchangeable from one season or community to the next. Today the entire World is neatly divided into time zones. We speak of “standard” time. Pilots all over the globe refer back to “Zulu” time—id est, Greenwich Mean Time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
By international convention Greenwich, England, became the point from which all time differences would be measured. Periodically, in unison, as though motivated by a single will, millions of people set their clocks back or forward an hour, and whatever our inner, subjective sense of things may tell us when time is dragging, or conversely when it seems to be whizzing by, and hour is now a single interchangeable, standardized hour. Second Wave civilization did more than cut time up into more precise and standard chunks. It also placed these chunks in a straight line that extended indefinitely back into the past and forward into the future. It made time linear. Indeed, the assumption that time is linelike is so deeply embedded in our thoughts that it is hard for those of us raised in Second Wave societies to conceive of any alternative. Yet many preindustrial societies, and some First Wave societies even today, see time as a circle, not a straight line. From the Mayas to the Buddhists and the Hindus, time was circular and repetitive, history repeating itself endlessly, lives perhaps reliving themselves through reincarnation. The idea that time was like a great circle is fond in the Hindu concept of recurrent kalpas, each one four thousand million years long, each representing but a single Brahma day beginning with re-creation, ending in dissolution, and beginning again. The notion of circular time is found in Plato and Aristotle, one of whose students, Eudemus, pictured himself living through the same moment again and again as the cycle repeated itself. It was taught by Pythagoras. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
In Time and Eastern Man, Joseph Needham tells us that “For the Indo-Hellenic…time is cyclical and eternal.” Moreover, while in China the idea of linear time dominated, according to Needham, “Cyclical time was certainly prominent among the early Taoist speculative philosophers.” In Europe, too, in the centuries preceding industrialization, these alternative views of time coexisted. “Throughout the whole medieval period,” writes mathematician G. J. Whitrow, “the cyclic and linear concepts of time were in conflict. The linear concept was fostered by the mercantile class and the rise of a money economy. For as long as power was concentrated in the ownership of land, time was felt to be plentiful and was associated with the unchanging cycle of soil.” As the Second Wave gathered force this ago-old conflict was settled: liner time triumphed. Linear time became the dominant view in every industrial society, East or West. Time came to be seen as a highway unrolling from a distant past through the present toward the future, and this conception of time, alien to billions of humans who lived before industrial civilization, became the basis of all economic suit of IBM, the Japanese Economic Planning Agency, or the Soviet Academy. It is worth noting, however, that linear time was a precondition for indust-real views of evolution and progress. Liner time made evolution and progress plausible. For if time were circular instead of linelike, if events doubled back on themselves instead of moving in a single direction, it would mean that history repeated itself and the evolution and progress were no more than illusions—shadows on the wall of time. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
Synchronization Standardization. Linearization. They affected the root assumption of civilization and they brought massive changes in the way ordinary people handled time in their loves. However, if time itself was transformed, space, too, had to be repackaged to fit into the new indust-reality. Then suddenly in the 1950s, urban-based intellectual discovered the suburbs. And what they discovered, to their horror, was an aesthetic and social dreamland filled with beautiful, new tract housing with big emerald green lawns, trees, bushes, and flowers, station wagons, sports cars and sedans, and organization men, housewives, and children. However, attention was riveted almost exclusively on the supposed negative consequences of city-oriented intellectuals, particularly those living in New York City, was that the postwar suburbs were an unmitigated aesthetic and social disaster. Suburbia was equated with the emergence of a popular mass culture dominated by the mass media. The neatness and repetitiveness of popular taste was blamed on the suburbs. They became a scapegoat for all that the cosmopolitan critics disliked about modern life. Often, this was accompanied with glorification of the past. In The City History Lewis Mumford bemoaned the growth of middle-class suburbs: “While the suburbs served only a favored minority, it neither spoiled the countryside nor threatened the city. But now that the drift to the outer ring has become a mass movement, it tends to destroy both environments without producing anything but a dreary substitute, devoid of form and even more devoid of the original suburban values.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
Further this mass exodus to suburbia was resulting in: “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, in uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated food, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold manufacture in the central metropolis (Mumford, 1961, p. 486). Mr. Mumford, like other cosmopolitan critics, seemed particularly offended that suburbia was developing not as planned communities for those of taste, but as mass suburbanization for the common man. Often, as in the above quotation, the characteristics of the housing and the characteristics of the suburban residents were directly linked. And both were clearly found wanting. The critics embraced an extreme form of environmental determinism in which the characteristics of the area determined the character of the inhabitants. According to a 1964 New York Times Magazine article by elitist Ada Louise Huxtable, the long-time New York Times architecture critic, “It is a shocking fact that more than 90 percent of builders’ homes are not designed by architects…and the consequent damage “is social, cultural, psychological, and emotional, as well as aesthetic” (Ada Louise Huxtable, “Clusters Instead of Slurbs,” New York Times Magazine, February 9, 1964, pp. 37-44). #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
Suburbia was thought by some to be a dismal place where mediocrity ruled and about which no intellectual could say anything favourable—even if they lived in one. The same biased criticism of popular tastes and cultural uniformity was delivered with far more humour in Malvina Reynolds’s folksong “Little Boxes.” Sung for decades by Pete Seeger to the point where it has become an American classic, the opening lines to the lyrics are: “Little Boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. There’s a green one and pink one and a blue one and a yellow one and they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.” This point that the little boxes and the people who lived in them are all the same was a core belief of the city-based intellectual critics of suburbs. It was a given that suburbs bred conformity. Ironically, the children born in the little boxes would spawn the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. It was the children of the suburbs who celebrated at Woodstock and Coachella. It should also be noted that this pattern of urban cities detailing the ills of suburbia is not a phenomenon common only to earlier decades. Even in 1993, in The New York Times, one could find a feature article bemoaning the isolation and lack of intellectual and cultural activities in suburbia, As stated in the article, “escapees from Manhattan have found that along with the gains have come unexpected nuisances, even deep feelings of loss. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
“And what is more, the unpleasant surprises are often the flip side of precisely the attractions that drew them to the suburbs in the first place. The emigres discover they can walk virtually anywhere at night without fear. But where to walk? So few places worth walking are open after dark…Some discover that at times their snug home on its separate lot, without a doorman downstairs or neighbor above and below, makes them feel lonely and more vulnerable, not more secure. And when pipes leak and the heat shuts off, they learn that the joys of the suburbs do not include supers” (Joseph Berger, “Emigres in Suburbs Find Life’s Flip Side,” New York Times, January 24, 1993, Metro p.30). Sounds a lot like satire. Nonetheless, there are significant differences between contemporary articles, such as that quoted above, and the typical piece written during earlier decades. While both might decry the absences of all-night take-out, current articles acknowledge that in addition to the opera, the city also has serious problems, such as old buildings with pest, noise, foul smells, a high density of unfriendly people packed into one place, lack of privacy and family values, political tensions are more visible, there are issues with parking and traffic, poor air quality, the menace of muggers and aggressive panhandlers. Contemporary laments are also less likely to be angry diatribes and more likely to be done tongue-in-cheek, with humour. Finally, the authors of contemporary suburban criticisms are more likely to be themselves suburbanites. They miss the city, but they, like most Americans having the choice, have chosen to live elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
The writer of the New York Times piece, for example, had moved to Westchester from the West Side of Manhattan some twenty months earlier. Envy impedes our spiritual growth and harms our relationship with others. Yet with hard work and the Lord’s help, it can be overcome. Most of us will experience envy at one time or another. The danger comes when we remain unaware of our envy or do not handle it appropriately; then it has the potential to harm us and may cause us to think or act badly toward others. “For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work,” reports James 3.16. However, by eliminating envy, we can improve our relationships with others and our view of ourselves. When we realize we are not competing with others, we can then rejoice in their accomplishments. The practice of comparing ourselves to others is usually at the root of envy. It causes us to feel that we are not good enough and that in order to be acceptable we have to achieve more, acquire more, or in other ways appear to be “better” than others. It occurs when we do not value ourselves sufficiently as children of God and consequently feel we have to prove our worth by “doing” or “having.” Envy is a form of pride. Pride can create enmity, or hatred, which separates us from our fellow humans. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. Part of the reason envy can be so difficult to recognize in ourselves is that it often disguises itself in other feelings and behaviours. One disguise envy wears is the tendency to criticize. Another is the desire to act in a way that will provoke envy in others. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
The good news is, once we unmask envy and begin to eliminate it, we can begin to feel much better about ourselves and others around us. Like layers of accumulated paint, envy covers our true worth, making it difficult to see ourselves accurately and change our beliefs so that we can feel better about ourselves. There are at least five reason why we need to be concerned about envy in ourselves: it blocks us from growing spiritually, it keeps us from having pure motives, it creates an “us against them” mentality, it can make us feel negative toward others, and a desire to be envied can cause others to feel negative toward us. When we grow up feeling that we are not loved for who we are and instead are criticized or are valued for how we compare to others, we can develop the habit of looking outside ourselves to feel good. People who try to pump up their self-worth by gaining the admiration of others for their thought or knowledge in reality may be suffering from a lack of understanding of their worth, and their true relation to God. However, as children of our Heavenly Father, each of us has inherent worth and has been endowed with divine potential. “We are the children of God,” the Apostle Paul declared, “and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ,” reports Romans 8.16-17. Many of us have inner standards of excellence and perfection that are hard or even impossible to meet, often causing emotional pain. We may have a hard time admitting mistake and living with imperfections. If not careful, we can end up envious of those who seem to achieve more or seem more comfortable being imperfect. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
It was once written “To oneself be true.” But who do we know who we are? One must learn to focus one’s assertive aggressive and hostile feelings, so that these do no suffuse too many inappropriate parts of oneself or one’s World. Learn to become less hostile and become more approachable so that better contact can be obtained from those you know and work with. This will allow anxiety to diminish. Self-acceptance is also useful in attacking the inner voices which persecuted oneself at times, denying one right to life and happiness. Having established the right to live, and a channel through which love and care can reach one, one will began to take an interest in the wide and varied World of other people and things. Having established the rudiment of self, mental illness can come to an end and one can be engaged in intellectual activity, accomplishing good work with success and ease. One may not only remain cured, without any recurrences of pathology, but one’s personality may continue to develop and may gain in strength. The basic anxiety-producing conflicts in human beings are no over the “gratification of desires” but over the frightening struggle to maintain themselves in existence at all as genuine individual persons. Of course guilt is a real experience and must be accepted, and there is no therapeutic result unless feelings of guilt are cleared up, but guilt is no at the core of psychological distress. Pathological guilt is a struggle to maintain object-relations, a defence against disintegration, and is a state of mind that is preferred to being undermined by irresistible fears. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The core of psychological distress is simply elementary fear, however much it gets transformed into guilt: fear carrying with it the feeling of weakness and inability to cope with life, fear possessing the psyche to such an extent that “ego-experience” cannot get started. People are dependent on the opportunities which the environment offers; one’s potentialities flourish best in an environment that understands, supports, and encourages individual growth. If the environment is unsatisfactory, development may be distorted or arrested. The True Self is as yet only potential; it will not be realized in unfavourable circumstances. Vulnerability to separation-anxiety exists when the human being is not ego-related. Ego-relatedness allows the individual to be protected by the presence of others without being impinged on by them. Given this, the vulnerable individual is able to develop in one’s individual way, without fear either of devastating loneliness or of devastating damage. People can begin to experience separateness from others, without losing one’s sense of security. The sense of belonging, of being securely in touch, as it grows in an individual by virtue of having relationships that are reliable, becomes an established property of one’s own psyche. When people feel totally secure and invulnerable, they gain proof that their trust is justified by finding they have experienced stable relationships in life. People who have not had enough of this good experience are excessively vulnerable to even the slightest loss of support. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Their chronic overdependence is a genuine compulsion which they cannot evade by effort, will-power, or intellectual understanding. Their only hope is to find someone who can understand them and help them grow out of it. That is what psychotherapy is. The need is for a relationship in which people can experience being securely held while they venture to be in touch with thoughts, feelings, or parts of the self from which fear has long kept them estranged. “Love made angry” is what happens when you want love from a person who is not giving it—you become angry with them in an attempt to force the to give what you want. This is called “coercive anger.” Obviously, at some point this anger must lead to worry hat your anger will drive away the very person you need, and for some this will lead on to guilt at having hurt the feelings of someone they care about. Not getting what you want, worrying about losing a loved person, having to live without love and mutual concern, makes you depressed as well as angry. One the bright side, however, you may in your anger turn to another person in the hope that they will love you better and so you have another chance. “Love made hungry” describes the view of the schizoid position. When you cannot get what you want from the person you love and need, it may be that instead of getting angry you simply feel more and more needy, with an ever stronger craving to get total possession of the loved person, to ensure that you will never be left wanting. However, then you may be visited by the terrible fear that your love has become so overwhelming and devouring that it will destroy your loved one, and that then there will be nothing left of them. And indeed, this can happen. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
The depression which comes from this craving brings aloofness with it: you withdraw from loving because loving destroys those you love. In this case, there is no second chance, because if that is what you believe to be the nature of love and this is what you do, you dare not love anyone for fear that it will lead to the destruction either of them or of you. The love-made-angry depressed person looks on one’s loved one as a hateful denier (a Rejecting Object), while the love-made-hungry schizoid person sees one’s beloved as a desirable deserter (an Exciting Frustrating Object) never to be fully possessed. When people reaching out and finding nothing there, the individual’s excitement about life meets with no response in the World of other people and things, so that one must turn back on oneself and be satisfied with one’s phantasies of what one wants, ceasing to look for satisfaction in a World devoid of interest. (In psycho-analytic language, cathexis is withdrawn from the object-World.) This sense of emptiness and void may be experienced where there would normally be connection with people and things, so that the individual feels one has nothing to hang on to and lacks any sense of secure attachment. In this case, one experiences their loved one’s as void and emptiness. At other times, void and emptiness may be experienced as coming from the self, as a frequent experience of hunger, for instance—the individual experiencing oneself as hungry-empty-needy-urgent-demanding-greedy-tearing-emptying in relation to their loved ones. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Every human must confront the monster within oneself, if one is ever to find peace without. There is always a two-endednes of relationships. This is not the case when one end of the relationship is experienced as not there: the experience that “the World is empty and des not hold anything for me” may be equivalent to “I am empty and cannot hold anything or anyone securely. Similarly “I am empty and will destroy, swallow, overwhelm the World” may be experienced as indistinguishable from “The World is empty and will overwhelm, destroy, swallow me.” People may experience all these possibilities, either simultaneously or in mood-swings up and down consecutively, however mutually contradictory they may seem to common sense (or rather to the “Central Ego”). Some people dread entering personal relationships which demand deep and genuine feeling on both sides. Such people may have felt compelled to withdraw heir consciousness into a relatively small area because, although their need for love is as great as anyone’s, it operates at the emotional level of absolute infantile dependence filled with need and greed and the terror of abandonment. At that level, dimly aware of their enormous need, they feel faced with risk of total loss and destruction, both of themselves and of those they love. It is the form their own love has taken and they have little knowledge of any other. Loving, therefore, seems to present them with a terrifying choice, in which both alternatives lead to loss and destruction for someone. If they let themselves be loved, that means they must let themselves be swallowed up and taken over: they must be totally compliant and cease to be an individual. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
If they let themselves love other people, this means that they themselves will inevitably take them over, insisting on their total compliance and swallowing them whole. Then the loved ones will disappear as real people. In this plight, some people try to comprise. This is called the in/out programme. Driven by their need to love and be with others, they go into a relationship but at once feel driven out again by their fear of exhausting the person they love with the demands they want to make on them, or by their fear of losing themselves through overdependence and compliance. Others escape this painful oscillation by withdrawing from feelings and relationships altogether. They then feel a dreadful meaningless emptiness. Their consciousness is confirmed to the unfeeling Central Ego, which relates only to idealized perfectly good and perfectly bad “inner objects.” Such uncomplicated phantasy-figures are all that they (selectively) perceive of all that the varied World of people and things has to offer. Libidinal relationships are quite disowned, though anti-libidinal ones may be used to keep libidinal strivings down. We can imagine spouses who feel like this being emotionless and unresponsive when their loved one’s tries to relate to them. We can imagine the dependent loved one’ greed for love and their fear of needing it. We can imagine the dependent loved one summoning up all their strength, in turn, to avoid evidence of feeling, and maturing, and becoming independent or single or having to be more of a provider in life. Out of experience in the World, from infancy onward, we form schema—ways of organizing and interpreting reality. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Lacking a schema to interpret ambiguous aspects of life, one probably does not form rational ideas about things they do not understand. As one continues to focus on reality, their mind struggles to make sense out of the apparent chaos. With patience one eventually imposes order, by seeing a reality that makes sense to them. Note, that once your mind forms a social construction of reality it controls your perception—so much so that it becomes virtually impossible not to perceive the many things that we take for granted and believe are objective reality are actually socially constructed, and thus, can change as society changes. The theory of social constructionism states that meaning and knowledge are socially created, and our assumptions and expectations may give us a perceptual set—a predisposition to interpret an ambiguous stimulus one way rather than another. Social constructionist believe that things are generally viewed as natural or normal in society, such as understandings of gender, race, class, and disability, are socially constructed, and consequently are not an accurate reflection of reality. Once preliminary hunches are formed based on a certain construction of reality, even if it is badly distorted, they interfere with accurate perceptions. Having formed a wrong idea about reality, people have more difficulty seeing the truth. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we being to the experience. Social constructs are often created within specific institutions and cultures and come to prominence in certain historical periods. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Our expectations influence how we see things. To see is to believe, but social constructs’ dependence of historical, political, and economic conditions can lead them to evolve and change. For all these reasons, religious perceptions depend on the state of the perceiver as well as on external reality. Depending on one’s perceptual set, a thought that pops into the mind while meditating may be perceived as a random cognition or as the still small voice of God. Moses perceived his burning bush and mountaintop experiences through the eyes of faith and thus assigned them a profound religious significance that would have been meaningless to someone lacking one’s perceptual sets. Imagine yourself looking with a friend at a clear night sky. Your friend points overhead and says, “Do you see the Little Bear?” Looking at the very same stars, you cannot perceive what your friend so clearly sees. Why? Because your friend, having taken the trouble to study star patterns, has eyes to see what you are not ready to notice. Similarly, people may see the Heavens, which declare the glory of God, yet not see that the Heavens, which declare the glory of God, yet not see that the Heavens are declaring God’s glory. Only the heart that already has faith will see the Heavens in the way. The point has been recognized even by religious skeptics, such as the philosopher Paul Kurtz: “I have wondered at times: Is it I who lacks religious sense, and is this due to a defeat of character? The tone-deaf are unable to fully appreciate the intensity of music, and the color-blind live in the World denuded of brightness and hue.” #RandolphHarrs 18 of 25
To have a religious experience is thus to assign sensory experience spiritual significance. It is to interpret phenomena with an awareness of the presence of God. Those who have a schema for interpreting life through the eyes of faith are like those who have a schema for perceiving the dalmatian: they have difficulty viewing things another way, yet sometimes find I hard to get others to see reality as they do. To refer simply to “religious experiences” as if we all knew exactly what we meant by them and had an agreed-upon definition would be naïve. In different religious traditions and in different historical epochs religious experience has referred to many different things. In the last few decades there has been, within the Christian tradition, a wide resurgence of interest in unusual religious experience. What are we to make of them? In the 1950s, Aldous Huxley invited his readers to take advantage of mind-altering drugs to give them new spiritual experiences. In the 1970s, Timothy Leary was a great advocate of altering consciousness with hallucinogenic drugs. Sadly, today, we are living with the tragic consequences to many of those who followed Leary’s advice and who now suffer. Even so, many of the drug takers longed for better spiritual awareness. However, if religious experience can be induced through drugs, what are we to make of what we believe are normal religious experiences? How can we properly understand them and derive the greatest benefit from them? Furthermore, how do we answer those who set aside all religious experiences on the grounds that we can give them an explanation in terms of psychology or physiology? The great philosopher Bertrand Russell, for example, asked, “What is the difference between a person who drinks alcohol and sees green snakes, and a person who half starves himself to death and sees God?” #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
We know from the use of hallucinogenic drugs, as well as from the agonizing experiences of some mentally ill people, that religious experiences can be a sign of psychopathology. The hardheaded and previously skeptical philosopher Simone Weil did not regard her spontaneous mystical experiences as proof of reality of God or of the truth of Christian doctrines. Rather, she saw the as drawing attention to, or helping to focus upon, a spiritual understanding of the things of this World: “If I light an electric torch at night, I don’t judge its power by looking at the bulb, but by seeing how many objects it lights up. The brightness of a source of light is appreciated by the illumination it projects upon non-luminous. The value of a religious or, more generally, a spiritual way of life is appreciated by the amount of illumination thrown up the things of this World.” It is not the experience that matters but the effects of that experience. The evidences for the reality of a spiritual experience should be seen in the subsequent life of the experiencer. The changed life of apostle Paul is the classic example of this. Spiritual experiences matter, but feelings are not the ultimate criterion for judging spirituality. Rather, “you will know them by their fruits.” With the schema of faith, a whole set of perceptions forcefully takes hold of one’s consciousness. Jesus Christ is perceived not as a psychotic but an incarnation of God. The Universe is seen not as a meaningless material reality, but as God’s creative handiwork—the ultimate miracle that makes little sense without a Creator. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
Life itself takes on purpose in a World where humans are viewed as called to recognize their limits and their value to their Creator, to assume their responsibility for the Earth and for each other’s welfare, and to serve and enjoy God forever. Lord, please open our eyes that we may see. Keep vivid in your memory the many splendid exploits of the Holy Fathers of the desert. In their lives true religious perfection has shone out like a flaming beacon on a hill. Sad to say, what we have been able to accomplish in our own modest lives adds up to a guttering candle. As Saints and friends of Christ, they served the Lord in famine and drought, coldness and nakedness, labour and fatigue, vigils and fasts, holy prayers and meditations, persecutions and derisions. Oh, how they suffered, the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Confessors, the Virgins, and all the rest who followed close upon the footsteps of Christ! They did the evangelical thing, at least as described by John (12.25), dispossessing their souls in this World that they might possess them in the next. Oh, how isolated and dedicated was the life of the Holy Fathers led in the desert! Their temptations were long and lurid, but they managed to endure. The Enemy harassed them suddenly and frequently. Just as sudden and frequent were the prayers they shot to Heaven. Their abstinences were rugged, but they managed to swallow their hunger. Crazed was their desire for spiritual progress! Feverish was their battle against what seemed the overwhelming supremacy of their vices! #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Through it all they held fast to God. Through the day they worked hard and prayed quietly to survive their harsh life; through the night they prayed, even in their sleep, their snores rising like incense to the Lord. Every hour of work seemed too long; every hour of prayer, too short. Making time to eat was impossible. The sweetness of contemplation was irresistible. All wealth, title, and honour, every friend and relative, they renounced. Nothing that smacked of all the World did they want to have. The necessities of life they scarcely touched. The pangs in their stomachs they begrudgingly satisfied. And so poor were they in the things of this World, but rich, so very rich, in graces and virtues! They were ravaged on the outside, but on the inside they were refreshed with Grace and Divine Consolation. The Fathers of the desert were aliens in their own World, but close family friends with God. In their own eyes self-esteem had no value, and hence they dressed like castaways. However, in the eyes of God they were precious, chosen ones, and further haberdashery was far from their minds. They stood in True Humility; they lived in Simple Obedience; they walked in Charity and Patience. And so daily they progressed in spirit and obtained great grace in God’s presence. They have been given as examples to all Religious and ought to rouse us to more spiritual progress. Standing in opposition to them are the Tepids, milling around every which way, affirming and denying, mummering and murmuring, whispering the rest of the World to a spiritual standstill. Religious orders, when they were founded, were quite remarkable gardens. Hotbeds of fervour they were. Their prayers were awash with devotion. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Their virtue was pruned and precise. Discipline, sometimes harsh and heavy-handed, took root. Under the rule of their Founder, and indeed under the inspiration of the Founder of Founders, Reverence and Obedience walked hand-in-hand down the garden path. These truly holy and perfect men poured out their lives in the strenuous fight against the World. The footprints they left behind are visible to this day. Odd thing, though. Today’s self-actualized, who is anything but exceptional when compared to the self-actualized of old, seems to be the exception to the rule; that is to say, one is thought to be observant and does no rock the boat, but there is not a great deal else that one does. Ah, the laziness and sloppiness of the religious life today! What Worldly winds could have cooled he fervour of our white-hot forge! Whatever happened to Motivation and Enthusiasm? They are nowhere to be seen! Is it any wonder, then, that the desire to live the religious life has decreased? Once so awake during the nocturnal watch, now you are found snoring on the battlement. Is this any way to live the religious life? And you of all people! You have had the privilege of meeting many of the devout Religious in your own community in the generation just passed. In Earth Prayers, the pain of the Earth is expressed. Knowing that the World is an intricate balance of parts we see that if one of the parts is sick or wounded, its plight and suffering affects us all. Here we humble ourselves before all creation and allow the outcries of despair from around the globe to touch our hearts, opened by the realization of an ecological self. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
Today the ability of the Earth to support life is being deeply eroded. The evidence is everywhere. We are mindlessly destroying the very web of life; millions of people are dying each year as a result of direct ecological collapse. Within the animal and plant kingdoms we are witnessing the greatest holocaust in history. Millions of species are on the verge of extinction. The old forests are being felled, the top soil washed away, and the groundwater contaminated. The air is polluted and the ran is acid. So the litany goes on, as every aspect of life on the planet is profoundly altered by the way our culture has organized the business of its existence. They have lost it, lost it, and their children will never even wish for it—and I am afraid…because the sun keeps rising and these days nobody sings. While many of us are aware of the destruction taking place on our planet, it is difficult to integrate this knowledge into our daily life. What do we do when it is not war that is killing us, but progress? When the problem is not the actions of an evil “other,” but ourselves? We fear the despair such information provokes. We do not want to feel the grief over all that is lost, nor our own complicity in the damage. This denial of feeling takes a heavy toll on us, impoverishing our sensory and emotional life. Ultimately, it puts us out of touch with reality. There is a historical tradition of prayer that foresees the ruination of the World because of human transgression. We find in the Old Testament, we find it again in the prayers of Native Americas as they witness the destruction of their way of life by conquerors. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
We are hearing it again now, as citizens from around the World express their fears and their grief at what is happening to the Earth. We have forgotten who are are. We have sought only our own security, we have exploited simply for our own ends, we have distorted our knowledge, we have abused our power. “The Earth dries up and withers, the World languishes and withers, the Heavens languish together with the Earth. The Earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statues, broken the everlasting covenant,” reports Isaiah 24.4-5. We therefore hope in Thee, O Lord our God, that we may soon behold the glory of Thy might, when Thou wilt remove the abominations from the Earth and when all idolatry will be abolished. We hope for the day when the World will be perfected under the Kingdom of the Almighty, and all humankind will call upon Thy name; when Thou wilt turn unto Thyself all the wicked of the Earth. May all the inhabitants of the World perceive and know that unto Thee every knee must bend, every tongue vow loyalty. Before Thee, O Lord our God, may they bow in worship, giving honour unto Thy glorious name. May they all accept the yoke of Thy Kingdom and do Thou rule over them speedily and forevermore. For the Kingdom is Thine and to tall eternity Thou wilt reign in glory; as it is written in Thy Holy Bible: The Lord shall reign for ever and ever. And it has been foretold: The Lord shall be King over all the Earth; on that day the Lord shall be One, and His name One. After some weeks on a healthy diet, the intellectual type of person will find, as I found, that there is greater mental clarity and greater mental drive. In fact, there may even be a tendency to overwork intellectually in reading and writing. A century ago, John Linton, of England, reported the result of a long period on a healthy diet in these words: “I was able to write with an ease and perspicacity and satisfaction which I had never before known, or had any idea of.” #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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Ten Minutes on the Clock, but a Thousand Centuries in My Heart!
The Greek philosopher Aristotle had a recipe for handling relationships smoothly. You must be able, he said, “to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way.” Psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer call such self-control “emotional intelligence.” Emotional intelligence refers to a combination of skills, such as empathy, self-control, and self-awareness. People who excel in life tend to be emotionally intelligent. Indeed, the costs of poor emotional skills can be high They range from problems in marriage and parenting to poor physical health. A lack of emotional intelligence can ruin careers and sabotage achievement. Perhaps the greatest toll falls on people who are still developing or marginalized members of the community. For them, having poor emotional skills and being subjected to dealing with those who have substandard emotional skills, makes them become victims of depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, unwanted lifestyle choices, aggression, and violent crimes, or they can also become violent criminals. The Devil has a sure foothold in Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 because many people seemed to be lacking emotional intelligence. People who were skeptical of witchcraft were thought to must undoubtedly be a witch. For instance, that Martha Corey’s skepticism was held against her is clear evidence that by this time the magistrates’ attitudes had hardened into those of the witch hunter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
It was at Martha Corey’s examination that one typical kind of behaviour first appeared. She bit her lip, and several of the afflicted children complained that they were bitten She was charged with biting her lip, and she quite naturally asked what harm was there in it. The Reverend Mr. Nicolas Noyes of Salem Town explained: “I believe it is apparent she practiseth witchcraft in the congregation; there is no need of images.” That is, instead of tormenting images she was using her own body as an image, biting the children by biting her own lips, and later pinching them by clenching her fingers together. From Martha Corey’s examination on, any motion on the part of the accused was apt to produce a corresponding effect in the afflicted children. It must have been a most convincing spectacle, as though black magic were being worked before the very eyes of the beholders. And as the effects produced on the children were obviously painful, they were that much more convincing. In some cases there were seen to be marks of bites or pinches on the children’s flesh; on other occasions there were pins literally stuck in their flesh. There are at least three explanations for this behaviour. In the first place, hysterics are extremely suggestible, and for hysterics familiar with the idea of image magic, it would be easy to assume that an accused person biting her lip was trying to bit them. A similar phenomenon is the “arctic hysteria” of North American Indians, in which the group imitates the motions of the shaman. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Secondly, hysteric will often try to injure themselves; they will beat their heads on the floor, or run into fire or water. (But they seldom succeed in injuring themselves seriously because they are most apt to make these attempts when other people are present, an able to stop them.) Surely this is the explanation for the pins in their flesh; the afflicted stuck them there themselves. However, this is not to say there was conscious fraud; people in fits are after all not responsible for their actions. Some of the bites and pinches, too, were probably self-inflicted, but it is also probable that some were not. Skin lesions are among the commonest of psychosomatic symptoms, and surely some of these bites and pinches were psychosomatic. Hathorne and Corwin, of course, thought the cause was witchcraft, and they committed Martha Corey to jail for further examination and eventually trial. And with her commitment to jail, Salem had very nearly committed itself to a witch hunt. Yet there would be moments during the succeeding month when the course of events would seem to hesitate and waver; moments wen the slightest change of circumstances might have averted the final catastrophe. On Saturday, March 19, two days before the examination of Martha Corey, the Reverend Deodat Lawson arrived in Salem Village. He has been its minister from 1684 to 1688 and had now returned as a visiting preacher and for personal reasons as well; the afflicted girls were saying that his wife and daughter, whom he had buried there, had been killed by witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Reverend Deodat Lawson tells us that there were at that time ten afflicted persons—three girls from nine to twelve years old: Elizabeth Parris, Abagail Williams, and Ann Putnam; three adolescent girls: Mary Walcott, Mercy Lewis, and Elizabeth Hubbard; and for married women: Goodwives Putnam, Pope, Bibber, and Goodall. He conducted both the morning and the afternoon services on Sunday, but without incident. Several of the afflicted persons were present. This was not Lawson’s first introduction to the behavior of the afflicted. He had lodged the night before at Ingersoll’s Tavern, and there had seen Mary Walcott, who, “as she stood by the door was bitten, so that she cried out of her wrist, and looked on it with a candle we saw apparently the marks of teeth, both upper and lower set, on each side of her wrist.” He had also visited the parsonage, where Abigail Williams “had a grievous fit.” He would see more on Monday, at Martha Corey’s examination, and on Wednesday, when he went to Thomas Putnam’s to see his wife, Ann Putnam, Senior. “I found her lying on the bed, having had a sore fit a little before. She spake to me and said she was glad to see me. Her husband and she both desired me to pray with her while she was sensible, which I did, though the apparition said [id est, to Ann Putnam, Senior] I should not go to prayer. At first beginning she attended but after a little time was taken with a fit, yet continued silent and seemed to be sleep. When prayer was done, her husband going to her found her in a fit. He took her off the bed to set her on his knees, but at first she was so stiff she could not be bended. But she afterwards set down, but quickly began to strive violently with her arms and legs.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Shortly afterward she began to argue with an apparition, and she thought that telling it a passage from the Christian Bible would make it vanish. She said, “I am sure you cannot stand before that text!” Then she was sorely afflicted, her mouth drawn on one side and her body strained for about a minute, and then said “I will tell, I will tell; it is, it is, it is!” three or four times, and then was afflicted to hinder her telling. At last she broke forth and said “It is the third chapter of the Revelations.” I did something scruple the reading it. [Reverend Lawson was reluctant because in this case reading the Bible might be construed as using it as a charm.] However, thought not versed she opened her eyes and was well. This fit [had] continued near half an hour. Her husband and the spectators told me she had often been so relieved by reading texts that she named, something pertinent to her case. The next day was Lecture Day at Salem Village and Reverend Lawson preached the sermon, which he published shortly thereafter under the title Christ’s Fidelity the Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity. Historians have consistently represented it as an attempt to sir up the emotions of the community, but in fact it was nothing of the sort. To be sure, Reverend Lawson did reaffirm that the girl’s afflictions were the “effects of Diabolical malice and operations, and that it cannot rationally be imagined to proceed from any other cause whatsoever.” Reverend Lawson was far from depending on the magistrates to cure the country of its troubles. In fact he warned the community that there was ultimately no legitimate secular defense against witchcraft. There was, for example, no legitimate means of testing to see whether an accused person was a witch: “we find no means instituted of God to make trial of witches.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Nor could one rightly defend oneself against witchcraft with white magic, such as boiling one’s urine or nailing a horseshoe over the door, because such charms were in themselves, “a kind of witchcraft,” and might well give a more secure foothold to the Devil. Careless accusations of suspected persons might also backfire, Reverend Lawson warned. “Rash censuring of others, without sufficient grounds, or false accusing any willingly…is indeed to be like the Devil, who is a calumniator, of false accuser.” Most important, he warned his listeners that the Devil might appear in the shape of an innocent person. Indeed, he suspected this was precisely what had happened when church members saw the apparitions of other church members afflicting them. The Devil had taken “some visible subjects of our Lord Jesus and [used] at least their shapes and appearances…to afflict and torture other visible subjects of that same Kingdom. Surely his design is that Christ’s Kingdom may be divided against itself.” Given all these difficulties the only sure protection against witchcraft, the “Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity,” was faith in Christ, and the application of that faith in prayer. And such prayer would be answered, particularly if it came from a people bound to the worship of God, like those of New England, by their church covenants: “whensoever God hath declared a person or people to be in covenant with Him, as the objects of His special mercy and favour, He will assuredly and shortly suppress the malice of Satan, however violently engaged against them.” In the late 19th century, it seemed that San Jose, California had come under a spell. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Mrs. Sarah Winchester moved to San Jose, California after the tragic loss of her baby daughter and husband and began to construct one of the most unique and elaborate Queen Anne Victorian mansions the World had ever witnessed. According to legend, Mrs. Winchester enacted a nightly séance to help with her building plans and for protection from “bad” spirits. While she sometimes drew up simple sketches of the building ideas, there were never any blueprints! In the morning, she would meet with Mr. John Hansen, her dutiful foreman, and go over new changes and additions. During the early years of construction, this resulted in some unusual and impractical concepts such as columns being installed upside down—though some suggest this was done deliberately to confuse the evil spirits. However, this is how the Winchester Mystery House became known as “the house built by the spirits.” Mr. John Hansen stayed with Mrs. Winchester for many years, redoing scores of rooms, remodeling the in one week and tearing them apart the next. It is doubtful whether Mr. Hansen ever questioned his boss. Mrs. Winchester may have been trying to confuse evil spirits, or simply unsure if she was pleased with aspects of traditional designs, but there was so budget ceilings or deadlines to meet. This resulted in many features being dismantled, built around, or sealed over. Some rooms were remolded many times. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
It is estimated that the Winchester mansion once contained 500 to 600 rooms, but because so many were redone, only 160 remains (110 open for touring). This naturally resulted in some peculiar effects, such as stairs that lead to the ceiling, door that go nowhere and that open onto walls, and chimneys that stop just short of the roof! Once a room was completed, and most importantly, not targeted for further alterations, it was adored with some of the best furnishings money could buy. Mrs. Winchester appreciated beauty, and she was a woman with exquisite taste. Freight cars loaded with gold- and silver-plated chandeliers, imported Tiffany art glass windows then valued at up to $1,500 ($39,587.50 in 2021 dollars), German silver and bronze inlaid doors at twice that amount, Swiss molded bathtubs, rare precious woods like mahogany and rosewood, and countless other items were docked onto a side track at San Jose. Everything was then transported to the house, where much of the material was never even installed. However, the employees often times seem to be bewitched by the Devil. “Oh, how I wish I were out of this dreadful, dreadful house!” said Stella the maid. “Please do not think me very ungrateful for saying this, after taking such pains to provide us with a Heaven upon Earth, as you thought, Mrs. Winchester.” What happened could, of course, have been neither foretold, nor guarded against, by any human being. Stella, Mrs. Winchester’s maid came to her with a very long face, and said, “If you please, Mistress, did you know that this house was haunted? #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Mrs. Winchester was so startled. She replied, “Good Heavens! No! is it?” Stella then explained, “Well, Mistress, I’m pretty nigh sure it is,” and the expression of her countenance was about as lively as an undertaker’s; and then she told Mrs. Winchester that cook had been that morning to order in groceries from a shop in the neighbourhood, and on her giving the man the direction where to send the things to, he had said, with a very peculiar smile, “The Winchester mansion–, eh? H’m! I wonder how long you’ll stand it; last cook held out just a fortnight.” He looked so odd that she asked him what be meant, but he only said, “Oh! nothing; only that help never did long at the Winchester mansion. He had known staff go in one day, and out the next, and during the last four years he had never known any remain over a month.” Feeling a good deal alarmed by this information, the cook naturally enquired the reason; but he declined to give it, saying that if se had not found out herself, she had much better leave it alone, as it would only frighten her out of her wits; and on her insisting and urging him, she could only extract from him, that the house has such a mysterious history. “You know, Mrs. Winchester, how firmly I believe in apparitions, and what an unutterable fear I have of them; anything material, tangible, that I can lay hold of—anything of the same fibre, blood, and bone as myself, I could, I think, confront bravely enough; but the mere thought of being brought face to face with the ‘bodiless dead,’ makes my brain unsteady.” Mrs. Winchester had the prettiest mansion in California. She told Setlla, “Most good things that had ever been in the World had had a bad name in their day; and moreover, the grocer probably a motive for taking away the house’s character.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Mrs. Winchester derided Stella’s “babyish fears,” to such an extent that she felt half ashamed, and yet not quite comfortable, either and then came the usual rush of the mansion’s engagements, during which one has no time to think of anything but how to speak, and act, and look for the moment then present. Marriam Marriot, Mrs. Winchester’s niece was to arrive the previous day and, in the morning, the weekly hamper of flowers, fruit, and vegetables arrived. Stella always dressed the flower-vase, while other servants ate so tasteless; and as she was arranging them, it occurred to her—you know Stella’s passion for flowers—to carry up one particular cornucopia of roses and mignonette and set it on Marriam’s toilet-table, as a pleasant surprise for her. As Stella came downstairs, she had seen Ashely, another maid. Ashely was a fresh round-faced country girl—she went into the room, which was being prepared for Mrs. Marriot, with a pair of sheets that she had been airing over her arm. Stella went upstairs very slowly, as her cornucopia was full of water, and she was afraid of spilling some. She turned the handle of the bedroom-door and entered, keeping her eyes fixed on her flowers, to see how they bore the transit, and whether any of them had fallen out. Suddenly a sort of shiver passed over her; and feeling frighten—she did not know why—she looked up quickly. The girl was standing by the bed, leaning forward a little with her hands clenched in each other, rigid, every nerve tense; her eyes, wide open, starting out of her head and a look of unutterable stony horror in them; her cheeks and mouth not pale, but livid as those of one that died awhile ago in mortal pain. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
As Stella looked at her, her lips moved a little, and an awful hoarse voice, not like hers in the least said, “Oh! my God, have see it!” and then she fell down suddenly, like a log, with a heavy noise. Using Mrs. Winchester’s call system, she alerted Mr. Hansen to what area in the mansion they were in. The message was loudly audible and Mr. Hansen came running in, and between the two of them they managed to lift Ashely on to the bed, and tried to bring her to herself by running her feet and hands, and holding strong salts to her nostrils. And all the while they kept glancing over their shoulders, in a vague cold terror of seeing some awful, shapeless apparition. Two long hours she lay in a state of utter unconsciousness. Meanwhile Mr. Hansen, who had been down to his guest house, returned. At the end of the two hours they succeeded in bringing Ashely back to sensation and life, but only to make the awful discovery that she was raving mad. She became so violent that it required all the combined strength of Mr. Hansen and Walley (the butler) to hold her down in the bed. Of course, the sent off instantly for a doctor, who, on her growing a little calmer towards evening, removed her in a carriage to his own house. The doctor had come later to tell Mrs. Winchester that Ashley was pretty quiet, not from any return to sanity, but from sheer exhaustion. Stella, Mrs. Winchester, Mr. Hansen and Walley were, of course, utterly in the dark as to what she saw, and her ravings were far to disconnected and unintelligible to afford them the slightest clue. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Everyone was so completely shattered and upset by the awful occurrence. No one was allowed to occupy that room again. Mrs. Winchester would shudder and run by quickly as she passed the door. Eventually Mr. Hansen boarded it up. Legend has it this room is one of the 50 not opened to guests on tours. Mrs. Winchester was still unconvinced as to the house being at fault. You know, she felt like the mansion was a godmother, a protector to her, and was responsible for its good behaviour. She thought the girl simply had a fit. Why not? She knew of a man who was subject to seizures of that kind, and immediately on being attacked his whole body became rigid, his eyes glassy and staring, his complexion livid, exactly as in that case. Or it was also possible that, if no a fit, that perhaps the girl was subject to madness? The doctor had to ascertain where there was not insanity in her family. Even allowing the possibility, nay, the actual unquestioned existence of ghost in the abstract, is it likely that there should be anything to be seen so horribly fear-inspiring, as to send a perfectly sane person in one instant raving mad, which, after many years of residence in the house that Mrs. Winchester had never caught a glimpse of? According to this hypothesis, everyone in the mansion should have, by that time, been stark raving mad and in a lunatic asylum. Stella told Mrs. Winchester that she was leaving that “terrible, hateful, fatal house. I wish I had escaped from it sooner! Oh, my dear Mrs. Winchester, I shall never be the same woman again if I live to be a hundred.” After Stella left, Ashley was removed to the lunatic asylum, Agnews State Hospital, where she remained in the same state. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Ashely had several lucid intervals, she was closely, pressingly questioned as to what it was she saw; but she maintained an absolute, hopeless, silence, and only shuddered, moaned, and would hide her face in her hands when the subject was broached. Stella went to see her, and on her retuned was sitting resting in the drawing-room, before going to dress for dinner, talking to Mrs. Winchester about her visit, when Theophilus Riesinger walked in, he had always been waling in the last ten days, and Mrs. Winchester always flushed up and looked happy, whenever he made his appearance. He looked very handsome, dear fellow, just came in from the park in a coat that fitted like a second skin, black gloves, and a top hat. He seemed in tremendous spirits, and was as sceptical as Mrs. Winchester to the ghostly origins of Ashley’s seizure. “Let me come here tonight and sleep in that room; Mrs. Winchester,” he said, looking very eager and excited, “with the gas lit and a poker, I’ll engage to exorcize every demon that shows his ugly nose; even if I should find seven white ghostisses, sitting on seven white postisses.” “You don’t mean really?” asked Stella, incredulously. “Don’t I? that’s all,” he answered, emphatically. “I should like nothing better. Well, is it a bargain?” Mrs. Winchester turned quite pale. “Oh, don’t,” she said, hurriedly, “Please, don’t; why should you run such a risk, besides the room has been boarded up? How do you know that you might not be sent mad too?” He laughed very heartily, and coloured a little with pleasure at seeing the interest she took in his safety. “Never fear,” he said, “it would take more than a whole squadron of departed ones, with the gentleman at their head, to send me crazy.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
He was so eager, so persistent, so thoroughly in earnest, that Mrs. Winchester yielded at last, though with a certain strong reluctance to his entreaties. Her eyes filled with tears, she had the room opened up and walked away hastily to the conservatory. Nonetheless, Father Riesinger got his wish; it was so difficult to refuse him anything. Mrs. Winchester gave up her engagements for the evening. And at about 10.00pm, she went to bed. Then he went, jumping up the stairs three steps at a time and humming a tune. The human victims of this tragedy should never be forgotten. With a magnitude registering 7.9, high intensity shaking was felt at 5.13am on April 18, 1906. It felt like the most powerful Earthquake on Earth. All of the sudden the whole Earth started shaking like crazy, and the shaking got worse and worse. Devastating fires soon broke out in the San Francisco Bay Area and lasted for several days. More than 3,000 people died and over 80 percent of San Francisco was destroyed. The position of the people in Agnews was critical; a number of insane persons escaped from the demolished asylum, and were running at random about the country. 117 patients and staff were killed and buried in mass graves on the site. The main building and some others were irreparably damaged. The ground just opened up. Back at her mansion, Mrs. Winchester was in her Daisy Bed Room, when she was awakened by the jolt, “Every time I took a step,” she said, “I fell. I heard an awful sound. The seven-story town went flying up and crashed down onto the house, trappimg me in my bedroom and destroying most of the fourth floor along with it.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
People were running, but the valley just opened up and swallowed them. Dozens of people sank into the Earth. “The house seemed to shake forever and ever. I felt a lump in my throat, a gasping for breath—ten minutes on the clock, but a thousand centuries in my heart. Then again, loud, sudden, a violent banging on the door! I made a simultaneous rush to the door. My servants came and saved me. They said I had been trapped in my room for days. As we walked down the hall, there was Father Riesinger, standing in the middle of the floor of the room we had boarded up, rigid, petrified, with that same look—that look that is burnt into my heart in letters of fire—of awful, unspeakable, stony fear on his brave young face. For one instant he stood thus; then stretching out his arms stiffly before him, he groaned in a terrible husky voice, ‘Oh, my God, I have seen it!’ and fell down dead. Yes, dead. Not in a swoon or in a fit, but dead. Vainly we tried to bring back the life to that strong young heart; it will never come back again till that day when the Earth and the sea give up the dead are therein. I cannot see for the tears that are blinging me; he was such a dear fellow.” Then an omnipresent, malevolent voice, said, “Can you feel that? Drowning deep in my sea of loathing, broken your servant I kneel. Will you give it to me? There is no turning back now. You’ve woken up the demon in me.” This is a true story. The Winchester mansion is a 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester rifle. The study of theology also tells us that a distinction between spirit and soul has remained obtuse till present day. As a result, the learned theologians of the most advanced organized religions take one for the other, keeping the identities and so interrelationship between the two hazy. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This obtuse relationship has been trickling down for the millenniums, from when humans lived in caves in the Mesolithic era, around 14,000 years BC. Sorcery is also visible in burial rites and construction of monuments. Belief in a deity or an afterlife could be an evolutionarily advantageous by-product of people’s ability to reason about the minds of others. The Victorian period was an era of deep and sustained religious belief in the supernatural. People have a bias for believing in the supernatural. Yet people think there is a dark force behind many of the tragic events that are happening today. A force that has a significant impact on Society. Repeatedly we see cases involving law-breaking, or violence on the rise, and in many cases people believe it proceeds from an unknown dark force. Perhaps the Victorian belief in the spiritual and occult was not too farfetched. And God say everything He had made, and found it very good. And He said: This is a beautiful World that I have given you. Take good care of it; do not ruin it. It is said: Before the World was created, the Holy One kept creating Worlds and destroying them. Finally He created this one, and was satisfied. He said to Adam: This is the last World I shall make. I place it in your hands: hold it in trust. 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. May the prayers and supplications of the House of America be acceptable unto their Father in Heaven; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
The most expensive window was built on the north side of the house with a room built over it. Ever wonder why? Come learn about this beautiful story at the Winchester Mystery House.
Now open for GUIDED Mansion Tours!
🎟️ Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
O Wicked Wit and Gifts that Have the Power So to Seduce!
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange story. Almost all humans are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a lister’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a devil, would have no fear mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before one would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequences is, that the general stock of experiences in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect. The Devil had been raised among us, and his rage was vehement and terrible; and, when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows. It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in Boston in 1688, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murders as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and if I could, I would bury the memory this this atrocious eminence, as hi body was buried, in the Witch House’s basement. When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicious fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As no reference was at the time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered. Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief observed the absence of the dead body from the bed. As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger posses of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. John Hathorne asked most of the questions and established the judicial attitude that was to prevail throughout most of the examinations and the trials. Many people suspected that the devil killed this man and he had been summoned by Sarah Good because she had also been accused of bewitching a few girls in the town. Mr. Hathorne asked the children to look at Sarah God and say whether she was one who afflicted them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
They accused her to her face, “upon which they were all dreadfully tortured and tormented for a short space of time.” When they recovered from their fits, they charged her with causing them, saying that her specter had come and tormented them although her body remained “at a considerable distance from them.” This was spectral evidence, that is, evidence concerning a specter or apparition of the accused, rather than her bodily person. It was eventually to become the central legal issue of the trials, but at the moment we need only see why it seemed initially so convincing to the examining magistrates. Here were girls afflicted with violent physical symptoms which had no known physical cause, but which a physician had attributed to witchcraft. There was a malicious old woman accused of causing them. When the sufferers accused her they were immediately thrown into convulsions. What could be more plausible than that the convulsions were inflicted as revenge for the accusation? Yet such behaviour was still unfamiliar enough in Salem so that one of the recorders noted that “none here see the [specters of the] witches but the afflicted and themselves.” However, the change was so startling that I fully believed the girls derived their impression in some occult manner. For instance, we knew there was something occult going on because the throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech for the defense, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat in the dreadful condition referred to. Yet, it would have been impossible for such a wound to be self-inflicted by either hand. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Certainly, Mr. Hathorne was convinced; when the children had recovered and repeated their accusation he turned to the accused woman. “Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you this torment these people children?” Certainly many of her neighbours though her malicious, since they attributed to her a number of inexplicable events, including the death of a cow which perished in a “sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner.” Such testimony was common in witchcraft cases, and it has caused much unseemly hilarity among the modern historians. It is likely, they have asked, that His Satanic Majesty the Devil or any of his minions would stop to concern themselves with the fate of a New England cow? The answer is that nothing is more likely. What else would a fertility god concern himself with but the health or sickness of crops, of animals, and of humans? From the standpoint of a society that still remembered who the Devil was, no testimony could be more relevant. As a matter of fact, the village witches who still exist in rural England are often expert in folk medicines, human and animal, as well as charms, and until recently many of them were midwives. Sarah Osburn also denied that she had hurt anyone, but the girls feel again into fits. Mr. Hathorne asked her how this happened. Perhaps, she said, the Devil went about in her likeness doing harm, but she knew nothing about it. Sarah Osburn was the first at Salem to assert the principle that the Devil can impersonate an innocent person. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Whether the devil could or not was a matter of debate in the seventeenth century, but most Protestant authorities agreed with Goodwife Obsurn that, as Hamlet put it, “The Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape.” However, the principle was not discussed at this hearing, since Sarah Osburn was a likely a suspect as Sarah Good, if for no other reason than her lying. Lying was still considered a serious sin in the seventeenth century, and a crime as well, legally punishable by the courts. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believed, had any one in Court. When Mr. Hathorne tried to find out how well Sarah Osburn knew Sarah Good she said she did not know her by name. Mr. Hathorne asked if Sarah Osburn had been tempted by the devil, and she said no. Why then, he asked, had not she been at church? She had been sick, she said, and unable to go. However, her husband and others contradicted her. “She had not been at meeting,” they said, “this year and two months.” To understand why the matter of church attendance was considered so significant one must remember that the seventeenth century saw witchcraft as literal Devil worship, and therefore as a rival religion to Christianity. This is why the magistrates sometimes asked accused persons, as they asked Sarah Good, what God they served. And if the accused person avoided speaking the name of God (as Sarah Good did), they had reason to think it a suspicious circumstance. The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the judge, on the other side of the court. He slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. Then he collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The examinations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn afford grounds for suspicion and for further examination. However, the major event of that first day of March was the examination of Tituba. It began like the others, but it changed very quickly: “Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” “None.” “Why do you hurt these children?” “I do not hurt them.” “Who is it then?” “The Devil, for aught I know.” “Did you never see the Devil?” “The Devil,” said Tituba, “came to me and bid me serve him.” She went on, with a minimum of judicia prodding, to provide a detailed confession of witchcraft, the first of approximately fifty that were made during the Salem trials. On March first and second, in her examination, Tituba said that the Devil had come to her in the shape of a man—a tall man in black, with white hair. Other times he had come in the shape of an animal. He had told her he was God, that she must believe him and serve him six years, and he would give her many fine things. He had shown her a book and she had made a mark in it, a mark that was “red like blood.” Many people thought this to be a revelation. “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the Earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to comedown from Heaven to Earth in full view of men. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“He ordered them to set up an image in honour of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless one had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name,” reports Revelation 13.11-17. Sarah Osburn was to die there on the tenth of May. Tituba, like later confessors, was never brought to trial. She lay in jail until she was sold to pay the jailer’s fees, her master refusing to pay them. Sarah Good was brought to trial. Another reaction to Tituba’s confession was to confirm the community in its fear of witchcraft, and particularly its fear of the three accused women. The night of March First William Allen and John Hughes heard a strange noise; it continued frightening them, but the approached and “saw a strange and unusual beast lying on the ground. Going up to it, the said beast vanished away and in the said place started up two or three women fled, not after the manner of other women but swiftly vanished out of sight, which women we took to be Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The next night William Allen again had hallucinations: “Sarah Good visibly appeared to him in his chamber, said Allen being in bed, and brought an unusual light with her. The said Sarah came and sat upon his foot. The said Allen went to kick at her, upon which she vanished and the light with her.” Notice that in this hallucination as in many others the hallucination stops as soon as the subject is able to move or speak. A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, “curse” may refer to such a wish or pronouncement made effective by a supernatural or spiritual power, such as a god, or gods, a spirit, or natural force, or else as a kind of spell by magic or witchcraft. The Winchester rifle is a handsome gun that legend has it was forged in Hell. Whoever possesses the cursed rife either suffers disaster or fortune. Oliver Fisher Winchester was an American businessman and politician, best known as being the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Oliver Winchester was born November 30, 1810 and dead December 10, 1880. Oliver Winchester was known for manufacturing and marketing the Winchester repeating rifle, which was a much re-designed descendant of the Volcanic rifle of some years earlier. Mr. Winchester was more learned than his kind in the mysteries of a deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination. He was a man highly honoured for his natural gifts and knowledge of learned books which nobody else could read, that was when he took his second orders the bishop gave him a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his shoulders in which, and his lordship had put such power into it that, when the parson has it rightly on, he could govern any ghost or evil spirit, and even stop an Earthquake. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Such a powerful man, in combat with supernatural visitations discovered that a division of Smith & Wesson firearms was failing financially with one of their newly patented arms. Having an eye for opportunity, Mr. Winchester assembled venture capital together with other stockholders and acquired the Smith & Wesson division, better known as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principle stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, and changed the name to New Haven Arms Company. After experiencing a slow start, and then a booming success with the Henry rifle, the company reorganized once again and the first Winchester rifle was the Model 1866, which had been nicknamed the Yellow Boy. The gun was called Yellow Boy because it should be remembered that, howsoever strange and singular it may sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance at his own hands. Gradually Mr. Winchester amassed a considerable fortune. When Mr. Oliver Winchester died on December 10, 1880, his ownership in the company passed to his son, William Wirt Winchester (who married Sarah Lockwood Pardee in 1862), and died March 7 1881 at the young age of 43. The couple has also had a child, Annie Pardee Winchester, born June 15, 1866, and died 6 weeks later on July 25, 1866. Mrs. Winchester was deeply troubled by the loss of her daughter. In the course of her daily walk, she had to pass a certain heath or down where the road wound along through tall blocks of granite with open spaces of grassy sward between them. #RandpolphHarris 9 of 13
There in a certain spot, and always in the same place, she declared that she encountered, every day, a baby with a pale and troubled face, clothed in a little dress of white pique, made with two skirts. The pique was cut slightly Gabriele, and rounded off in the front with scallops, bound with white braid, with a button in each scallop, and ribbon-sash, tied at the left side, with one hand always stretched forth, and the other pressed against her side. “She is my baby,” Mrs. Winchester would say, and she often used to come to her parents house in New Haven; but that which troubled her was, that she had now been dead three years, and she had seen her body laid in the grave at her burial, this that she saw every day must needs be her soul or ghost. The hair of the appearance, sayth Mrs. Winchester, is not like anything alive, but it is so soft and light that it seemth to melt away while you look; but her eyes are set, and never blink—no, not when the sun shineth full upon her face. She maketh no steps, but seemth to swim along the top of the grass; and her hand, which is stretched out alway, seemth to point to something far away, out of sight. It is her continual coming; for she never failth to meet Mrs. Winchester, and to pass on, that hath quenched her spirits; and although she never seeth her by night, yet cannot she get her natural rest. Mrs. Winchester went to see a doctor who told her, “The case is strange but by no means impossible. It is one that I will study, and fear not to handle, if you will be free with me, and fulfill all that I desire.” Mrs. Winchester was overjoyed, but she perceived that the doctor turned pale, and was downcast with some thought which, however, he did not express. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The doctor knew that this might be a doemonium meridianum, the most stubborn spirit to govern and guide that any human can meet, and the most perilous withal. He made an appointment to go with Mrs. Winchester to the spot where she had these encounters. They had hardly reached the accustomed spot, when they both saw her at once gliding towards them; punctually as the ancient writers describe their “lemures, which swoon along the ground, neither marking the sand nor bending the herbage.” The aspect of the baby girl was exactly that which had been related by Mrs. Winchester. There was a pale and stony face, the strange misty hair, the eyes firm and fixed, that gazed, yet not on them, but on something that they saw far, far away; one hand and arm stretched out, and the other grasping the girdle of her waist. She floated along the field like upon a stream, and glided past the spot where they stood, pausingly. But so deep was the awe that came over the doctor, as he stood there in the light of day, face to face with a human soul separate from her bones and flesh, that his heart and purpose both failed him. He had resolved to speak to the spectre in the appointed form of words, but he did not. He stood like one amazed and speechless, until she had passed clean of out sight. When they returned to the house, and after he had said all he could to pacify Mrs. Winchester, he took leave for that time, with a promise that when he had fulfilled certain business elsewhere, when then he alleged, he would return and take orders to assuage these disturbances and their cause. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The doctor later told Mrs. Winchester that he thought it was best that they try an exorcism, but his Church, as is well known, hath abjured certain branches of her ancient powers, on grounds of perversion and abuse. So he referred her to a medium. The medium told Mrs. Winchesters, “There is a danger from the demons, but so there is in the surrounding air every day.” There was a kind of trouble in the air, a soft rippling sound, and all at once the shape appeared, and came towards the medium gradually. She opened her parchment scroll, and read aloud the command. The spirit paused, and seemed to waver and doubt; stood still; then she rehearsed the sentence again, sounding out every syllable like a chant. The spirit then swam into the midst of the circle, and there stood still, suddenly. Her knees shook under her, and the drops of sweat ran down her flesh like rain. But, although face to face with the spirit, the medium’s heart grew calm, and her mind was composed. The spirit then commanded Mrs. Winchester to move West and build a mansion in honour of the spirit killed by the Winchester rifle and “as long as the hammer keep pounding, her heart would continue to beat.” The medium dismissed the troubled ghost, until she peacefully withdrew, gliding towards the west. Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose, which was near her family Member, Enoch Pardee, an occultist, prominent physician, free mason, and Mayor of Oakland, California USA, had built his family’s mansion in 1868, which is now known as the Pardee House Museum. Masonry has influenced more the modern witchcraft; it has influenced dozens of occult orders. Mrs. Winchester bought a farm house and built a massive mansion. There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the Winchester mansion through the nineteenth century. The estate in those days was in a transitory state, and Mrs. Winchester, like her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the new interpretation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, the mansion is now flanked by a pleasantness, a beautiful garden and lawn, and it is surrounded by a sole grove of palm trees. It has also the aspect of age and of solitude, and looks the very scene of harmony and supernatural events. A legend might well belong to every beautiful glade of grass around, and there must surely be a haunted room somewhere within its walls. The incredible mansion, scenery of the legend still survives, and, like the field of the forty footsteps in another history, the place is still visited by those who take interests in the supernatural tales of old and new. Freemasons supposedly conducted a séance in the mansion in August of 2019. A phantom made an answer willingly. It stated, “before the next Yule-tide, a fearful pestilence will lay waste the land, and myriads of souls will be loosened from the flesh, until our valleys will be full.” The general facts stated in this diary are to these matters of belief accounted a strong proof of the veracity of the Ghost that the plague, fatal to so many millions, did break out in the global village at the close of the year. How sorely must the infidels and heretics of this generation be dismayed when they know that this Black Death, which is now swallowing its thousands in the streets of the great city, was foretold several months before the outbreak, under the séance of a freemason, by a visible and suppliant ghost! And what pleasure and improvements do such deny themselves who scorn and avoid all opportunity of intercourse with souls separate, and the spirits, glad and sorrowful, which inhabit the unseen World! May they who observe the Sabbath and call it a delight, rejoice in Thy Kingdom. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the most desirable of the days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
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Nature, in Giving Humans Tears, Bears Witness She Gave Humans the Softest Hearts!
Last year was not all that bad. We led the league in flu shots. Becoming number one is easier than remaining number one. The split-up of production and consumption also created, in all Second Wave societies, a case of obsessive “macrophilia”—a kind of Texas infatuation with bigness and growth. If it were true that long production runs in the factory would produce lower unit costs, then, by analogy, increases in scale would produce economies in other activities as well. “Big” became synonymous with “efficient,” and maximization became the fifth key principle. Cities and nations would boast of having the tallest skyscraper, the largest damn, or the World’s biggest miniature golf course. Since bigness, moreover, was the result of growth, most industrial governments, corporations, and other organizations pursued the ideal of growth frenetically. Japanese workers and managers at the Matsushita Electric Company would jointly chorus each day: “Doing our best to promote production, sending our goods to the people of the World, endlessly and continuously, like water gushing from a fountain. Grow, industry, Grow, Grow, Grow! Harmony and sincerity! Matsushita Electric!” In 1960, as the United States of America completed the stage of traditional industrialism and began to feel the first effects of the Third Wave of change, its fifty largest industrial corporations had grown to employ an average of 80,000 workers each. General Motors alone employed 595,000, and one utility, Vail’s AT&T, employed 736,000 women and men. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
This meant, at an average household size of 3.3 that year, that well over 2,000,000 people were dependent upon paychecks from this one company alone—a group equal to one half the population of the entire country when Hamilton and Washington were stitching it into a nation. (Since then AT&T has swollen to even more gargantuan proportions. By 1970 it employed 956,000—having added 136,000 employees to its work force in a single twelve mother period. By 2020, because of diversification and advanced technology in telecommunications, the company AT&T had 230,000 employees, but is still the largest employer in the U.S. telecommunications industry today, ahead of Verizon, T-Mobile U.S. and Sprint. AT&T was a special case and, of course, Americans were peculiarly addicted to bigness. However, macrophilia was no monopoly of the Americans. In France in 1963 fourteen hundred firms—a mere .0025 percent of all companies—employed fully 38 percent of the work force. Governments in Germany, Britain, and other countries actively encouraged mergers to create even larger companies, in the belief that larger scale would help them compete against the American giants. Nor was this scale maximization simply a reflection of profit maximization. Karl Marx had associated the “increasing scale of industrial establishments” with the “wider development of their material power.” Dr. Lenin, turn, argued that “huge enterprises, trusts and syndicates had brought the mass production technique to its highest level of development.” His first order of business after the Soviet revolution was to consolidate Russian economic life into smallest possible number of the largest possible units. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
Mr. Stalin pushed even harder for maximum scale and built vast new projects—the steel complex at Magnitogorsk, another at Zaporozhstal, the Balkhash copper smelting plant, the tractor plants at Kharkov and Stalingrad. He would ask how large a given American installation was, then order construction of an even larger one. In The Cult of Bigness in Soviet Economic Planning, Dr. Leon M. Herman writes: “In various parts of the USSR, in fact, local politicians became involved in a race for attracting the ‘World’s larges projects.’” By 1938 the Communist party warned against “gigantomania,” but with little effect. Even today Russian and East European communist leaders are victims of what Dr. Herman calls “the addiction to bigness.” Such faith in sheer scale derived from narrow Second Wave assumptions about the nature of “efficiency.” However, the macrophilia of industrialism went beyond mere plants. It was reflected in the aggregation of many different kinds of data into the statistical tool known as Gross National Product (GNP), which measured the “scale” of an economy by totting up the value of goods and services produced in it. This tool of the Second Wave economists had many failings. From the point of view of GNP it did not matter whether the output was in the form of food, education and health services, or munitions. The hiring crew to build a home or to demolish one both added to GNP, even though one activity added to the stock of housing and the other subtracted from it. GNP also, because it measured only market activity or exchanges, relegated to insignificance a whole vital sector of the economy based on unpaid production—child-rearing and housework, for example. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
Despite these shortcomings, Second Wave governments around the World entered into a blind race to increase GNP at all costs, maximizing “growth” even at the risk of ecological and social disaster. The macrophiliac principle was built so deeply into the industrial mentality that nothing seemed more reasonable. Maximization went along with standardization, specialization, and the other industrial ground rules. Finally, all industrial nations developed centralization into a fine art. While the Church and many First Wave rulers knew perfectly well how to centralize power, they dealt with far les complex societies and were crude amateurs by contrast with the men and women who centralized industrial societies from the group floor up. All complicated societies require a mixture of both centralized and decentralized operations. However, the shift from a basically decentralized First Wave economy, with each locality largely responsible for producing its own necessities, to the integrated national economies of the Second Wave led to totally new methods for centralizing power. These came into play at the level of individual companies, industries, and the economy as a whole. The early railroads provide a classic illustration. Compared with other business they were the giants of their day. In the United States of America in 1850 only forty-one factories had a capitalization of $250,000.00 USD ($8,740,097.40 USD in 2021 dollars) or more. By contrast, the New York Central Railroad as early as 1860 boasted a capitalization of $30,000,000.00 USD ($972,993,975.90 USD in 2021 dollars). To run such a gargantuan enterprise, new management methods were needed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
The early railroad managers, therefore, like the managers of the space program in our own era, had to invent new techniques. They standardized technologies, fares, and schedules. They synchronized operations over hundreds of miles. They created specialized new occupations and departments. They concentrated capital, energy, and people. They fought to maximize the scale of their networks. And to accomplish all this they created new forms of organization based on centralization of information and command. Employees were divided into “line” and “staff.” Daily reports were initiated to provide data on car movements, loadings, damages, lost freight, repairs, engine miles, et cetera. All this information flowed up a centralized chain of command until it reached the general superintendent who made the decisions and sent orders down the line. The railroads, as business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr., has shown, soon became a model for other large organizations, and centralized management came to be regarded as an advanced, sophisticated tool in all the Second Wave nations. In politics, too, the Second Wave encouraged centralization. In the United States of America, as early as the late 1780’s, this was illustrated by the battle to replace the loose, decentralist Articles of Confederation with a more centralist Constitution. Generally the First Wave rural interests resisted the concentration of power in the national government, while Second Wave commercial interest led by Hamilton argued, in The Federalist and elsewhere, that a strong central government was essential not only for military and foreign policy reasons but for economic growth. The resultant Constitution of 1787 was an ingenious comprise. Because First Wave forces were still strong, the Constitution reserved important powers to the states rather than the central government. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
To prevent overly strong central power it also called for a unique separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. However, the Constitution also contained elastic language that would eventually permit the federal government to extend its reach drastically. As industrialization pushed the political system toward greater centralization, the government in Washington took on an increasing number of powers and responsibilities and monopolized more and more decision-making at the center. Within the federal government, meanwhile, power shifted from Congress and the courts to the most centralist of the three branches—the Executive. By the Nixon years, historian Arthur Schlesinger (himself once an ardent centralizer) was attacking the “imperial presidency.” The pressures toward political centralization were even stronger outside the United States of America. A quick look at Sweden, Japan, Britain, or France is enough to make the United States of America’s system seem decentralized by comparison. Jean-Francois Revel, author of Without Marx or Jesus, makes this point in describing how governments respond to political protest: “When a demonstration is forbidden in France, there is never any doubt about the source of the prohibition. If it is a question of a major political demonstration, it is the [central] government,” he says. “In the United States of America, however, when a demonstration is forbidden, the first question everyone asks is, ‘By whom?’” Dr. Revel points out that it is usually some local authority operating autonomously. The extremes of political centralization were found, of course, in the Marxist industrial nations. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
In 1850 Mr. Marx called for a “decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state.” Mr. Engels, like Mr. Hamilton before him, attacked decentralized confederations as “an enormous step backward.” Latter on the Soviets, eager to accelerate industrialization, proceeded to construct the most highly centralized political and economic structure of all, submitting even the smallest of production decisions to the control of central planners. The gradual centralization of a once decentralization economy was assisted, moreover, by a crucial invention whose very name reveals its purpose: the central bank. In 1694, at the very dawn of the industrial age, while Newcomen was still tinkering with the steam engine, William Paterson organized the Bank of England—which became a template for similar centralist institutions in all Second Wave phase without constructing its own equivalent of this machine for the central control of money and credit. Paterson’s bank sold government bonds; it issued government back currency; it later began to regulate the lending practices of other banks. Eventually it took on the primary function of all central banks today: central control of the money supply. In 1800 the Banque de France was formed for similar purposes. This was followed by the formation of the Reichsbank in 1875. In the United States of America, the collision between First and Second Wave forces led to a major battle over central banking shortly after the adoption of the Constitution. Mr. Hamilton, the most brilliant advocate of the Second Wave policies, argued for a national bank on the English Model. The South and the frontier West, still wedded to agriculture, opposed him. Nevertheless, with the support of the industrializing Northeast, he succeeded in forcing through legislation that created the Bank of the United State—forerunner of today’s Federal Reserve System. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
Employed by government to regulate the level and rate of market activity, central banks introduced—by the back door, as it were—a degree of unofficial short-range planning into capitalist economies. Money flowed through every artery in Second Wave societies, both capitalist and socialist. Both needed, and therefore created, a centralized money pumping station. Central banking and centralized government marches hand in hand. Centralization was another dominating principle of Second Wave civilization. What we see, therefore, is a set of six guiding principles, a “program” that operated to one degree or another in all the Second Wave countries. These half-dozen principles—standardization, specialization—were applied in both the capitalist and socialist wings of industrial society because they grew, inescapably, out of the basic cleavage between producer and consumer and the ever-expanding role of the market. These principles in turn, each reinforcing the other, led relentlessly to the rise of bureaucracy. They produced some of the biggest, most rigid, most powerful bureaucratic organizations the World had ever seen, leaving the individual to wander in a Kafka-like World of looming mega-organizations. If today we feel oppressed and overpowered by them, we can trace our problems to the hidden code that programmed the civilization of the Second Wave. This six principles that formed this code lent a distinctive stamp to Second Wave civilization. Today, as we shall shortly see, every one of these fundamental principles is under attack by the forces of the Third Wave. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
So, indeed, are the Second Wave elites who are still applying these rules—in business, in banking, in labour relations, in government, in education, in the media. For the rise of a new civilization challenges all the vested interests of the old one. In the upheavals that lie immediately ahead, the elites of all industrial societies—so accustomed to setting the rules—will in all likelihood go the way of the feudal lords of the past. Some will be by-passed. Others will be dethroned. Many will be reduced to impotence or shabby gentility. Several—the most intelligent and adaptive—will be transformed and emerge as leaders of the Third Wave civilization. To understand who will run things tomorrow as the Third Wave is becoming dominant, we must first know exactly who is running things today. Modern suburbia is the period of the twentieth century prior to the second World War was one of momentous changes in the volume of suburbanization. This was the era in which the city reached is zenith and suburbs fully came into their own. Cities were booming. The year 1920 was a watershed insofar as it marked the first time the nation was more than half (51.7 percent) urban. The Roaring Twenties exemplified the urban adolescence of a country that was now explicitly being shaped by urban goals and values. As stated during the Depression of the 1930s by the Report of the Urbanization Committee to the National Resources Committee: “The faults of out cities are not those of decadence and impending decline, but of exuberant vitality crowding its way forward under tremendous pressure—the flood rather than the drought. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
“The city is both the great playground and the great battleground of the Nation…An unprecedented mobility arising from the harnessing of stream, electricity, and internal-combustion engine to humans and materials are responsible for this phenomenal urban development. Swifter forms of urban and interurban transportation have further led to suburban migration and caused the emergence of metropolitan districts instead of individual cities as the actual areas of urban life.” Thus, in the period before the second World War, the cities appeared robust and growing in economic and social dominance, not in decline and decay. Suburbs were part of the growth of the urban area, no longer simply a footnote. With some 17 million residents in 1930 (the total American population was 123.1 million), suburbs were becoming a majority component of metropolitan population. Suburban population was already 45 percent as large as the central-city population. Suburbs built between the first and second World Wars (1918-1942) represented the first steps toward mass suburbanization. Elite suburbs of the nineteenth-century model—that is large, large architecturally designed homes—continued to be built. However, such suburbs, as for example, Shaker Heights, east of Cleveland, Ohio; were now more oriented to streetcar lines than railroads. Moreover, the growing upper-middle class use of automobiles for commuting now put a premium on living in a quality suburb not too distant from downtown offices. Thus, across the country, upper-status inner-ring suburbs on the “good side” of the city saw fine homes constructed during the 1920s. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
These pre-World War II suburbs were built to have the best of both Worlds. They could appeal to the long standing antiurbanism of many Americans. They also appealed to those seeking to remove themselves from heavy concentration of new immigrant populations in the central cities. The suburbs could also boas that with their greenery they were closer to nature and thus better places to raise children. All this could be enjoyed while residents remained within a short commute of the city and kept all urban advantages. This meant not only the city’s cultural life and nightlife, but more importantly, the advantages of the city’s gas, electric, and telephone utilities. Inner-ring suburbs might have their own government, run their own schools, and collect their own lower taxes, but they were connected to city gas mains, electric lines, water and sewer systems, and telephones. Affluent suburban residents thus obtained all the practical advantages of living in the city while escaping the costs and problems. No wonder the popular middle-class women’s magazine such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, and Good Housekeeping extolled the benefits of suburban living. You could have the mythical American Pie Life with a beautiful house with the gorgeous roses surrounded by the pristine white picket fence while surrendering none of the urban comforts and advantages. Housing styles in affluent lace curtain between-war suburbs reflected the privileged positions of their owners. Depending on one’s preference, the homeowner could build an ideal home in a Colonial New England style while next door a Grand Queen Anne Victorian and next to an English half-timbered Tutor, and across the Street from a center-entrance Georgian and at the corner a Spanish-Moorish style villa. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
The last style reflected the importance of the expanding Southern California movie industry. Films such as The Sheik created a fad for all things thought to be Moorish Arab, which, when combined with the Spanish influences in Southern California, produced an ersatz Spanish-Moorish style found in places as far from the ocean and sun as Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An excellent example of the ersatz style then called Spanish is expensive Palos Verdes, Estates outside of Los Angeles. The style has come to be known as Californian style; that is, low hacienda-style stucco-sided and red-tiled-roofed homes with terraces and verandas. Overall, if not exciting, Palos Verdes produced a very pleasant and harmonious physical perspective. Architectural styles during the 1920s and early 1930 were often mixed in occasionally bizarre and electric fashions. For example, for a number of years I lived in the suburb of Shorewood, just north of Milwaukee, in a marvelous 1930 Dutch Colonial home that had a living room done in Spanish-Moorish style complete with rounded arches and rough Spanish plaster. The builders of such homes created for themselves far more than housing; they created the romantic idealization of earlier eras. “A man’s home was his castle,” where he could life if not as a lord, at least as a latter-day country gentleman. And all this could be had while benefiting from twentieth-century urban technology of indoor plumbing, central heating, and electricity. In the words of President Herbert Hoover, “To own one’s home is a physical expression of individualism, of enterprise, of independence, and of the freedom of spirit” (Speech quoted in American Home, February 1932, p. 253). #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
It should be remembered that most of the communities in which these “expressions of individualism” were located were deliberately racially, religiously, ethnically, and economically restricted In Palos Verdes, for example, cost restrictions mandated minimum lot sizes, set back requirements, and minimum construction costs. Residential covenants attached to the deeds excluded most groups and religions. An exception was made for live-in servants. The irony of such exclusive housing is that the heritage for the architecture that was so popular came from a community development designed to copy Mexican-style hacienda architecture apparently never occurred to the developers or residents. The feeling of being accepted by someone we love is a basic human need. In the pas 100 years, the United States of America has changed significantly and become far more loving and accepting. Being accepted by good people motivates us. It increases our sense of self-worth and self-confidence. Those who cannot find acceptance from desirable sources often seek it elsewhere. They may look to people who are not interested in their well-being. They may attach themselves to false friends and do questionable things to try to receive the acknowledgement they are seeking. They may seek acceptance by wearing a particular brand of clothing to generate a feeling of belonging or status. For some, striving for a role or a position of prominence can also be a way of seeking acceptance. They define their worth by a position they hold or status they obtain. Even in the Church we are not always free from this type of thinking. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Seeking acceptance from the wrong sources or for incorrect reasons puts us on a dangerous path—one that is likely to lead us astray and even to destruction. Instead of feeling cherished and self-confident, we will eventually feel abandoned and inferior. However, see that you look to God and live. The ultimate source of empowerment and lasting acceptance is our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. They know us. They love us. They do not accept us because of our title or position. They do not look at our status. They look into our hearts. They accept us for who we are and what we are striving to become. Seeking and receiving acceptance from Them will always lift and encourage us. As we look into our hearts, we screen ourselves. What no one around us knows, we surely know. We know our motives and desires. When we engage in sincere, honest reflection, we do not rationalize or deceive ourselves. As we sincerely and prayerfully ponder he extent to which our hearts are hones and broken, we will be taught by the Holy Ghost. We will receive a sweet confirmation or gentle correction, inviting us to act. At first it would seem that humans in the World, having among themselves no type of moral relations or acknowledged duties, could be neither good nor evil, and had neither vices nor virtues, unless, if we take these words in a physical sense, we call those qualities that can harm an individual’s preservation “vices” in one, and those that can contribute to it “virtues.” In that case it would be necessary to call the one who least resists the simple impulses of nature the most virtuous. However, without departing from the standard meaning of these words, it is appropriate to suspend the judgment we could make regarding such a situation and to be on our guard against our prejudices, until we have examined with scale in hand whether there are more virtues than vices among civilized humans. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Or whether all things considered they would not be in a happier set of circumstances if they had neither evil to fear nor good to hope for from anyone, rather than subjecting themselves to a universal dependence and obliging themselves to receive everything from those who do not oblige themselves to give them anything. Above all, let us not conclude with Dr. Hobbes that because humans have no idea of goodness one is naturally evil; that one is vicious because one does not know virtue; that one always refuses to preform service for one’s fellow humans which one reasonably attributes to oneself, to those things one needs, one foolishly imagines oneself to be the sole proprietor of the entire Universe. Dr. Hobbes has very clearly seen the defect of all modern definitions of natural right, but the consequences one draws from one’s own definition show that one takes it in a sense that is no less false. Were he to have reasoned on the basis of the principles he established, Dr. Hobbes should have said that since the state of nature is in the state in which the concern for our self-preservation is the least prejudicial to that of others, that state was consequently the most appropriate for the peace and the best suited for the human race. Dr. Hobbes says precisely the opposite, because he had wrongly injected into the savage human’s concern for self-preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions which are the product of society and which have made laws necessary. The evil human, he says, is a robust child. It remains to be seen whether savage humans are a robust child. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Were we to grant Dr. Hobbes this, what would we conclude from it? That is this human were as dependent on others when one is robust as one is when one is weak, there is no type of excess to which one would not tend: one would not tend: if she was too slow in offering one nourishment, one would disrespect one’s mother; should one find one’s younger brother annoying, one would harm him; should one be assaulted or aggravated by an individual, one would bite that person’s leg. However, being robust and being dependent are two contradictory suppositions in the state of nature. When they are dependent, humans are weak, and when one is emancipated from that dependence before one is robust. Dr. Hobbes did not see that the same cause prevents them at the same time from abusing their faculties, as one oneself maintains. Hence we could say that savages are not evil precisely because hey do not know what it is to be good; for it is neither the development of enlightenment nor the restraint imposed by the law, but the clam of the passions and the ignorance of vices which prevents the from doing evil. So much more profitable to these is the ignorance of vice than the knowledges of virtue is to those. Moreover, there is another principle that Dr. Hobbes failed to notice, and which, having been given to humans in order to mitigate, in certain circumstances, the ferocity of one’s egocentrism or the desire for self-preservation before this egocentrism of one came into being, tempers the ardor one has for one’s own well-being by an innate repugnance o seeing one’s fellow humans suffer. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
I do not believe I have any contradiction to fear in grating the only natural virtue that the most excessive detractor of human virtues was forced to recognize. I am referring to pity, a disposition that is fitting for beings that are as weak and as subject to ills as we are; a virtue all the more universal and the more useful to humans in that it precedes in one any kind of reflection, and so natural that even animals sometimes show noticeable signs of it. Without speaking of the tenderness of mothers for their young and of the perils hey have to brave in order to protect them, one daily observes the repugnance that horses have for trampling a living body with their hooves. An animal does not go undisturbed past a dead animal of its own species. There are even some animals that give them a kind of sepulchre; and the mournful lowing of the cattle entering a slaughterhouse voices the impression they received of the horrible spectable that strikes them. One notes with pleasure the author of The Fable of the Bees, having been forced to acknowledge humans as a compassionate and sensitive being, departing from one’s cold and subtle style in the example one gives, to offer us the pathetic image of an imprisoned human who sees outside one’s cell a ferocious animal tearing a child from its mother’s arms and nourishment, mashing its frail limbs with its murderous teeth, and ripping with its claws the child’s quivering entrails. What horrible agitation must be felt by this witness of an event in which one has no personal interest! What anguish must one suffer at this sigh, being unable to be of any help to the fainting mother or to the dying child. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Such is the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection. Such is the force of natural pity, which the most depraved mores still have difficulty destroy, since everyday one sees in our theaters someone affected and weeping at the ills of some unfortunate person, and who, were one in the tyrant’s place, would intensify the torments of one’s enemy still more; [like the bloodthirsty Sulla, so sensitive to ills he had not caused, or like Alexander of Pherae, who did not dare attend the performance of any tragedy, for fear of being seen weeping with Andromache and Priam, and yet who listened impassively to the cries of so many citizens who were killed every day on his orders. Nature, in giving humans tears, bears witness that she gave the human race the softest hearts.] If nature have not given humans pity to assist their reason, there is a clear awareness that, with all their mores, humans would have never been anything but monsters; but one has not seen that from this quality alone flow all the social virtues that one wants to deny in humans. In fact, what are generosity, mercy, and humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general. Benevolence and even friendship are, properly understood, the products of a constant pity fixed on a particular object; for is desiring that someone not suffer anything but desiring that one be happy? Were it true that the commiseration were merely a sentiment that puts us in the position of the one who suffers, a sentiment that is obscure and power in savage humans, develop but weak in humans dwelling in civil society, what importance would this idea have to the truth of what I say, expect to give it more force? #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
In fact, commiseration will be all the more energetic as the witnessing animal identifies itself more intimately with the suffering animal. Now it is evident that this identification must have been infinitely close in the state of nature than in the state of reasoning. Reason is what engenders egocentrism, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what engenders egocentrism, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what turns humans in upon oneself. Reason is what separates one from all that troubles one and afflicts one. For centuries, philosophers have debated what it means to be human. However, the answer has eluded us. Perhaps it is because it is so simple. To be human means to choose. Philosophy is what isolated one and what moves one to say in secret, at the sight of a suffering human, “Perish if you will; I am safe and sound.” No longer can anything but danger to the entire society trouble the tranquil slumber of the philosopher and yank one from one’s bed. One’s fellow humans can be killed with impunity underneath one’s window. One has merely to place one’s hands over one’s ears and argue with oneself a little in order to prevent nature, which rebels within one, from identifying one with the human being assassinated. Savage humans do not have this admirable talent, and for lack of wisdom and reason one is always seen thoughtlessly talent, and for lack of wisdom and reason one is always seen thoughtlessly giving in to the first sentiment of humanity. When there is a riot or a street brawl, the populace gathers together; the prudent human withdraws from the scene. It is the rabble, the women of the marketplace, who separate the combatants and prevent decent people from killing one another. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
It is therefore quite certain that pity is a natural sentiment, which, by moderate in each individual the activity of the love of oneself, contributes to the mutual of the entire species. Pity is what carries us without reflection to the assistance of those we see suffering. Pity is what, in the state of nature, takes the place of laws, mores, and virtue, with the advantage that no one is tempted to disobey its sweet voice. Pity is what will prevent every robust savage from robbing a weak child or an infirm old man of one’s hard-earned subsistence, if one oneself expects to be able to find one’s own someplace else. Instead of the sublime maxim of reasoned justice, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, pity inspires all humans with another maxim of natural goodness, much less perfect but perhaps more useful than the preceding one: Do what is good for you with as little hard as possible to others. In a word, it is in this natural sentiment, rather than in subtle arguments, that one must search for the cause of the repugnance at doing evil that every human would experience, even independently of the maxims of education. Although it might be appropriate for Socrates and minds of his stature to acquire virtue through reason, the human race would long ago have ceased to exist, if its preservation had depended solely on the reasoning of its members. With passions so minimally active and such a salutary restraint, being more wild than evil, and more attentive to protecting themselves from the harm they could receive than tempted to do harm to others, humans were not so subject to very dangerous conflicts. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
Since they had no sort of intercourse among themselves; since, as a consequence, they knew neither vanity, nor deference, nor esteem, nor contempt; since they had not the slightest notion of mine and thine, nor any true idea of justice; since they regarded the acts of violence that could befall them as an easily redressed evil and not as an offense that must be punished; and since they did not even dream of vengeance except perhaps as a knee-jerk response right then and there, like the dog that bites the stone that is thrown at one, their disputes would rarely have had bloody consequences, if their subject had been no more sensitive than food. Likewise, a mother who is overwhelmed by power negative emotions, like anger or grief, while nursing her infant, could be the cause of its spasms and convulsions. Even medical science admits that a depressive kind of emotionalism contributes towards causing hardening of the arteries and hence earlier old age. Whenever Gandhi had an important decision to make, and went through protected self-wrangling in the process, the physician who attended him noted that his blood pressure rose considerably. Once Gandhi went to sleep in such a condition. Next morning the pressure had fallen to normal. During the night he had ended the mental pressure and arrived at a decision! Angina pectoris is recognized by many physicians now as a very serious disease, often fatal and always painful, mostly brought on by extreme nervous tension. The power of the mind over flesh is proved convincingly even by such simple, everyday experiences as the vomiting caused by a horrible sigh, the weeping caused by a tragic one, the loss of appetite of positive indigestion caused by bad news, and the headache caused by quarreling. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
As long as we live in this World, trails and tribulations will dog our steps. Job has it right. “Human life on Earth is just one unending trudge” (7.1). Each one of us, therefore, ought to take care. Do not underestimate the power of a temptation. Do no overestimate your own power of a temptation. Do not overestimate your power to resist a temptation. After all, we do not want the Devil to take us by surprise. He never sleeps. He goes about seeking whom he may devour, as Peter wrote in his First Letter (5.8). What is the moral? No one’s so honied and wholesome that one cannot be deviled for dinner. And at dinner, or so the Gospels would have us believe, the Devil’s the guest from Hell. Yes, temptations are often useful to the human race, whether they come n small packages or large. However, how can this be? They bring us low, purge, scourge, and school us in the fire; that is to say, they scare the living daylights out of us. All the Saints have passed barefoot over the coals and in the process still made some spiritual progress. Alas, those who cannot withstand temptations become the shipwrecked, cast adrift forever. Yes, there is a moral. There is no religious order so lofty or monastery so remote that the Unwanted Visitor cannot slip in and make some mischief. Over time Humankind has not been able to defend itself successfully from the assaults of all temptations. Our common experience tells us that. And the reason why? The source of our temptations has already invaded us; that is to say, we were born in concupiscence, and in concupiscence we thrive. Sad to say, we did not need the Letter of James to remind us that (1.14). #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
We do have some success in the fight. However, as one temptation or tribulations is dispatched, another will soon take its place. We will always have something to whack away at, it seems, for are no we still paying the price for pummeling our Primal Felicity? Many seek to flee he temptations altogether. Alas, the escape route is clogged, and the refugee is destined to succumb! Advancing to the rear, then, is not the answer. We cannot hope to conquer that way. However, through spiritual cunning—that is to say, through Patience and True Humility—we become the stronger, and the tempters have to try harder. If a wildly successful plant—that is to say, a temptation—causes you pain, you will probably take the pruning knife and trim it back. Do that, and it will return the hardier. Pull out its root, however, and it is gone forever. You will feel better, and your spiritual garden will recover its charm. The way we stand, you can see we have grown up this way together, out of the same soil, with the same rains, leaning in the same way toward the Sun. See how we lean together in the same direction. How the dead limbs of one of us rest in the branches of another. How those branches have grown around the limbs. How the two are inseparable. And if you look you can see the different ways we have taken this place into us. Magnolia, loblolly bay, sweet gum, Southern bayberry, Pacific bayberry; whenever we grow there are many of us; Monterey pine, sugar pine, white-bark pine, four-lead pine, single-leaf pine, bristle-cone pine, foxtail pine, Torrey pine, Western red pine, Jeffrey pine, bishop pine. And we are various, and amazing in our variety, and our differences multiply, so that edge after edge of the endlessness of possibility is exposed. You know we have grown this way for years. And to no purpose you can understand. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
Yet what you fail to know we know, and the knowing is in us, how we have grown this way, why these years were not one of them heedless, why we are shaped the way we are, not all straight to your purpose, but to ours. And how we are each purpose, how each cell, how light and soil are in us, how we are in the soil, how we are in the air, how we are both infinitesimal and great and how we are infinitely without any purpose you can see, in the way we stand, each alone, yet none of us separable none of us beautiful when separate but all exquisite as we stand, each moment heeded in this cycle, no detail unlovely. Our God and God of our father and mothers, please remember the merit of our ancestors who, from year to year, appeared before Thee in America, Thy Holy City. How deep was their rejoicing as they brought their offerings before Thee! We pray Thee, imbue us, O Lord our God, with their faith in Thee and their joy in Thy World, their love for Thy Scripture and their yearning for freedom and justice. May we, in their spirit of sacrificial devotion, fulfill our duty toward the rebuilding of Thy Holy Land, the fountain of our life, that we may ever serve Thee in reverence as in days of yore. Because of our sins we were exiled from the Holy Land and removed far away from its sacred soil We cannot therefore make our festival pilgrimages before Tee nor can we fulfill our obligations in Thy chosen House, the great and holy Temple which was called by Thy name, because of the destruction that has come upon Thy Sanctuary. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers and mothers, merciful King, in Thine abundant compassion, again to have mercy upon us and upon Thy Sanctuary. O rebuild it speedily and please enhance its glory. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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What Kind of Soul is it that Can Eat, Drink, and be Marry?
Sometimes it is necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly. In all Second Wave societies a third institution arose that extended the control of the first two. This was the invention known as the corporation. Until then, the typical business enterprise had been owned by an individual, a family, or a partnership. Corporations existed, but were extremely rare. Even as late as the American Revolution, according to business historian Arthur Dewing, “no one could have concluded” that the corporation—rather the partnership or individual proprietorship—would become the main organizational form. As recently as 1800s there were only 335 corporations in the United States of America, most of them devoted to such quasi-public activities as building canals or running turnpikes. The rise of mass production changed all this. Second Wave technologies required giant pools of capital—more than a single individual or even a small group could provide. So long as proprietors or partners risked their entire personal fortunes with every investment, they were reluctant o sink their money in vast or risky ventures. To encourage them, the concept of limited liability was introduced. If a corporation collapsed, the investor stood to lose only the sum invested and no more. This innovation opened the investment floodgates. Moreover, the corporation was treated by the courts as an “immortal being”—meaning it could outlive its original investors. This meant, in turn, that it could make very long-range plans and undertake far bigger projects then ever before. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
By 1901 the World’s first billion-dollar corporation—United States Steel—appeared on the scene, a concentration of assets unimaginable in any earlier period. By 1919 there were half a dozen such behemoths. Indeed, large corporations became an in-built feature of economic life in all the industrial nations, including socialist and communist societies, where the form varied but the substance (in terms of organizations) remained very much the same. Together these three—the nuclear family, the factory-style school, and the gain corporation—became the defining social institutions of all Second Wave societies. And, throughout the Second Wave World—in Japan as well as in Switzerland, Britain, Poland, the United States of America, Russian—most people followed a standard life trajectory: reared in a nuclear family, they moved en masse through factorylike schools, then entered the service of a large corporation, private or public. A key Second Wave institution dominated each phase of the lifestyle. Around these three core institutions a host of other organizations sprang up. Government ministries, sports clubs, churches, chambers of commerce, trade unions, professional organizations, political parties, libraries, ethnic associations, recreational groups, and thousands of others bobbed up in the wake of the Second Wave, creating a complicated organizational ecology with each group servicing, coordinating, or counterbalancing another. At first glance, the variety of these groups suggests randomness or chaos. However, a closer look reveals a hidden pattern. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
In one Second Wave country after another, social inventors, believing the factory to be the most advanced and efficient agency for production, tried to embody its principles in other organizations as well. Schools, hospitals, prisons, government bureaucracies, and other organizations thus took on many of the characteristics of the factory—its division of labour, its hierarchical structure and is metallic impersonality. Even in the arts we find some of the principles of the factory. Instead of working for a patron, as was customary during the long reign of agricultural civilization, musicians, artist, composers, and writers were increasingly thrown on the mercies of the marketplace. More and more they turned out “products” for anonymous consumers. And as this shift occurred in every Second Wave country, the very structure of artistic production changes. Music provides a striking example. As the Second Wave arrived, concert halls began to crop up in London, Vienna, Paris, and elsewhere. With them came the box office and the impresario—the businessman who financed the production and then sold tickets to culture consumers. The more tickets he could sell, naturally, the more money he could make. Hence more and more seats were added. In turn, however, larger concert halls required louder sounds—music that could be clearly heard in the very last tier. The result was a shift from chamber music to symphonic forms. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Says Curt Sachs in his authoritative History of Musical Instruments, “The passage from an aristocratic to a democratic culture, in the eighteenth century, replaced the small salon by the more and more gigantic concert halls, which demanded greater volume.” Since to technology existed yet to make this possible, more and more instruments and players were added to produce the necessary volume. The result was the modern symphony orchestra, and it was for this industrial institution that Beethoven, Mendelson, Schubert, and Brahms wrote their magnificent symphonies. The orchestra even mirrored certain features of the factory in its internal structure. At first the symphony orchestra was leaderless, or the leadership was casually passed around among players. Later the players, exactly like workers in a factory or bureaucratic office, were divided into departments (instrumental sections), each coordinated from above by a manager (the conductor) or even, eventually, a straw boss farther down the management hierarchy (the first violinist or the section head). The institution sold its product to a mass market—eventually adding phonograph records to its output. The music factory had been born. The history of the orchestra offers only one illustration of the way the Second Wave socio-sphere arose, with its three core institutions and thousands of varied organizations, all adapted to the needs and style of the industrial techno-sphere. However, a civilization is more than simply a techno-sphere and a matching socio-sphere. All civilizations also require an “info-sphere” for producing and distributing information, and here, too, the changes brought by the Second Wave were remarkable. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the advantages of the city and the difficulties of commutation insured that commuters were not a significant proportion of the populations of most cities. The historian Henry Binford argues that early suburbs, rather then being appendages or outgrowths from the city, were freestanding, thinly settled, semirural communities. Such communities included manufacturing and commercial activity related to the city, but the limited mobility of persons and goods meant that contact with the city was sporadic rather than daily. Going into the city just took too much effort. Before the late 1840s travel required considerable energy, time, and expense. In their social life and political organization, early suburbs were more villages than smaller clones of the central city. Only when transportation improved, would fringe areas be transformed into commuter suburbs. In the meantime, fringe locations would be hybrid communities. Even before the era of mass transportation and the period when the suburbs would have regular contact with the city, the suburban fringe had already begun to change in significant ways. First, the suburbs had become more diverse villages, with a mixture of newcomers, some of whom had links to the central city and some of whom had economic and other links to the country. Secondly, partially as a consequence of the increased population diversity, there was increased social complexity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
As the populations of the suburban villages became more diverse, their social organizations became more complex, with overlapping circles of interests and involvement. Boundaries became more varied and flexible. People’s social, religious, business, and political networks were increasingly likely to vary from individual to individual. Finally, the villages were changing politically. Newer and younger men had a wider range of interests, and they were more open to the growth of local government and its evolution from village to suburban forms. However, not all American suburban areas of a century and a half ago were impoverished, housing only the poor and outcast. Outer areas had open land, and America’s Jeffersonian agrarian heritage contributed to an ideology that encouraged open space while viewing cities as source of discord and social evils. Since virtue (and affordably land) increased as one approached rural life, the goal of some urbanites was to be in the city, but just barely. Thus suburban development of Brooklyn as an independent suburban community, across the harbour from Manhattan, indicated how the dilemma of continuing urban business without abandoning the city could be resolved using the technology of the ferryboat. Living in Brooklyn, across the harbour from Manhattan, provided the prototype compromise. Brooklyn was the first commuter suburb. With its ferryboat connection to Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights had easy access to the city while at the same time retaining the suggestion of a bucolic community. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
By 1841 half of the householders who had bought land in Brooklyn Heights commuted to offices in Manhattan. By no stretch could these commuters be characterized as social outcasts or those on the margins of society. Hezekiah Beers Pierrepoint developed Brooklyn Heights as a community, noting “Gentlemen whose business or profession required daily attendance into the city cannot better, or with less expense, secure the health and comfort of their families.” Here in his comments were the themes that would be used to promote and advertise suburban living for the next century and a half. Suburbia claimed to offer a superior lifestyle, was a more healthful place to live, and was less expensive in the bargain. There are two kinds of inequality in the human species: one which I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature and consists in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and qualities of mind or soul. The other may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of humans. This latter type of inequality consists in the different privileges enjoyed by some at the expense of other, such as being richer, more honoured, more powerful than they, or even causing themselves to be obeyed by them. There is no point in asking what the source of natural inequality is, because the answer would be found enunciated in the simple definition of the word. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
There is still less of a point in asking whether there would not be some essential connection between the two inequalities, for that would amount to asking whether those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and whether strength of body or mind, wisdom or virtue are always found in the same individuals in proportion to power or wealth. Perhaps this is a good question for slabs to discuss within earshot of their masters, but it is not suitable for reasonable and free people who seek the truth. Precisely what, then, is the subject of this discourse? To mark, in the progress of things, the moment when, right taking the place of violence, nature was subjected to the law. To explain the sequence of wonders by which the strong could resolve to serve the weak, and the people to buy imaginary repose at the prince of real felicity. The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of returning to the state of nature, but none of them has reached it. Some have not hesitated to ascribe to human in that state the notion of just and unjust, without bothering to show that one had to have that notion, or even that it was useful to one. Others have spoken of the natural right that everyone has to preserve what belongs to one, without explaining what they mean by “belonging.” Others started out by giving authority to the stronger over the weaker, and immediately brought about government, without giving any thought to the time that had to pass before the meaning of the words “authority” and “government” could exist among humans. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Finally, all of them, speaking continually of need, avarice, oppression, desire, and pride, have transferred to the state of nature the ideas they acquired in society. They spoke about savage humans, and it was civil humans they depicted. It did not even occur to most of our philosophers to doubt that the state of nature had existed, even though it is evident from reading the Holy Scriptures that the first man, having received enlightenment and precepts immediately from God, was not himself in that state; and if we give the writings of Moses the credence that every Christian owes them, we must deny that, even before the flood, men were every in the pure state of nature, unless they had fallen back into it because of some extraordinary event: a paradox that is quite awkward to defend and utterly impossible to prove. Let us therefore begin by putting aside all the facts, for they have no bearing on the question. The investigations that may be undertaken concerning this subject should not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better suited to shedding light on the nature of things than on pointing out their true origin, like those our physicists make everyday with regard to the formation of the World. Religion commands us to believe that since God Himself drew humans out of the state of nature, they are unequal because He wanted them to be so; but it does not forbid us to form conjectures, drawn solely from the nature of humans and the beings that surround them, concerning what the human race could have become, if it had been left to itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Humans, whatever country you may be from, whatever your opinions may be, listen: here is your history, as I have thought to read it, not in the books of your fellowmen, who are liars, but in nature, who never lies. Everything that comes from nature will be true; there will be nothing false except what I have unintentionally added. The times about which I am going to speak are quite remote: how much you have changed from what you were! It is, as it were, the life of your species that I am about to describe to you according to the qualities you have received, which your education and your habits have been able to corrupt but have been unable to destroy. There is, I feel, an age at which an individual human would want to stop. You will seek the age at which you would want your species to have stopped. Dissatisfied with your present state for reasons that protend even greater grounds for dissatisfaction for your unhappy posterity, perhaps you would like to be able to go backwards in time. This feeling should be a hymn in praise of your first ancestors, the criticism of your contemporaries, and the dread of those who have the unhappiness of living after you. Without having recourse to the supernatural knowledge we have on this point, and without taking note of changes that must have occurred in the internal as well as the external conformation of humans, as they applied their limbs to new purposes and nourished themselves on new foods, I will suppose one to have been formed from all time as I see them today: walking on two feet, using their hands as we use ours, directing their gaze over all of nature, and measuring with their eyes the vast expanse of the Heavens. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Like the Old Testament, the New Testament sees human nature as a psychophysical unity. Although Jesus Christ and the apostles spoke Aramaic, their words have been handed down to us in New Testament Greek, which, depending on its frames of reference, uses any of several interchangeable terms for referring to persons. Whether we are admonished to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind or to present our bodies “as living sacrifice,” the meaning is the same: commit your whole person to God. The Greek word psyche parallels the Hebrew nephesh and is frequently translated as “soul.” In many cases its meaning is clearly not that of an immaterial soul. When Joseph brought his father, Jacob, and seventy-five “souls” into Egypt (as narrated in Acts 7.14), he did not leave their bodies behind in Canaan. The rich farmer dreams of harvests so great that one can say to one’s psyche, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” The biblical scholar Frank Stagg wonders aloud, “What kind of soul is it that can eat, drink, and be merry? A soul is a self, a person. In Romans 2.9, every “human being” who does evil and suffers for it is a psyche and in Romans 13.1 every “person” to be subjected to persons who govern is likewise a psyche. The whole [person] sins and the whole [person] is called to responsible citizenship. Saint Paul, true to his Hebrew heritage, here thins of man as a unity. The Biblical teaching is not that one has a soul but that one is a soul.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
That is exactly it. You do not have a soul, you are a soul. A soul comes from God. Nothing created can exist without a soul. God is omnipresent, we are emanations of God. He is our soul. Spirituality, as reflected in the Greek words translated as “spirit” and “flesh,” similarly has not to do with the whole person in relationship with God and other persons. The theologian Bruce Reichenbach suggests that to recapture this sense of spirituality we ought to drop the term soul from our religious vocabulary: “Such an approach, far from destroying faith in the spiritual aspect of humans, will assist in clarifying precisely wherein the spiritual lies, that is, that it lies not in the possession of an entity, but in the style of life one leads insofar as it manifests a relation to God and to one’s fellow human.” We also see the Hebrew-Christian understanding of psychophysical unity in the New Testament teaching concerning life after death. Oscar Cullmann beings his classic book, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? by observing that if we were to ask ordinary Christians what they conceive to be the New Testament teaching concerning our fate after death, “with few exceptions we should get the answers: The immortality of the soul. Yet this widely accepted idea is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Christianity.” Scripture promises us not immortality of the soul, but resurrection to eternal life as an “embodied spirit”—a very different proposition. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
For Jesus, unlike Socrates, death was no friend. At the grace of his friend Lazarus, Jesus wept. Death mattered. It was, in the apostle Paul’s words, “the great enemy.” Death is real, and I is an enemy precisely because we do not have within our own natures a guaranteed immortality. At the end of our lives we do not, as Socrates assumed, “pass away”; rather, we die. However, there is hope, a hope rooted not in our nature but in God’s love and faithfulness. Christians believe that God created and values human lives and that God will re-create them after death, giving us, on that “great gettin’-up morning,” what, apart from divine love, we do not have—eternal life. The hope that Christians proclaim in the Apostle’s Creed—“I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”—is a hope grounded in God’s initiative, not in our nature. To use a crude but modern analogy, after the plug is puled on our computing machinery, the divine programmer promises to re-create our software on a new, error-free, piece of hardware. (Contrast this view with the pre-Christian idea of Seneca, who viewed himself as a “mixture of body and soul, of divine and human; my body I will leave where I found it, my soul I will restore to Heaven.”) If we have immortal souls, it must not have been the case the Christ was the first to defeat death nor did he need to force open a door that until then had been locked. However, Christians believe that it was and He did. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
However, if the Psychical Researchers succeeded in proving “survival” and showed that the Resurrection was an instance of it, they would not be supporting the Christian faith but refuting it. (In fact, the founders or parapsychology were mostly people who had lost their faith in God and were searching for another basis for believing in the meaning of life and the possibility of life after death.) This claim embodies the Christian concept of resurrection containing the belief that our lives will be followed not by eternal extinction but by a renewal of life, with our individual identities intact, perhaps rather as a beautiful flower preserves the identity of the human seed that precedes it. (From this, all Christians, whether they hold to an immortal soul or not, derive equal comfort when confronting death.) Second, the New Testament image of a restored and perfected mind-body unit reinforces the other biblical images of human nature as a psychophysical unity. We must be wary of yoking biblical ideas to the details of any currently prevailing scientific theory. However, it is noteworthy that this unified image is consistent with the emerging scientific image of humans as a mind-body unity. Fundamentally, both views assume that without our bodies we are nobodies, and that we had best therefore be good to our bodies. Rather than despising the body as that which “fills us with passions, and desires, and fears, and all sorts of fancies, and foolishness,” as Socrates declare, Christians regard the body as “the temple of the Holy Spirit.” #RandolphHarrs 14 of 22
Indeed, we do not have bodies rather, we are bodies, bodies alive with minds. That being so, we should care about people’s whole selves—body and all. And that is indeed why people of faith have been on the forefront of efforts to take medicine to the developing World, to alleviate hunger, and to combat debilitating racism. The biblical accounts of human nature are, in a very profound sense, timeless. They made sense to our forebears long before science appeared, and they are relevant today. That should warn us against misconstruing them today by trying to impose on their vocabulary a precision, familiar to us today within science, that they were never intended to have. We discover that their main concern is with what God thinks about humans. The biblical account is a God-centered view and is pre-occupied with relationships—first and foremost the relationship of God to humanity, but also of person to person, and of humankind to the created order, of which it both a part and a steward. It provides advice and enduring truths on how to live our lives day by day. However, humankind today is not as God created it. An event described as the fall occurred, in which humankind’s obedience to God turned to disobedience. Seen in this way the fall is interpreted primarily as a break in the relationships of God, humans, and nature. The fall is often described as having “marred” or “obscured” God’s image, which can be restored in Christ. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
However, our physical existence has continued without interruption despite the fact that unredeemed humankind has been “dead in trespasses and sins” since then. Thus, while biological and spiritual life can be distinguished from each other, we must not overemphasize this possibility, since they are part of a whole. The rich fabric of the total picture given to us in Scripture brings to mind the similarly rich complexity of the total picture of human nature given to us through the scientific endeavour today. Both emphasize the complexity of human nature, the need to understand and study it from many diverse aspects or perspectives, and the need to recognize that human nature is a unity—a unity now in this present life and, by the grace of God, a unity in the life to some. The person who lusts for something breaks out into hives. The person who is proud produces pouches under one’s eyes. The person who is greedy develops hollows in one’s cheeks. The persons who has not died to oneself is easy game for the Enemy’s guile. Whoever finds oneself flooded with weakness and clinging to the flesh is mired in desire. One can still extract oneself from this sort of life, but only with the greatest difficulty. When a person like this holds oneself back, one grows sad. When someone else holds one back, one flies off into a rage. By way of contrast, the person who is poor and the one who is humble in spirit may seem to live a humdrum life; nonetheless they experience a measure of control and even a modicum of concord. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
You may go for the gusto, that is to say, aggressively pursue something you lust for; but when you grab it, it will grab you and twist you to the floor. By allowing a thousand rich such small passions to enslave you, you will never find True Peace of Heart. If you ever hope to escape, you must resist, fight back to fund what you are looking for. In the same way anyone who reveals and drivels one’ life away cannot find True Peace; only the fervent and spiritual know where to look for that. If one cares enough for the Quest and understand enough about the relation between it and diet, one will come sooner or later to choose one’s food with more resistance to habit. There is an opportunity to strengthen one’s will, overcome a bad habit and show one’s determination to quicken progress by dropping a negative practice of behaviour or action altogether from the first day. Do not sin against your health. Somethings humans partake in is poisonous physically and morally. Not all sickness and all disease are caused by wrong thinking in this present reincarnation but some of them are. How great or how small that part is depends entirely upon the individuals concerned. With some, it is a very high proportion, with others it is a small one. In the former case, therefore, we must look back to anterior lives for the wrong thought or wrong conduct which produced the sickness of the present physical body as bad karma. The practice of Christian Science is one part of the means to be applied in the hope of relieving the suffering and restoring normalcy to the physical, mental, and spiritual. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
We have inherited a body which, after ages of mistreatment, degradation, and wrong feeding, cannot quickly change itself and accept the new habits and the new feeding with its organs in their present condition. If the millions spent on research for cancer have so far failed, and if a simple change of faulty thought, belief, conduct, and goal cures it, the worth of this method is thereby demonstrated. Bodily healing is an occasional by-product of the healing of thought and feeling, or the re-education of moral character; it is not at all the invariable result of such processes. If wrong living breaks hygienic laws and provokes disease, wrong-doing also breaks Universal laws and provokes disease, as one form of retribution out of several possible forms. A hereditary affliction would obviously be of a universal origin. The individual mind and the cosmic mind are indissoluble connection, an out of their combined activity the human World-idea is produced. It would be correct to say that the redirection of thought and feeling would largely help to eliminate disease. As the race learns to substitute healing and caring thoughts for negative thoughts, aspiration for passion, and concentration for distraction, it will inevitably throw off many maladies that originate in wrong attitudes. Certain maladies in the physical being may quite easily be directly traced to evil impulses in the mental being. It is not only human’s diseases which are the consequence of their bad thinking, however, but also human’s misfortunes. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
If one is healthy in body one may be unhealthy in fortune. The Universal law of retribution expresses itself in a variety of ways. It is a mistake to narrow this linking of wrong thinking and ill feeling with the body’s sicknesses alone. They are to be linked with all forms of life experience. States of mind are directly or indirectly connected with states of health. A mind sinking under the heavy weight of responsibilities, or filled with the heavy stresses and pressures of business, or depressed by frustration, unhappiness or unrest, or shaken by the ending of a close relationship, may soon or late reflect itself in disease, sickness, psychosis, or neurosis. Wrong thinking expresses itself in the end in wrong functioning of some organ of the body. The nature of the thoughts and the nature of the malady correspond to each other. The individual who gives oneself up to negative destructive thoughts or feverish tempo of living for years and, later, find oneself sick or diseased, usually fails to think there is any mutual connection between the mental thoughts or unrelaxed way of life and the physical state. One does not even dream that one has been called to account. Quite clearly, it is as disorders of the various organs, as functional troubles, or as functional troubles, or as abnormal conditions in one or another part of the body that emotional, nervous, and mental disharmonies firs show themselves physically. Definitions: A sickness develops into an ailment, which if not cured becomes a disease. There is dissension between heart and head, between feeling and reasoning, and there is disease in the body itself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
There is an undesirable physical reaction for every undesirable emotional activity. Most people are careless about their mental habits because these seem of trivial importance by contrast with their physical habits. They do not know that sinning against the mind’s hygiene may manifest in the physical body itself. The body’s organs are affected by the mind’s states. Worry or fear or shock or excessive emotion may disturb, reduce, increase, or even paralyze their working for a time—in some cases for all time. Humans can cease to become human, and become God; but humans cannot be God and human at the same time. One can hold oneself in this egoless state for a brief while only. The ego soon raises up again and the glorious presence retires, for the two are incompatible. Such periods are short and uncommon but they lift us up and draw us in. Even if they are not immediate actualities, we feel then that there is peace and joy for us as ultimate possibilities. It is true that the felicity and freedom of such glimpses are too often too momentary. Yet immense forces lie hidden beneath their brief but intense existence. All glimpses are not of equal duration nor of equal degree. One or other or both may differ from person to person. These glimpses of Reality which wake us out of the World or illusion come to us only at intervals. We cannot hold them, but we can repeat them. The glimpse may past only an instant, or it may last a year. The glimpse lasts a moment, a minute, an hour, or a week—who can say, for it is a mysterious grace? However, in that while, the oscillation of human thoughts is stilled and time takes a rest. It cannot be shared with others—although they may notice or sense some of its fruits—and to that extent it is a private experience. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
It comes to us only in gleams whose disappointing brevity is balanced by their overwhelming beauty. Such moments rarely come to flower in the arid wildness of a human’s life today. There will even be rare and brief times when these serene glimpses will dissolve into wonderful ecstasies. The glimpses are usually quite short in duration, quite sudden in onset. The splendour of lightning, they disappear within the twinkling of an eye. Such experiences can be sustained only in small homeopathic doses. However, glimpses, as charming to the mind as scented blossoms to the nose, are fugitive. They cannot be kept. They are ephemeral. These glimpses are rarely sustained and should be accepted without surprise or disappointment for the short events they usually are. During the years when I investigated such matters—collecting data from several hundred cases, including my own experience, and combining it with the more authoritative teachings of highly attained and highly respected top-rank persons—I found that in large percentage of persons who feel too preoccupied with the work of starting to build a career, earn their livelihood, and build a family, the initial glimpse may have been the first and last for a long period of many years. However, in some cases they say in this period of disinterest because of disillusionments. The bliss of the glimpse must pass—and often quickly: its confirmation of unworldly values must diminish. One does not expect to feel often these great moments when one passes through an archway opening on the infinity and enjoys the Best. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
These glimpses are fitful and their content is fragmentary. It is true that the glimpse comes seldom to most people, but it is all the better remembered for that rarity. The fleeting beauty of these moments veils the harsh greyness of the long periods between them. These moments of spiritual nearness shine in one’s life, but the glorious feeling they induce does not stay. However, the glimpse comes to an end. The glorious new identity which one took on for a while will be shed. These glimpses are often unexpected, usually isolated, and only brief. A brief release from the burdens of living, peace-bestowing and mentally illumining, a healing suspense of all negative traits—but soon gone. These moments are rare and beautiful. They can never come too soon nor stay too long. The energy which appears to us as light is the basis of the Universe, the principle from which all things are made. The first aspect of God is Light; the first contact of human the Supreme Being is Light. If seen in vision, the pure and primal life-force appears as golden sunshine. You ask why I perch on a jade green mountain? I laugh but say nothing my heart free like a peach blossom in the flowing stream going by in the depths in another World not among humans. In the book of life, blessing, peace and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who establishest peace. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to grant our portion in your Kingdom and may the Temple be rebuilt in our day. There we will serve Thee with awe as in days of old. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Next to Life and Liberty, We Consider Education the Greatest Blessing!
We had a sense of importance that would have led us to risk our lives for our rhetoric. The precondition of any civilization, old or new, is energy. First Wave societies drew their energy from “living batteries”—human and animal muscle-power—or from sun, wind, and water Forests were cut for cooking and heating. Waterwheels, some of them using tidal power, turned milestones. Windmills creaked in the fields. Animals pulled the plow. As late as the French Revolution, it has been estimated, Europe drew energy from an estimated 14 million horses and 24 million oxen. All First Wave societies thus exploited energy sources that were renewable. Nature could eventually replenish the forests they cut, the wind that filled their sails, the rivers that turned their paddle wheels. Even animals and people were replaceable “energy slaves.” All Second Wave societies, by contrast, began to draw their energy from coal, gas, and oil—from irreplaceable fossil fuels. This revolutionary shift, coming after Newcomen invented a workable steam engine in 1712, meant that for the first time a civilization was eating into nature’s capital rather than merely living off the interest it provided. This dipping into the Earth’s energy reserves provided a hidden subsidy for industrial civilization, vastly accelerating its economic growth. And from that day to this, wherever the Second Wave passed, nations built towering technological and economic structures on the assumptions that cheap fossil fuels would be endlessly available. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
In capitalist and communist industrial societies alike, in East and West, this same shift has been apparent—from dispersed to concentrated energy, from renewable to non-renewable, from many different sources and fuels to a few. Fossil fuels formed the energy base of all Second Wave societies. The leap to a new energy system was paralleled by a gigantic advance in technology. First Wave societies had relied on what Vitruvius, two thousand years ago, called “necessary inventions.” However, these early winches and wedges, catapults, winepresses, levers, and hoists were chiefly used to amplify human or animal muscles. The Second Wave pushed technology to a totally new level. It spawned gigantic electromechnical machines, moving parts, belts, hoses, bearings, and bolts—all clattering and ratcheting along. And these new machines did more than augment raw muscle. Industrial civilization gave technology sensory organs, creating machines that could hear, see, and touch with greater accuracy and precision than human beings. It gave technology a womb, by inventing machines designed to give birth to new machines in infinite progression—id est, machine tools. More important, it brought machines together in interconnected systems under a single roof, to create the factory and ultimately the assembly line within the factory. On this technological base a host of industries sprang up to give Second Wave civilization its defining stamp. At first there were coal, textiles, and railroads, then steel, auto manufacture, aluminum, chemicals, and appliances. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Huge factory cities leaped into existence: Lille and Manchester for textiles, Detroit for automobiles, Essen and—later—Magnitogorsk for steel, and a hundred others as well. From these industrial centers poured million upon endless millions of identical products—shirts, shoes, automobiles, watches, toys, soap, shampoo, camera, machine guns, and electric motors. The new technology powered by the new energy system opened the door to mass production. Mass production, however, was meaningless without parallel changes in the distribution system. In First Wave societies, goods were normally made by handcraft methods. Products were created one at a time on a custom basis. The same was largely true of distribution. It is true that large, sophisticated trading companies had been built up by merchants in the widening crack of the old feudal order in the West. These companies opened trade routes around the World, organized convoys of ships, and camel caravans. They sold glass, paper, silk, nutmeg, tea, wine and wool, indigo and mace. Most of these products, however, reached consumers through tiny stores or on the backs of wagons of peddlers who fanned out into the countryside. Wretched communications and primitive transport drastically circumscribed the market. These small-scale shopkeepers and itinerant vendours could offer only the slenderest of inventories, and often they were out of this or that item for months, even years, at a time. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The Second Wave wrought changes in this creaking, overburdened distribution system that were as radical, in their ways, as the more publicized advances made in production. Railroads, highways, and canals opened up the hinterlands, and with industrialism came “palace of trade”—the first department stores. Complex networks of jobbers, wholesalers, commission agents, and manufacturers’ representatives sprang up, and in 1871 George Huntington Hartford, whose first store in New York was painted vermilion and had a cashier’s cage sharped like a Chinses pagoda, did for distribution what Henry Ford later did for the factory. He advanced it to an entirely new stage by creating the World’s first mammoth chain-store system—The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. Customer distribution gave way to the mass distribution and mass merchandising that became as familiar and central a component of all industrial societies as the machine itself. What we see, therefore, if we take these changes together, is a transformation of what might be called the “techno-sphere.” All societies—primitive, agricultural, or industrial—use energy; they make things; they distribute things. In all societies energy system, the production system, and the distribution system are interrelated parts of something larger. This larger system is the technosphere, and it has a characteristic form at each stage of social development. As the Second Wave swept across the planet, the agricultural techno-sphere was replaced by an industrial techno-sphere: non-renewable energies were directly plugged into mass production systems which, in turn, spewed goods into a highly developed mass distribution system. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
This Second Wave techno-sphere, however, needed an equally revolutionary “socio-sphere” to accommodate it. It needed radically new forms of social organization. Before the industrial revolution, for example, family forms varied from place to place. However, wherever agriculture held sway, people tended to live in large, multigenerational households, with uncles, aunts, in-laws, grandparents, or cousins all living under the same roof, all working together as an economic production unit—from the “joint family” in India to the “zadruga” in the Balkans and the “extended family” in Weser Europe. And the family was immobile—rooted to the soil. This is why the Victorian homes were so large, often three and four stories, with an average of 5,000 square feet, and several acres of land; so the families could live at home, have their own space without overcrowding the house, and farm to grow their food and meat. As we are now experiencing a global pandemic in 2021, houses are getting larger again, more people are living in multigenerational households, and even growing their own food. As the Second Wave began to move across First Wave societies, family felt the stress of change. Within each household the collision of wave fronts took the form of conflict, attacks on patriarchal authority, altered relationship between children and parents, new notions of propriety. As economic production shifted from the field to the factory, the family no longer worked together as a unit. To the free workers for factory labour, key functions of the family were parceled out to new, specialized institutions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Education of the child was turned over to schools. Care of the aged was turned over to poorhouses or old-age homes or nursing homes. Above all, the new society required mobility. It needed workers who would follow jobs from place to place. Burdened with elderly relatives, the sick, the disabled, and a large brood of children, the extended family was anything but mobile. Gradually and painfully, therefore, family structure began to change. Torn apart by the migration to the cities, battered by economic storms, families stripped themselves of unwanted relatives, grew smaller, more mobile, and more suited to the needs of the new techno-sphere. The so-called nuclear family-father, mother, and a few children, with no encumbering relatives—became the standard, socially approved, “modern” model in all industrial societies, whether capitalist or socialist. Even in Japan, where ancestor worship gave the elderly an exceptionally important role, the large, close-knit, multigenerational household began to break down as the Second Wave advanced. More and more nuclear unis appeared. In short, the nuclear family became an indentifable feature of all Second Wave societies, marking them off from First Wave societies just as surely as fossil fuels, steel mills, or chain stores. As work shifted out of the fields and the home, moreover, children had to be prepared for factory life. The early mine, mill, and factory owners of industrializing England discovered, as Andrew Ure wrote in 1835, that it was “nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands.” #RandolpHarris 6 of 21
If young people could be prefitted to the industrial system, it would vastly ease the problems of industrial discipline later of on. The result was another central structure of all Second Wave societies: mass education. Built in the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the “overt curriculum.” However, beneath it lay an invisible or “covert curriculum” that was far more basic. It consisted—and till does in most industrial nations—of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labour demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations. Thus from the mid-nineteenth century on, as the Second Wave cut across country after country, one found a relentless educational progression: children started school at a younger and younger age, the school year became longer and longer (in the United States of America it climbed 35 percent between 1878 and 1956), and the number of years of compulsory schooling irresistibly increased. Mass pubic education was clearly a humanizing step forward. As a group of mechanic and workingmen in New York City declared in 1829, “Next to life and liberty, we consider education the greatest blessing bestowed upon mankind.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Nevertheless, Second Wave schools machined generation after generation of young people into a pliable, regimented work force of the type required by electromechanical technology and the assembly line. Taken together, the nuclear family and the factory-style school formed part of a single integrated system for the preparation of young people for roles in industrial society. In this respect, too, Second Wave societies, capitalist or communist, North or South, were all alike. For many decades the ecological model was “the” model of urban growth. However, during recent decades it has increasingly come under attack by the scholars favouring neo-Marxian or political economy models. These models challenge the mainstream urban ecology perspective by emphasizing that urban patterns are not the result of “hidden hand” economic forces, but rather that urban patterns are deliberately shaped for private profit by elites in business and government. Thus, unlike ecological approaches, which explain suburbanization as occurring as a consequence of technological factors such as street-car or automobile, political economy, or neo-Marxian, views stress the role played by corporate and real estate interests in manipulating land usage and markets. Suburbia is not a consequence of individuals homeowner choice, but a consequence of a deliberate decision by elites to disinvest in the cities. These elites are composed of “the industrial executives, developers, bankers, and their political allies. This approach is sometimes also identified as the “new urban sociology.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The new urban sociology is usually based on assumptions of neo-Marxism and conflict theory. The term “new urban sociology” is a bit of a misnomer, since advocates of this approach or paradigm often are geographers, urban planners, or political scientists rather than sociologists. Although these perspectives differ in specifics, they all stress that urban development is a consequence of capitalist modes of production, capital accumulation, exploitation of he powerless, and conflictual class relations. Societies are specified according to their mode of production. In the United States of America and Western Europe as well as elsewhere societal development is dominated by the capital accumulation process. A central role in the process of accumulation is assigned to labour power—its use, management, and reproduction. Social spatial relationships, particularly the relationship between capitalistic processes and space, are an intrinsic part of social development. Methodological individualism is overcome through specification of structure and its relationship to the agency, although the articulation of this relationship varies among the new urbanists. Real-estate and its supporting infrastructure constitute a “second circuit” of capital. Certain assumptions are common to the new critical urbanists. These are: Societal interaction is dominated by antagonistic social relationships. Consequently society is not a unified biotic community that experiences change from the outside, but a stratified and highly differentiated form of organization characterized by its own fissures, contradictions, and patterns of uneven development—features that flow from the (for example, the capitalistic) mode of production itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Social development is unstable in societies with antagonistic owner relationships. Contradictions of development and inequalities of growth fuel antagonism and define the nature of political activities. Power inequality is a basic element in societal relationships and the exercise of power can be a factor in societal development. No society can be adequately analyzed without reference to either its long-term history or its global context. Urban sociology has become captive of its own comfortable assumptions and resonates strongly with younger academics. Some also believe strongly that the social inequality, social conflict, and social problems in many American cities is the predictable consequences of capitalist political economy determining real estate and land usage because certain groups of people had their homes red tagged (scheduled for demolition) as cities were planning to redevelop them. This led to many years of generational wealth being lost for certain groups of people are these homes appreciated to become worth millions just 40 to 40 years later. However, capitalists tend to be republican, but some of these policies that led to certain groups of people being displaced from the homes they owned and robbed of future equity, for example, were policies created by the governors Pat Brown and his son Jerry Brown, who are both democrats. Even today as California brags about having a nearly $40 billion budget surplus, there is a major homeless crisis that is being overlooked by democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and the TV news media, but they can conjure up sports complexes and have them operational in two years, but no move being made on the construction and management of affordable housing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
However, there is a conflict about affordable housing because many of their buildings tend to rent to people and do not manage them and there is a lot of violence, crime, rule breaking, and noise, so people do not want income based, or low-income properties in their community because rules are not enforced and it makes the community unlivable for people who pay market rate and often well above market rate prices for their homes. Yet, the answer is not to leave people on the streets to endure unhygienic and unsafe conditions. Well have to acknowledge and deal with gentrification, displacement, and neighbourhood revitalization. We also have to acknowledge the opposite of gentrification is happening: middle- and upper-income residents are moving out, and lower-income residents moving in. Urban space (as well as space at other scales) is the specific effect of the kind of society in which this urban space is developed and the capitalist city is developed according to a logic that is internal to capital itself. The trend of the affluent moving out of their communities has implications for millions of Americans who own a home or are thinking of buying one. In a neighbourhood that is losing its more affluent residents, home prices are likely to underperform, just as they tend to outperform in areas that are gentrifying, as incomes rise. As a buyer, you may value new construction and/or home prices that appreciate above all, and thus be attracted only to rising-income areas where the lawns are all manicured, houses are nice and well-maintained, and not too many cars on the street and in the driveway. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
As a systematic statement of how non-Marxian new sociology political economy approach can be used to study how property markets work as social phenomena is done by understanding that place is valued in two ways: first, as an object of exchange to be bought and sold, and second, when it is used to do business in or live in. In the latter case place has a sentimental and symbolic value associated with jobs, neighbourhood, hometown, and community. However, the urban growth machine of corporate political elites is interested in land strictly as an investment and commodity to be bought and sold. Their interest is in creating a good business environment so that investments and new residents will come to the area and increase market value of the land, and aggregate rent levels will increase. This governmental and corporate emphasis on growth is at the expense of the interest of local residents and their communities. The needs of the general public are captive to the “growth machine” whose principal interest is in the transfer of wealth rentier groups. Use values of the majority are sacrificed for the exchange values of a few. Thus, community groups that advocate slow growth or neighbourhood preservation are fought by the business elites that profit from maintaining the growth machines. For how can the source of the inequality among humans be known unless one begins by knowing humans themselves? And how will humans be successful in seeing themselves as nature formed one, through all the changes that the succession of time and things must have produced in one’s original constitution, and in separating what one derives from one’s own wherewithal from what circumstances and one’s progress have added to or changed in one’s primitive state? #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Like the Winchester mansion, which time, sea, earthquakes, humans, and storms have caused wear and damage to while the owners and historians fight to preserve this priceless treasure some consider a god, the human soul, altered in the midst of society by a thousand constantly recurring causes, by the acquisition of a multitude of bits of knowledge and errors, by changes that to place in the constitution of bodies, by the constant impact of the passions, as, as it were, changed its appearance to the point of being nearly unrecognizable or not fully displaying its original intent. And instead of a being active always by certain and invariable principles, instead of that Heavenly and majestic simplicity whose mark its author had left on it, one no longer finds anything but grotesque contrast of passion which thinks I reasons and an understanding in a state of delirium. What is even more cruel is that, since all the progress of the human species continually moves away from its primitive state, the more we accumulate new knowledge, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all. Thus, in a sense, it is by dint of studying humans that we have rendered ourselves incapable of knowing them. It is easy to say that it is in these successive changes of the human constitution that we must seek the first origin of the differences that distinguish humans, who, by common consensus, are naturally as equal among themselves as were the terrestrial beings of each species the varieties we now observe among some of them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
In effect, it is inconceivable that these first changes, by whatever means they took place, should have altered all at once and in the same manner all the individuals of the species. However, while some improved or declined and acquired various good and bad qualities which were not inherent in their nature, the others remained longer in their original state. And such was the first source of inequality among humans, which it is easier to demonstrate thus in general than to assign with precision its true causes. Let my readers not imagine, then, that I dare flatter myself with having seen what appears to me so difficult to see. I have begun some lines of reasoning; I have hazarded some guesses, less in the hope of resolving the question than with intention of clarifying it and of reducing it to its true state. Others will easily be able to go farther on this same route, though it will not be easy for anyone to reach the end of it. For it is no light undertaking to separate what is original from what is artificial in the present nature of humans, and to have a proper understanding of a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which probably never will exist, and yet about which it is necessary to have accurate notions in order to judge properly our own present state. One who would attempt to determine precisely which precautions to take in order to make solid observations on the subject would need even more philosophy than is generally supposed; and a good solution of the following problem would not seem to me unworthy of the Aristotles and Plinys of our century: What experiments would be necessary to achieve knowledge of natural man? And what are the means of carrying out these experiments in the midst of society? #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Far from undertaking to resolve this problem, I believe I have meditated sufficiently on the subject to dare respond in advance that the greatest philosophers will not be too good to direct these experiments, nor the most powerful sovereigns to carry them out. It is hardly reasonable to expect such a combination, especially with the perseverance or rather the succession of understanding and good will needed on both sides in order to achieve success. These investigations, so difficult to carry out and so little thought about until now, are nevertheless the only means we have left of removing a multitude of difficulties that conceal from us the knowledge of the real foundations of human society. It is this ignorance of the nature of humans which throws so much uncertainty and obscurity on the true definition of natural right. For the ideal of right, and even more that of natural right, are manifestly ideas relative to the nature of humans. Therefore, one continues, the principles of this science must be deuced from this very nature of humans, from human’s constitution and state. It is not without surprise and a sense of outrage that one observes the paucity of agreement that prevails among the various authors who have treated it. Among the most serious writers one can hardly find two who are of the same opinion on this point. The Roman jurists—not to mention the ancient philosophers who seem to have done their best to contradict each other on the most fundamental principles—subject human and all other terrestrial beings indifferently to the same natural law, because they take this expression to refer to the law that nature imposes on itself rather than the law she prescribes, or rather because of the particular sense in which those jurists understood the word “law,” which on this occasion they seem to have taken only for the expression of the general relations established by nature among all animate beings for their common preservation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The moderns, in acknowledging under the word “law” merely a rule prescribed to a moral being, that is to say, intelligent, free, and considered in one’s relations with other beings, consequently limit the competence of the natural law to the only terrestrial being who know of endowed with reason, that is, to humans. However, with each other defining this law in one’s own fashion, they all establish it on some metaphysical principles that even among us there are very few people in a position to grasp these principles, far from being able to find them by themselves. So that all the definitions of these wise humans, otherwise in perpetual contradiction with one another agree on this alone that it is impossible to understand the law of nature and consequently to obey it without being a great reasoner and a profound metaphysician, which humans do not naturally have, and from advantages the idea of which they cannot conceive until after having left the state of nature. Writers begin by seeking the rules on which, for the common utility, it would be appropriate for humans to agree among themselves; and then they give the name natural law to the collection of these rules, with no other proof than the good which presumably would result from their universal observance. Surely this is a very convenient way to compose definitions and to explain the nature of things by virtually arbitrary views of what is seemly. However, as long as we are unaware of natural man, it is futile for us to attempt to determine the law he has received or which is best suited to his constitution. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
All that we can see very clearly regarding this law is that, for it to be law, not only must he will of one who is obliged by it be capable of knowing submission to it, but also, for it to be natural, it must speak directly by the voice of nature. Leaving aside therefore all he scientific books which teach us only to see humans as they have made themselves, and meditating on the first and most simple operations of the human soul, I believe I perceive in it two principles that are prior to reason, of which one makes us ardently interested in our well-being and our self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being, especially our fellow humans, perish or suffer. It is from the conjunction and combination that our mind is in a position to make regarding these two principles, without the need for introducing that of sociability, that all the rules of natura right appear to me to flow; rules which reason is later forced to reestablish on other foundations, when, by its successive developments, it has succeeded in smothering nature. In this way one is not obliged to make a human a philosopher before making one a human. One’s duties toward others are not uniquely dictated to one by the belated lessons of wisdom; and as long as one does no resist the inner impulse of compassion, one will never harm another human or even another sentient being, except in the legitimate instance where, if one preservation were involved, one is obliged to give preference to oneself. By this means, an end can also be made to the ancient disputes regarding the participation of non-human terrestrial beings in the natural law. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
For it is clear that, lacking intelligence and liberty, some terrestrial beings cannot recognize this natural law; but since they share to some extent in our nature by virtue of the sentient quality with which they are endowed, one will judge that they should also patriciate in natural right, and that humans are subject to some sort of duties toward them. It seems, in effect, that if I am obliged not to do any harm to my fellow humans, it is less because one is a rational being than because one is a sentient being: a quality that, since it is common to both non-human terrestrial beings and human beings, should at least give the former the right not to be needlessly mistreated by the latter. This same study or original man, of his true needs and the fundamental principles of his duties, is also the only good means that can be used to remove those multitudes of difficulties which present themselves regarding the origin of moral inequality, the true foundations of the body politic, the reciprocal rights of is members, and a thousand other similar questions that are as important as they are poorly explained. In considering human society from a tranquil and disinterested point of view it seems at firs to manifest merely the violence of powerful men and the oppression of the weak. The mind revolt against the harshness of the former; one is inclined to deplore the blindness of the latter. And since nothing is less stable among men than those external relationships which chance brings about more often than wisdom, and which are called weakness or power, wealth or poverty, human establishments appear at first glance to be based on piles of shifting sand. It is only in examining them closely, only after having cleared away the dust and sand that surround the edifice, hat one perceives the unshakable base on which it is raised and one learns to respect its foundations. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Now without a serious study of man, of his natural faculties and their successive developments, one will never succeed in making these distinctions and in separating, in the present constitution of things, what the divine will has done from what human art has pretended to do. The political and moral investigations occasioned by the important question I am examining are therefore useful in every way; and the hypothetical history of governments is an instructive lesson for man in every respect. In considering what we would have become, left to ourselves, we ought to learn to bless him whose beneficent hand, in correcting our institutions and giving them an unshakable foundation, has prevented the disorders that must otherwise result from them, and has brought about our happiness from the means that seemed likely to add to our misery. Learn whom God has ordered you to be, and in what part of human affairs you have been placed. As it stands, 52 percent of evangelicals do not accept or do not believe in absolute moral truths! What is happening? When the church does not get it right, the World certainly cannot get it right. Revival is coming! The Heavenly messengers will quiet your fears as you learn to find Jesus Christ. “Then I saw another mighty Angel coming down from Heaven. He was robed in a cloud, with a rainbow above his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs were like fiery pillars. He was holding a little scroll, which lay open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the land, and he gave a loud shout like the roar of a lion. When he shouted, the voices of the seven thunders spoke. And when the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write; but I heard a voice from Heaven say, ‘Seal up what thunders have said and do not write it down.’ #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“Then the Angel I had seen standing on the sea and on the land raised his right and to Heaven. And he swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created the Heavens and all that is in them, the Earth and the sea and all that is in it, and said, ‘There will be no more delay! However, in the days when the seventh Angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets.’ Then then voice that I had heard from Heaven spoke to me once more: ‘Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the Angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.’ So I went to the Angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, ‘Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.’ I took the little scroll from the Angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. Then I was told, “You must prophesy again about many people, nations, languages and kings,” reports Revelation 10.1-11. With tender regard for human weaknesses, the Angel will give humans time to become accustomed to the divine radiance. Then the joy and glory will no longer be hidden. The whole plain will light up with the bright shinning of the hosts of God. Earth will be hushed, and the Heavens will stoop to listen to the son—“Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace, good will towards humans.” “For the Lord your God is brining you into a good land, a land of flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a long of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
“God is blessing us with a land where we will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and from whose hills you may mine copper, blue sapphires and diamond. You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land He has given you,” reports Deuteronomy 8.7-11. Tall, lush rain forest dripping in the morning wild orchids banana flowers, thick vines drape los palos del sol and great white cedar; others with five foot green elephant ears flopping, hundreds of butterflies, orange caterpillars, blue birds, pink mushrooms, through billion of green leaves quivering moist in the patchy sunlight. There are exalted but rare occasion when inspiration, peace, and spiritual majesty conjoin their blessed presence within us. It is with one for the flicker of a second—an unfathomable tranquility, an indefinable beauty—and then gone. Some enter into this experience only once in a lifetime; others repeat it a few times. Only a rare individual here and there enters it frequently. In the book of life, blessing, peace, and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who establishest peace. O Lord, please guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile, and to those who slander me, let e give no heed. May my soul be humble and forgiving unto all. Please open Thou my heart, O Lord, unto Thy sacred Law, that Thy statutes I may know and all Thy truths pursue. Please bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill; speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for Thine own sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered, answer us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou who establishes peace in the Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto All America. Amen. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Be Thou a Spirit of Health or Goblin Damned?
The Heaven was full of fiery shapes, Mrs. Winchester was terribly shocked by the death of her month-old baby girl; in fact, it can be well believed she never fully recovered and this surely influenced some of her eccentricities. Added to this loss was the death of her husband, William Wirt Winchester, 15 years later from Tuberculosis. On arrival in San Jose, Mrs. Winchester started remodeling the newly purchased, unfinished eight-room farm house. She found that the planning kept her grief-disturbed mind occupied and she became thoroughly enthused. Financial problems were certainly no deterrent; in the late 1880s, Mrs. Winchester brought a fortune of $20,000,000.00 ($523,635,294.12 in 2021 dollars) with her and had an average income of $1,000 ($26,181.76 in 2021 dollars) a day. Just how such precise amounts came to be public knowledge is unknown. In the period, 1881 to 1889, the dividends from her 777 shares of stock in the Winchester Company gave her an annual average income of $43,335.00 ($1,134,586.77 in 2021 dollars). It must be quickly added that upon the death of her mother-in-law in 1897, Mrs. Winchester’s holdings were increased to 2777 shares. Her lack of architectural training gave her little concern. Every morning she made the rounds with her ever patient foreman inspecting the latest progress. Some days Mrs. Winchester sketched plans on the spot using a saw-horse drawing table and any handy material, often brown wrapping paper (and used both sides). From the foreman came no argument; he had no problem of interpretation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
One afternoon in the mansion, a variety of circumstance concurred to being about the dreadful scene through which I was that night to pass. In the first place, I was literally overpowered with fatigue, and longing for sleep; in the next place, the effect of this extreme exhaustion upon my nerves resembled that of a narcotic, and rendered me less susceptible than, perhaps I should in any other condition have been, of the exciting fears which had become habitual to me. Then again, a little bit of the window was open, a pleasant freshness pervaded the room, and, to crown all, the cheerful sun of day was making the room quite pleasant. What was to prevent my enjoying an hour’s nap here? The whole air was resonant with the cheerful hum of life, and the broad matter-of-fact light of day filled every corner. I yielded—stifling my qualms—to the almost overpower temptation; and merely throwing off my coat, and loosening my cravat, I lay down, limiting myself to half-an-hour’s doze in the unwonted enjoyment of a feather bed, a coverlet, and a bolster. It was horribly insidious; and the demon, no doubt, marked my infatuated preparations. Dolt that I was, I fancied, with my mind and body worn out for want of sleep, and an arrear of a full week’s rest to my credit, that such measure as half-an-hour’s sleep, in such a situation, was possible. My sleep was death-like, long, and dreamless. Without a start of fearful sensation of any kind, I waked gently, but completely. It was, as you have good reason to remember, long past midnight—I believe, about two o’clock. When sleep has been deep and long enough to satisfy nature, thoroughly, one often wakens in this way, suddenly, tranquilly, and completely. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There was a figure seated in that lumbering, old sofa-chair, near the fireplace Its back was rather towards me, but I could not be mistaken; it turned slowly round, and merciful heavens! there was the stony face, with its infernal lineaments of malignity and despair, gloating on me. There was now no doubt as to its consciousness of my presence, and the hellish malice with which it was animated, for it arose, and drew close to the bedside. There was a rope about its neck, and the other end, coiled up, it held stiffly in its hand. My good angel nerved me for this horrible crisis. I remained for some seconds transfixed by the gaze of this tremendous phantom. He came close to the bed, and appeared on the point of mounting upon it. The next instant I was upon the floor at the far side, and in a moment more was, I do not know how, upon the lobby. However, the spell was not broken; the valley of the shadow of death was not yet traversed. The abhorred phantom was before me there; it was standing near the banisters, stooping a little, and with one end of the rope round its own neck, was poising a noose at the other, as if to throw over mine; and while engaged in this baleful pantomime, it wore a smile so sensual, so unspeakably dreadful, that my senses were nearly overpowered. I saw and remember nothing more, until I found myself in the maid’s room. I had a wonderful escape—there is no disputing that—an escape for which, while I live, I shall bless the mercy of Heaven. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
No one can conceive or imagine what it is for flesh and blood to stand in the presence of such a thing, but one who has had the terrific experience. A shadow has passed over me—a chill has crossed my blood and marrow, and I will never be the same again—never, never! Our handmaid, a mature girl of two-and-fifty, as I have said, stayed her hand, and by little and little drew near to me, with open mouth, her brows contracted over her little, bready black eyes, till stealing a glance over her shoulder now and then, she established herself close behind us. During the relation, she had made various earnest comments, in an undertone; but these and her ejaculations, for the sake of brevity and simplicity, I have omitted in my narration. “It is often I heard tell of it,” she said, “but I never believed it rightly till now—though, indeed, why should I not? Does not my mother, down there in the lane, know quare stories, God bless us, beyant telling about it? But you ought not to have slept in the back bedroom. She was loath to le me be going in and out from that room even in the time, let alone for any Christian to spend the night in it; for sure she says it was his own bedroom.” “Whose own bedroom?” I asked, in a breath. “Why, his—the ould Judge’s—Judge John Conduit’s, to be sure, God rest his sowl”; and she looked fearfully round. “Amen!” I muttered. “But did he die there?” “Die there! No, not quite there,” she said. “Shure, was not it over bannisters he hung himself, the ould sinner, God be merciful to us all? and was not it in the alcove they found the handles of the skipping rope cut off, and the knife where he was settling the cord, God bless us, to hang himself with? #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“It was his housekeeper’s daughter owned the rope, my mother told me, and the child never throve after, and used to be starting up out of her sleep, and screeching in the night time, wid dhrames and frights that cum an her; and they said how it was the speerit of the ould Judge that was tormentin’ her; and she used to be roaring and yelling out to hould back the big ould fellow with the crooked neck; and then she’d screech ‘Oh, the master! the master! he’s stampin’ at me, and beckoning to me! Mother, darling, don’t let me go!’ And so the poor crathure died at last, and the doctors said was marasmus, for it was all they could say.” “How long ago was all this?” I asked. “Oh, then, how would I know?” she answered. “But it must be a wondherful long time ago, for the housekeep was an ould woman, with a pipe in her mouth, and not a tooth left, and better nor eighty years ould when my mother was first married; and they said she was a rale buxom, fine-dressed woman when the ould Judge come to his end; an’, indeed, my mother’s not far from eighty years ould herself this day; and what made it worse for the unnatural ould villain, God rest his soul, to frighten the little girl out of the World the way he did, was what was mostly thought and believed by every one. My mother says the poor little crathure was his own child; for he was by all accounts an ould villain every way, an’ the hangin’ est judge that ever was known.” “From what you said about the danger of sleeping in that bedroom,” said I, “I suppose there were stories about the ghost having appeared there to others.” “Well, there was things said—quare things, surely,” she answered, as it seemed, with some reluctance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
“And why would not there? Sure was it not up in that same room he slept for more than twenty years? and was it not in the alcove he got the rope ready that done his own business at last, the way he done many a better man’s in his lifetime?—and was not the body lying in the same bed after death, and put in the coffin there, too, and carried out to his grave from it in St. Joseph’s Cathedral Basilica, after the coroner was done? But there was quare stories—my mother has them all—about how one Archbishop Patrick William Riordan got into trouble on the head of it. Some years later he died of pneumonia at the 1000 Fulton Street Mansion in San Francisco, California.” “And what did they say of this Archbishop Riordan?” I asked. “Oh, for that matther, it’s soon told,” she answered. And she certainly did relate a very strange story, which so piqued my curiosity, that I took occasion to visit the ancient lady, her mother, from whom I learned many very curious particulars. Indeed, I am tempted to tell the tale, but my fingers are weary, and I must defer it. But if you wish to hear it another time, I shall do my best. When I had heard the strange tale I have not told you, I put one or two further questions to her about the alleged spectral visitations, to which the house had, ever since the death of the wicked old Judge, been subjected. “No one ever Mrs. Winchester myself telling how the children used to be lifted up in the bed at night, she could not see by what mains; and how they were starting and screeching every hour, just all as one as the housekeeper’s little girl that died till at last one night poor Chadwick had a dhrop in him, the way he used now and again; and what do you think in the middle of the night he thought he heard a noise on the stairs, and being in liquor, nothing less id do him but out he must go himself to see what was wrong. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“Well, after that, all she ever heard of him was himself sayin’, ‘Oh, God!’ and a tumble that shook the very house; and there, sure enough, eh was laying on the lower stair, under the lobby, with his neck smashed double undher him, where he was flung over the banisters.” Then the handmaiden added—“I’ll go down the lane, and send up Hansen Solomon to pack up the rest of the taythings, and bring all the things across to your new lodgings.” And so we all sallied out together, each of us breathing more freely, I have no doubt, as we crossed that ill-omened threshold for the last time. Now, I may add thus much, in compliance with the immemorial usage of the Winchester legacy, which see the hero not only through one’s adventures, bur fairly out of the World. You must have perceived that what the flesh, blood, and bone hero of romance proper is to the regular compounder of legends, this ancient Victorian mansion of brick, wood, glass, and mortar is to the humble recorder of this true tale. Gods have different properties, due to different antecedents. The definitive book on gods and their qualities has yet to be written. Mrs. Winchester built the door to nowhere for the gods to enter. However, a human being has the key—the big key. The all-important key. The long-lost secret key that lets a human talk to the gods, command them, bring them down to Earth. Solomon’s key. A man gets that key, he be stronger than the gods. You do not want to mess with that key stuff. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Remember that persons skeptical of witchcraft did not doubt the practice of it, but only whether or not it worked, or worked through spiritual means. Thus the skeptic John Webster, in his Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, was willing to concede that there were witches and devils who “have power to perform strange things.” However, he spent his twelfth chapter on the question “whether they do not bring the to pass by mere natural means.” What was at issues here was the reality of the spiritual World, the “invisible World,” as Dr. Mather called it. The controversy over witchcraft, therefore, raised theological issues fundamental to the seventeenth-century Christian. “We shall come to have no Christ but a light within, and no Heaven but a frame of Mind,” said Dr. Mather, if the materialists—the Saducees—should succeed in destroying the belief in an invisible World. Whatever one’s own belief, or lack of it, one has to admit that he was right. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries scientific materialism was to triumph, and the pious were to find that all the concreteness had left their religion, leaving nothing behind but a “light within” and a “frame of mind.” Conceive, then, of Dr. Mather’s excitement. At a time which he recognized to be a crisis in the history of religious belief he had discovered a clear case of witchcraft which he thought could not possibly be explained on material grounds. He made it the central matter of his Memorable Providences (1689), a book which he hoped might once and for all confute materialism and reestablish Christianity on the firm foundation of a real and concrete spiritual World. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The book met with considerable success. Richard Baxter, one of the most distinguished English Puritans, wrote a laudatory preface to the first London edition, and in Baxter’s own Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691) he spoke of it as the ultimate proof of the existence of a spiritual World. Any doubter, he said, “that will read…Mr. Cotton Mather’s book of the witchcrafts in New England may see enough to any incredulity that pretendeth to be rational.” The four or so cases we have reviewed over the past few weeks confirm in detail what we have seen to be true in general. Accusations of witchcraft were continual among common people, so continual that Dr. Cotton Mather took time in his “Discourse” to warn his congregation sharply against them “Take heed that you do not wrongfully accuse any other person of this horrid and monstrous evil…What more dirty reproach than that of witchcraft can there be? Yet it is most readily cast upon worthy persons when there is hardly a shadow of any reason for it. An ill look or a cross word will make a witch with many people who may on more ground be counted so themselves. There has been a fearful deal of injury done in this way in this town to the good name of the most credible persons in it. Persons of more goodness and esteem than any of their calumnious abusers have been defamed for witches about this country—a country full of lies.” However, the charges of irresponsible accusers were checked by the responsibility of the community’s leaders, the ministers and magistrates. They had been reluctant to act in Mrs. Hibbins’ case. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
At Groton, Mr. Willard’s investigation had been so careful that two accusations of witchcraft were retracted and the case never brought to court, on the ground that it was possession rather than witchcraft. At Hartford a confessor and her husband had been hanged and at Boston a confessor, but in both instances, although more persons were accused, the individual case did not develop into a witch hunt. There were other individual convictions, but they were outnumbered by the acquittals. For example, the records of the Court of Assistants show that in 1662 Eunice Cole of Hampton was found not guilty as indicated, although there was “just ground of vehement suspicion.” In 1666 John Godfrey of Salem was discharged as not legally guilty, although there were again grounds for suspicion. (Mr. Godfrey seems to have been a thorough reprobate; at various times he was convicted of stealing, swearing, drunkenness, and suborning witnesses.) In 1637 Anna Edmunds was acquitted and her accusers order to pay charges. In 1675 Mary Parsons of Northampton was found not guilty, in 1681 Mary Hale of Boston, and in 1683 Mary Webster of Hadley. Also in 1683 James Fuller of Springfield, who had confessed but then retracted his confession, was found not guilty but was whipped and fined for “his wicked and pernicious willful lying and continuance in it until now, putting the country to so great a change.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
In All the American colonies during the seventeenth century there were fewer than fifty executions for witchcraft, and excluding Salem there were fewer than thirty. This is a genuinely exemplary record, considerably superior to Europe for intelligence and restraint. Before the Glover case a part of this restraint may have proceeded from the New Englander’s conviction that he belonged to a chosen people. God, many thought, would not permit Satan to afflict the elect. The Devil might appear among “the wigwams of Indians, where the pagan Powaws often raise their masters in the shapes of bear and snakes and fires,” but there would be a few demonic terrors in the New Jerusalem. This belief was shattered by the events of 1688. Goodwife Glover had demonstrated clearly that witchcraft did exist in Massachusetts, and witchcraft of the most serious and dangerous sort. The Devil was abroad in Zion, seeking whom he might devour. When the Devil broke forth again, at Salem Village in 1692, he was not immediately recognized. “When these calamities first began,” wrote the Reverend Samuel Parris, “which was in my own family, the affliction was several weeks before such hellish operations as witchcraft were suspected. A quack doctor, who called himself William Griggs, moved into my family home, and catastrophe ultimately befell it. He filled the parlour widow with bottle of indescribable horrors preserved in brandy, and the fairly new concept in the American colonies called the newspaper with the usual grandiloquent and mendacious mix of local social and culture news. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
“This gentleman among his virtues did not reckon sobriety, and one night, being overcome with much wine, he set fire to his bed curtains, partially burned himself, and totally consumed the hose. It was afterwards rebuilt, and for a time an undertaker established himself in the premises. I fear some young persons, through vain curiosity to know their future condition, have tampered with the Devil’s tools so far that hereby one door was opened to Satan to play those pranks, Anno 1692. I knew one of the afflicted persons who (as I was credibly informed) did try with an egg and a glass to find her future husband’s calling [id est, occupation], till there came up a coffin, that is, a specter in likeness of a coffin. And she was afterward followed with diabolical molestation to her death, and so died a single person—a just warning to others to take heed of handling the Devil’s weapons lest they get a wound thereby. Another, I was called to pray with, being under sore fits and vexations of Satan. And upon examination I found that she had tried the same charm, and after her confession of it and manifestation of repentance for it, and our praters to God for her, she was speedily released from those bonds of Satan.” As human beings, we interact with the environment around us and affect it through our bodies as extensions of our minds. However, the thing is, we are never satisfied with the simplistic nature of these interactions. We are aware of limitations of our human nature and that has always been a driving force for us as a race to look for other ways to affect our environment in a more impactful way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Witchcraft is another way, a “tool” if you will, to impact the environment in a way so unique that simple, everyday folk like us cannot wrap our minds around it. It surpasses the wonders of mechanics as there is no external connection, the power of witchcraft extends from an internal World, bypassing the need to learn complex machinery or spend years labouring over physics and math textbooks. Alongside the innovation we traditionally ascribe to the Victorian period, was an older, persistent belief in the supernatural. Although the laws against witchcraft had been repealed in 1736, folklore continued to be active and potent force in everyday life. Many people believe that supernatural forces are what compelled Mrs. Winchester, at a cost of $5,000,000.00 ($171, 188, 461.51 in 2021 dollars) alone spent on materials to build the Winchester mansion with 10,000 windows, nine kitchens, and 47 fireplaces built of rosewood, cherry, mahogany, Italian marble, oak, teak, and pipestone; all hand carved, and no two alike. Construction went on for 38 years. At one point the mansion was as high as nine stories, had 200 rooms, and was 50,000 square feet. Once an enterprising young realtor leaked the rumor to Mrs. Winchester’s servants that across the road (now Stevens Creek Chevrolet) an investor was planning to build an Inn. “Saloon” was the word in those says. Mrs. Winchester quickly purchased the property at an exorbitant figure. Of course this was a false alarm but it brought her holdings to 160 acres. In the book of life, blessing, peace, and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord who establishest peace. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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It is Difficult for an Education in Which the Hearts is Involved to Remain Forever Lost!
Trying to sneak a pitch past him is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster. Three hundred and fifty years ago, give or take a half-century, an explosion was heard that sent concussive shock waves racing across the Earth, demolishing ancient societies and creating a wholly new civilization. This explosion was, of course, the industrial revolution. And the giant tidal force it set loose on the World—the Second Wave—collided with all the institutions of the past and changed the way of life of millions. During the long millennia when First Wave civilization reigned supreme, the planet’s population could have been divided into two categories—the “primitive” and the “civilized.” The so-called primitive peoples, living in small bands and tribes and subsisting by gathering, hunting, or fishing, were those who had been passed over by the agricultural revolution. The “civilized” World, by contrast, was precisely that part of the planet on which most people worked the soil. For wherever agriculture arose, civilization took root. From China and India to Benin and Mexico, in Greece and Rome, civilizations rose and fell, fought and fused in endless, colourful admixture. However, beneath their differences lay fundamental similarities. In all of them, land was the basis of economy, life, culture, family structure, and politics. In each community, life was organized around the village. Each of which, life was a simple division of labour prevailed and a few clearly defined castes and classes arose: a nobility, a priesthood, warriors, helots, slaves, or serfs. For all of these people, power was rigidly authoritarian. #RandolphHarris 1 of 28
In all of these cases, birth determined one’s position in life. And for any one of these people, the economy was decentralized, so that each community produced most of its own necessities. There were exceptions—nothing is simple in history There were commercial cultures whose sailors crossed the seas, and highly centralized kingdoms organized around giant irrigation systems. However, despite such differences, we are justified in seeing all these seemingly distinctive civilizations as special cases of a single phenomenon: agricultural civilization—the civilization spread by the First Wave. During is dominance there were occasional hints of things to come. There were embryonic mass-production factories in ancient Greece and Rome. Oil was drilled on one of the Greek islands in 400 B.C, and in Burma in A.D. 100. Vast bureaucracies flourished in Babylonia and Egypt. Great urban metropolises grew up in Asia and South America. There was money and exchange. Trade routes crisscrossed the deserts, ocean, and mountains from Cathy to Calais. Corporations and incipient nations existed. There was even, in ancient Alexandria, a startling forerunner of the steam engine. Yet nowhere was there anything that might remotely have been termed an industrial civilization. These glimpses of the future, so to speak, were mere oddities in history, scattered through different places and periods. They never were brought together into a coherent system, nor could they have been. Until 1650-1750, therefore, we can speak of a First Wave. #RandolphHarris 2 of 28
Despite patches of primitivism and hints of the industrial future, agricultural civilization dominated the planet and seemed destined to do so forever. This was the World in which the industrial revolution erupted, launching the Second Wave and creating a strange, powerful, feverishly energetic countercivilization. Industrialism was more than smokestacks and assembly lines. It was a rich, many-sided social system that touched every aspect of human life and attacked every feature of the First Wave past. It produced the great Willow Run factory outside Detroit, but it also put the tractor on the farm, the typewriter in the office, the refrigerator in the kitchen. It produced the daily newspaper and the cinema, the subway and the DC-3. It gave us cubism and twelve-tone music. It gave up Bauhaus buildings and Barcelona chairs, sit-down strikes, vitamin pills, and lengthened life spans. It universalized the wristwatch and the ballot box. More important, it linked all these things together—assembled them, like a machine—to form the most powerful, cohesive, and expansive social system the World had ever known: Second Wave civilization. As the Second Wave moved across various societies it touched off a bloody, protracted war between the defenders of the agricultural past and the partisans of the industrial future. The forces of First and Second Wave collided head-on, brushing aside, often decimating, the “primitive” peoples encountered along the way. #RandolphHarris 3 of 28
In the United States of America, this collision began with the arrival of the Europeans bent on establishing an agricultural, First Wave civilization. A white agricultural tide pushed relentlessly westward, dispossessing the Indian, depositing farms and agricultural villages father and father toward the Pacific. However, hard on the heels of the farmers came the earliest industrializers as well, agents of the second Wave future. Factories and cities began to spring up in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Northeast had a rapidly growing industrial sector producing firearms, watches, farm implements, textiles, sewing machines, and other goods, while the rest of the continent was still ruled by agricultural interests. Economic and social tensions between First Wave and Second Wave forces grew in intensity until 1861, when they broke into armed violence. The Civil War was not fought exclusively, as it seemed to many, over the moral issue of slavery or such narrow economic issues as tariffs. It was fought over a much larger question: would the rich new continent be ruled by farmers or industrializers, by the forces of the First Wave or the Second? Would the future American society be basically agricultural or industrial? When the Northern armies won, the die was cast. The industrialization of the United States of America was assured. From that time on, in economics, in politics, in social and culture life, agriculture was in retreat, industry ascendant. The First Wave ebbed as the Second came thundering in. #RandolphHarris 4 of 28
The same collision of civilizations erupted elsewhere as well. In Japan the Meiji Restoration, beginning in 1868, replayed in unmistakably Japanese terms the same struggle between agricultural past and industrial future. The abolition of feudalism by 1876, the rebellion of the Satasuma clan in 1877, the adoption of Western-style constitution in 1889, were all reflections of the collision of the First and Second Waves in Japan—steps on the road to Japan’s emergence as a premier industrial power. In Russia, too, the same collision between First and Second Wave forces erupted. The 1917 revolution was Russia’s version of the American Civil War. It was fought not primarily, as it seemed, over communism but once again over the issue of industrialization. When the Bolsheviks wiped out the last lingering vestiges of serfdom and feudal monarchy, they pushed agriculture into the background and consciously accelerated industrialism. They became the party of the Second Wave. In country after country, the same clash between First Wave and Second Wave interests broke out, leading to political crisis and upheavals, to strikes, uprisings, coup d’etat, and wars. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the forces of the First Wave were broken and the Second Wave civilization reigned over the Earth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 28
Today an industrial belt girdles the globe between the twenty-fifth and sixty-fifth parallels in the Northern Hemisphere. In North America, and much of the other developed nations, some 80 percent of the population lives an industrial way of life. Despite dizzying differences of language, culture, history, and politics—differences so deep that wars are fought over them—all these Second Wave societies share common features. Indeed, beneath the well-known differences lies a hidden bedrock of similarity. And to understand today’s colliding waves of change we must be able to identify clearly the parallel structures of all industrial nations—the hidden framework of Second Wave civilization. For it is this industrial framework itself that is not being shattered. And you, MAGNIFICENT AND MOST HONOURED LORDS, you upright and worthy magistrates of free people, permit me to offer you in particular my compliments and my respects. If there is a rank in the World suited to conferring honour on those who hold it, it is without doubt the one that is given by talents and virtue, that of which you have made yourselves worthy, and to which your fellow citizens have raised you. Their own merit adds still a new luster to yours. And I that find you, who were chosen by humans capable of governing others in order that they themselves may be governed, are as much above other magistrates as a free people; and above all that one which you have the honour of leading, is, by its enlightenment and reason, above the populace of other states. #RandolphHarris 6 of 28
May I be permitted to cite an example of which better records ought to remain, and which will always be near to my heart. I never call to mind without the sweetest emotion the memory of the virtuous citizen to whom I owe my being, and who often spoke to me in my childhood of the respect that was owed you. I sill see him living from the work of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the most sublime truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch and Grotius mingled with the instruments of his craft before him. I see at this side a beloved son receiving with too little profit the tender instruction of the best of fathers. However, if the aberrations of foolish youth made me forget such wise lessons for a time, I have the happiness to sense at last that whatever the inclination one may have toward vice, it is difficult for an education in which the heart is involved to remain forever lost. Such, MADNIFICENT AND MOST HONOURED LORDS, are the citizens and even the simple inhabitants born in the state you govern. Such are those educated and sensible human concerning whom, under than name of workers and people, such base and false ideas are entertained in other nations. My father, I gladly acknowledge, was in no way distinguished among his fellow citizens; he was only what they all are; and such as he was, there was no country where his company would not have been sought after, cultivated, and profitably too, by the most upright humans. It does not behoove me, nor, thank Heaven, is it necessary to speak to you oft the regard which humans of that stamp can expect from you: your equals by education as well as by the rights of the nature and of birth; your inferiors by their will and by the preference they owe your merit, which they have granted to it, and for which you in tern owe them some sort of gratitude. #RandolphHarris 7 of 28
It is with intense satisfaction that I learn how much, in your dealings with them, you temper with gentleness and cooperativeness the gravity suited to the ministers of law; how much you repay them in esteem and attention for the obedience and respect they owe you; conduct full of justice and wisdom, suited to putting at a greater and greater distance the memory of unhappy events which must be forgotten so as never to see them again; conduct all the more judicious because this equitable and generous people makes a pleasure out of its duty, because it naturally loves to honour you, and because those who are most zealous in upholding their rights are the ones who are most inclined to respect yours. It should not be surprising that the leaders of a civil society love its glory and happiness; but, unfortunately for the tranquility of humans, that those who consider themselves as the magistrates, or rather as the masters, of a more holy and more subline homeland manifest some love for the Earthly homeland which nourishes them. How sweet it is for me to be able to make such a rare exception in our favour, and to place in the rank of our best citizens those zealous trustees of the sacred dogmas authorized by the laws, those venerable pastors of souls, whose lively and sweet eloquence the better instills the maxims of the Gospel into people’s hearts as they themselves always begin by practicing them. Everyone knows the success with which the great art preaching is cultivated in Geneva. #RandolphHarris 8 of 28
However, since people are too accustomed to seeing things said in one way and done in another, few of them know the extent to which the spirit of Christianity, the saintliness of mores, severity to oneself and gentleness to others reign in the body of our ministers. Perhaps it behooves only the city of Geneva to provide the edifying example of such a perfect union between a society of theologians and men of letters. It is in large part upon their wisdom and their acknowledged moderation and upon their zeal for the prosperity of the state that I base my hopes for its eternal tranquility. And I note, with a pleasure mixed with amazement and respect, how much they abhour the atrocious maxims of those sacred and barbarous humans of whom history provides more than one example, and who, in order to uphold the alleged rights of God—that is to say, their own interests—were all the less sparing of human blood because they hoped their own would always be respected. Could I forget hat precious half of the republic which produces the happiness of the other and whose gentleness and wisdom maintain peace and good mores? Amiable and virtuous women and citizens, it will always be the fate of your gender o govern ours. Happy it is when your chase power, exercised only within the conjugal union, makes itself felt only for the glory of the state and the public happiness! Thus it was that in Sparta women were in command, and thus it is that you deserve to be in command in American. #RandolphHarris 9 of 28
What barbarous man could resist the voice of honour and reason in the mouth of an affectionate wife? And who would not despise vain luxury on seeing your simple and modest attire, which, from the luster it derives from you, seems the most favourable to beauty? It is for your to maintain always, by your amiable and innocent dominion and by your insinuating wit, the love of laws in the state and concord among the citizens to reunite, by happy marriages, divided families; and above all, to correct, by the persuasive sweetness of your lessons and by the modest graces of your conversation, those extravagances which our young people come to acquire in other countries, whence, instead of the many useful things they could profit from, they bring back, with a childish manner and ridiculous airs adopted among fallen women, nothing more than an admiration for who knows what pretended grandeurs, frivolous compensations for servitude, which will never be worth as much as august liberty. Therefore always be what you are, the chaste guardians of mores and the gentle bonds of peace; and continue to assert on every occasion the rights of the heart and of nature for the benefit of duty and virtue. I flatter myself that events will not prove me wrong in basing upon such guarantees hope for the general happiness of the citizens and for the glory of the republic. #RandolphHarris 10 of 28
I admit that with all these advantages it will not shine with brilliance which dazzles most eyes; and the childish and fatal taste for this is the deadliest enemy of happiness and liberty. Let a dissolute youth go elsewhere in search of easy pleasures and lengthy repentances. Let the alleged men of tastes admire someplace else the grandeur of palaces, the beauty of carriages, the sumptuous furnishings, he pomp of spectacles, and all the refinements of softness and luxury. In American we will find only men; but such a sight has a value of its own, and those who seek it are well worth the admirers of the rest. May you all, MAGNIFICENT, MOST HONOURED AND AOVEREIGN LORDS, deign to receive with the same goodness the respectful testimonies of the interest I take in your common prosperity. If I were unfortunate enough to be guilty of some indiscreet rapture in this lively effusion of my heart, I beg you to pardon it as the tender affection of a true patriot, and to the ardent and legitimate zeal of man who envisage no greater happiness for oneself than that of seeing all of you happy. With the most profound respect, I am MAGNIFICENT, MOST HONOURED AND SOVEREIGN LORDS, you most humble and most obedient servant and fellow citizen. The Angels had wondered at the glorious plan of redemption. They watched to see how the people of God would receive His Son, clothed in the garb of humanity. Angels came to the land of the chosen people. Other nations were dealing in fables and worshipping false gods. To the land where the glory of God had been revealed, and the light of prophecy had shone, the Angels came. #RandolphHarris 11 of 28
They came to unseen America, to the appointed expositor of the Sacred Oracles, and the ministers of God’s house. Christ’s arrival had been announced. Already the forerunner was born, His mission attested by miracle and prophecy. The tidings of His birth and the wonderful significance of His mission had been spread abroad. And American was preparing to welcome her Redeemer. With amazement the Heavenly messengers beheld the excitement that the people whom God had called to communicate to the World the light of sacred truth. The American nation had been preserved as a witness that Christ was to be born of the seed of Abraham and of David’s line. The priests and teacher rehearsed their sacred prayers, and performed important rites of worship to honour the Lord, and prepare for the revelation of the Messiah. Hearts were Heavenly enthralled and were blessed by the joy that thrilled all Heaven. Everyone has the experience of doing, few of being. Yet that is the most precious, most important of all life’s experiences. This is the experience which makes the fully mature human happiest. It is usually short but its next advent will always be eagerly awaited. It is often isolated by long intervals of prosaic commonplace living, but they only serve to give it even greater value by contrast. The inner need of humans is forever demanding this experience, for it is Heaven. Whether it is born out of appreciation of beauty or an infinite humiliation of the ego, or out of some totally difference occasion, this awareness of the Overself’s presence is essential to the completion and fulfilment of human life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 28
To enter Heaven is to enter into fulfilment of our Earthly life’s unearthly purpose. And that is, simply, to become aware of the Overself. This holy awareness brings such joy with it hat we then know why the true saints and the real ascetics were able to disdain all other joys. The contrast is too disproportionate. Nothing that the World offers to tempt us can be put on the same level. One will find that somewhere within there is a holy presence not oneself, a sublime power not one’s own. One will understand then that no one is truly alive who has not made this discovery. The glimpse of Heaven lies at the core of religion, the precious gem which each devotee must find for oneself underneath all the sermons, chantings, rituals, prayers, and observances of one’s creed. A stillness which is simply the absence of noise but which is rich, fruitful, and uplifting in beauty and refinement of its presence—this is the best. No good fortune that comes one’s way will ever after be counted so great as the good fortune which one now feels to be one’s in the realization of the Overself. Would but the desert of the Fountain yield One glimpse—if dimly, yet indeed revealed, to which the fainting traveler might spring. Another significance of the glimpse is that of initiation. We cannot know God in the fullness of His consciousness but we can know the link which we have with God. If you mist, call it the soul, or if you prefer the Overself, but catch a glimpse of this link to be reborn. #RandolphHarris 13 of 28
The glimpse gives one a journey to a land flowing not with milk and honey, but with goodness and beauty, with peace and wisdom. It is the best moment of one’s life. When a human’s consciousness is turned upside-down by a glimpse, when one thought most substantial is revealed as least so, when one’s values are reversed the Good takes on a new definition, one writes that day down as one’s spiritual birthday. What better thing can one find than the divine Overself! That would be the decisive moment of one’s entire bodily existence, as establishing oneself permanently in its fullness and finality would be the grandest sequel. There is no higher happiness than this discovery of the real human. Joseph Smith knew that if his important work of translating was to be finished, he must have a capable scribe who could spend hours at a time at the job of writing. As usual when he needed guidance, Joseph prayed that such a person might be found. Meanwhile, back in Palmyra, a schoolteacher named Oliver Cowdery had come to live in the Smith home. Oliver, who was about Joseph’s age, had not been in the family of Joseph’s parent long before they told him the strange story of the golden plates and the Angel visits. Oliver liked the Smiths and believed the story. Oliver also prayed. He wanted to help in great new work. In his heart he began to feel that his place was beside Joseph. Because he felt so strongly that he could be helpful, he went to Pennsylvania in April, 1829. Upon hi arrival at the home of Joseph and Emma, Oliver told them why he had come. Joseph was not surprised because he knew God had sent this young man in answer to his prayer for help. #RandolphHarris 14 of 28
Joseph and Oliver became friends immediately. They trusted each other because each felt that God had told him, even before they met, that they would work together. Joseph had not had much opportunity to go to school to learn from books, and he was to appreciate the help of schoolteacher Oliver, who had excellent schooling, was a great reader, and a fine writer. Soon after the meeting of these two young men, the Lord Jesus Christ, spoke to them saying: “A great and marvelous work is about to come forth unto the children of men: behold, I am God, and give heed unto my word. Keep my commandments, and seek to bring forth and establish the cause of America. Seek not for riches but for wisdom; and, behold, the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto you, and then shall you be made rich. Behold, one that hath eternal life is rich. If you desire, you shall be the means of doing much good in this generation. Say nothing but repentance unto this generation: keep my commandments, and assist to bring forth my work…and you shall be blessed. Behold, thou knowest that that thou hast inquired of me, and I did enlighten thy mind; and now I tell thee these things, that thou mayest know that thou hast been enlightened by the spirit of truth. Yea, I tell thee, that thou mayest know that there is none else save God, that knowest thy thoughts and the intents of thy heart. I tell thee these things as a witness unto thee, that the words of the work which thou hast been writing is true. Treasure up these words in thy heart. Be faithful and diligent in keeping the commandments of God, and I will encircle thee in he arms of my love. #RandolphHarris 15 of 28
“I say unto you, as I said unto my disciples, Where two or three are gathered together in my name, as touching one thing, behold, there will I be in the midst of them; even so am I in the midst of you. Fear not to do good, my sons, for whatsoever ye sow, that shall ye also reap: therefore, if ye sow good, ye shall also reap good for your reward. Therefore fear not, little flock, do good. Look unto me in every thought, doubt not, fear not. Be faithful; keep my commandments, and ye shall inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.” Two days after their meeting, Oliver began to write as Joseph translated. They worked hour after hour, day after day, happy in their new-found friendship and the work which bound them together. Oliver describes this work in these words: “These were days never to be forgotten—to sit under the sound of a vice dictated by the inspiration of Heaven. Day after day I continued to write as he translated with the Urim and Thummim.” Sometimes as they worked, on the translation they came to things they did not understand. They prayed for explanations. It was on such an occasion that the Lord explained to them how they might know the answers to many of their problems and receive the knowledge by the Holy Spirit. The Lord said: “Verily I say unto you, that assuredly as the Lord liveth, who is your God and your Redeemer, even so sure shall you receive a knowledge of whatsoever things you shall ask in faith, with an honest heart, believing that you shall receive. Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart by Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you, and which shall dwell in your heart. Now, behold, this is the spirit of revelation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 28
“Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, wen you took no thoughts, save it was to ask me; but, behold, I say unto you, that you mut study it out in your mind. Then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right, I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall fell that it is right. However, if it be not right, you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought, that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong.” The Lord provided this means whereby Joseph and Oliver, and all the people, might know by His Holy Spirit the truth of all things. We must look upon these glimpses as sacred one. And this is so even if they rise of themselves in our best moments. For in these times we, and especially the younger ones among us, need wider definitions of such matters. These moments, when spiritual presence is distinctly felt, may be rare or frequent, misunderstood or recognized, but they are moments of blessing. And this is true even if they open the door only slightly and let in merely a ray of light. In these moments of a glimpse, one discovers the very real presence of the Overself. They provide one with a joy, an amiability, which disarms the negative side of one’s character and brings forward the beneficial side. These are precious moments; they cannot be too highly valued. And though they must pass, some communication with them is always possible through memory. #RandolphHarris 17 of 28
Remember this truth: The Old Testament is God’s will concealed, and the New Testament is God’s will revealed—every word is equally anointed, relevant, and eternally true. The glimpse is of supreme worth morally, helping to free one, bestowing goodwill and humility, uplifting one’s ideals however fleetingly. Instead of being an escape from life, as some sceptics unwisely think, they are its fulfilment. Although life is really like a dream, some phases of the dream are more worthwhile than others—those which bring the Glimpse, for instance. It is far better than being ignorant to know what is read in books or heard at lectures on this topic, but far better than both of these is to feel vividly the Overself’s presence and reality, to know the truth of It with complete certainty. No better fortune can come to a human than one’s serene inward well-being and this certitude of universal truth. We must have Good Conscience and live a Virtuous Life! Why? Because a lot of us spend more time studying hard than living well. That is such a mistake! All that does is produce a tree that bears in fruit, except perhaps the odd pear or single peace. Plowing vices under and planting virtues in their place—that is hard work. Harder even than the grunt and the grind of the great philosophical issues. However, if the priestly scholar had already done that hard and serious work in one’s own life, one would find it easier now dealing with those Devouts traipsing about in sandals and self-actualizes processing around in ermines. #RandolphHarris 18 of 28
With the certain advent of that Final Event, the question o be posed is not whether we read the right books, but whether we did the good deeds; not whether we said the right things, but whether we made the right choices. Tell me now, where are those celebrity professors who taught you when they were at the height of their careers and you were starting out? They are dead and gone. You occupy their chairs of learning now, and now you are spending their stipends. Doctors they once were; now they are only dodoes, and you can hardly remember their names. How soon the glory of the Worlds set, wrote John in his first letter to an early group of Christians (2.17)! Would that the professors’ lives had matched their doctrinal teachings! Yet they fell short. If they had it to do over again, I suppose they would have studied longer and read till their eyes turned red. However, that would have done the little good. That is what Paul had in mind when he wrote to the Romans (1.21). How many of the professors have perished because they followed the unreliable wisdom of the World! Because they gave scant attention to the service of God. They had their choices, though. They picked greatness rather than humility, and as a result logicked themselves right out of their own holy syllogisms. However, when the sun finally sets, there will be other, happier people. The truly great? Those who did not make a lot of themselves; they gathered honours as their due, but they did not display their trophies in the window. The truly prudent? If it is what would keep them on the path to God, those who gave the World its due; they would not mind sweeping up after elephants, as St. Paul put it so Earthily to the Philippians (3.8). #RandolphHarris 19 of 28
The truly educated? Those who engaged God’s will and disengaged their own in one and the same transaction. Does no death mean that the body comes to exist by itself, separated from the soul, and that the soul exists by herself, separated from the body? What is death but that? For the Hebrew, a human is a unity, and that unity is the body as a complex of parts, drawing their life and activity from a breath-soul, which has no existence apart from the body. What is our essential nature? Are we a dualism of body and soul, as Socrates and Plato believed, or a psychophysical unity, as H. Wheeler Robinson suggests is the Old Testament view? Take a little survey of Christian laypeople, and you will surely find most people agreeing with Plato: we are made up of two realities, body and soul. Or so most of us have been taught since childhood. One book of Christian doctrine for children explains: Maybe you have been to a funeral. You have seen the dead body. That is buried in the ground. However, the inside part of you, the part that thinks and feels, that is the part that lives forever. This is the part of us that would go to hell. Christians talk and sing a lot about souls. It has seemed natural to appear to our possession of a soul as “proof” that we are alive. The belief that we possess a soul has been the foundation of our dignity and out view of the sacredness of human life. For many, talk about the soul has been a way of thinking about our “divine image.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 28
Not surprisingly, anyone who seems to question one of our most treasured beliefs will face strong challenges, and quite properly be put under close scrutiny. That has happened in the past, of course, with other Christian beliefs. We all remember the sustained action to the views of Copernicus and Galileo, which displaced our Earth from the center of the Universe. How much more of a reaction, then, might we expect to anyone seeming to question our possession of a soul as the hallmark of our being made “in the image of God”? If, as the Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner suggests, “the telescope of Galileo did more to interpret Psalm 96 verse 10 than the pen of the theologian,” we need to pause and ask in what way today might the discoveries of the neuropsychologists and evolutionary psychologists do more to interpret biblical references to the soul than the comments of philosophical theologians? The distinguished Nobel laureate Francis Crick wrote, “In spite of differences among religions, there is broad agreement on at least one point: People have soul, in the literal and not merely the metaphorical sense.” Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, begs to differ: “In the Christian tradition, like the Jewish and Muslim, the soul is not a substantial entity which exists without and before the body, and is better off without the body.” Instead, Dr. Ward contends, the Christian tradition proclaims an essential unity of body and soul. Indeed, as Socrates’ discourse on death hints, the idea of an immortal soul separable from the body arises not from the Christian Bible but from Greek thought. #RandolphHarris 21 of 28
In the end, Plato records that Socrates lived his own teaching by drinking the poison hemlock in the serene conviction that his immortal soul would now find release from its bodily prison. For Socrates and Plato, bodily death was a welcome liberation. Indeed, it was actually not dying. This Greek belief of separate body and soul has permeated Christian tradition quite thoroughly. When Origen, a third-century platonic philosopher, became the father of theology, he built into Christian doctrine Plato’s idea of the soul. In the early fifth century, Augustine thought Plato’s to be the most brilliant of all philosophers. And in the sixteenth century, John Calvin, who was heavily influenced by both Plato and Augustine, declared that Plato alone “rightly affirmed” the immortal soul that “lies hidden in humans separate from the body.” It has been one of the tasks of twenty-first century biblical scholarship to disentangle the biblical images of human nature from those of Greek philosophy. Discerning the biblical picture of the person is no simple matter, for the Bible is actually not one book but a library of sixty-six books, written over some fifteen hundred years, in three languages, and under varying historical circumstances. Not surprisingly, then, the meanings of the same words within the Hebrew Old Testament and within the Greek New Testament may shift. Fresh scholarship has modified earlier views. Today we recognize that the long-standing and pervasive view that presented a dichotomy between Hebrew thought (affirming some form of monism) and Greek thought (affirming some dualism) is a caricature. #RandolphHarris 22 of 28
Greek thought was more caried on the nature of the soul than a reading focused solely on Plato would suggest. There was no single concept of the soul among the Greeks, and the body-soul relationship was described variously among philosophers and physicians in the Hellenistic period. It was a belief cluster, not a single view. Recognizing these varied views within Hellenistic Judaism is not seen by biblical scholars as being directly relevant to understanding the cultural narrative within which anthropology is described in the New Testament. It is increasingly recognized that it was Israel’s Scriptures that were the most potent influence on New Testament writers. Thus readings of New Testament anthropology must take Old Testament monism as their point of departure. One mistake is to interpret the everyday language of the Christian Bible and The Book of Mormon and The Doctrine and Covenants as modern, scientific statements. When the writer of Ecclesiastes (1.5) noted, “The sun rises and the sun goes down,” the church of Galileo’s day understood this to be a scriptural proclamation of a stationary Earth encircled by the sun. Because the writers of Genesis (1.16) described the moon as a “light to rule the night,” the church also could not accept Galileo’s conclusion that the moon shone by reflected light; when Galileo invited them to look through his telescope and see the shadows of the craters for themselves, they declined and dismissed his observations as delusions of the devil. It is similarly possible to misinterpret the Bible’s human images. It is important to remember the Bible is written for all people all times. #RandolphHarris 23 of 28
As such, the Bible does not intend to offer a precise psychology, and certainly not one in the language of the early twenty-first century. Moreover, the Christian Holy Bible(s) is a book for living, not a book of science. It is not biographical. It is about the acts of God in the lives of people throughout history. Bearing these cautions in mind, what general understand of human nature emerge from the library of Scriptures? Let us consider some conclusions reached by scholars who have devoted their lives to exploring the whole of Scripture, in more depth during our next few lectures. Predestination presupposes election in the order of reason; and election presupposes love. The reason of this is that predestination is a part of providence. Now providence, as also prudence, is the plan existing in the intellect directing the orderings of some things towards an end. However, nothing is direct towards an end unless the will for that end already exists. Whence the predestination of some to eternal salvation presupposes, in the order of reason, that God wills their salvation; and to this belong both election and love:–love, inasmuch as He wills them this particular god of eternal salvation; since to love is to wish well to anyone:—election, inasmuch as He wills this good to some in preference to others; since He reprobates some. Election and love, however, are differently ordered in God, and in ourselves: because in us the will in loving does not cause good, but we are incited to love by the goo which already exits; and therefore we choose someone to love, and so election in us precedes love. #RandolphHarris 24 of 28
In God, however, it is the reverse. For His will, by which in loving He wishes good to someone, is the cause of that good possessed by some in preferences to others. Thus it is clear that love precedes election in the order of reason, and election precedes predestination. Whence all the predestinate are objects of election and love. If the communication of the divine goodness in general be considered, God communicates His goodness without election; inasmuch as there is nothing which does not in some way share in His goodness. However, if we consider the communication of this or that particular good, He does not allow it without election; since He gives certain goods to some humans, which He does not give to others. Thus in the conferring of grace and glory election is implied. When the will of the person choosing is incited to make a choice by the good already pre-existing in the object chosen, the choice must needs be of those things which already exist, as happens in our choice. In God it is otherwise. This, as St. Augustin says (De Verb. Ap. Serm. 11): “Those are chosen by God, who do not exist; yet He does not err in His choice.” God wills all humans to be saved by His antecedent will, which is to will not simply but relatively; and not by His consequent will which is to will simply. I part out thrusting branches and come in beneath the blessed and the blessing trees. Though I am silent, there is singing around me. Though my vision is clouded, there is clarity around me. Though I am heavy, there is the flight of Angels around me. #RandolphHarris 25 of 28
It is a mistake to believe that because any art of healing—whether it be a material or a spiritual one—is able to heal a particular kind of sickness once, it is consequently able to heal all similar cases of sickness by its own merits. Forces outside it have something to do with the matter. There are some cases where failure by material methods is preordained by the higher power of destiny. There are others where failure by spiritual methods is also inevitable, because the heart of the sick human being has not been touched. As elsewhere, there are limits to human effort set here by certain laws. O inscribe all the children of Thy covenant of a happy life. May all the living do homage unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who art our salvation and our helps. Blessed by Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whom our thanks are due. Our God and God of our fathers, bless us with the threefold blessings written in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, and spoken by Aaron and his sons, Thy consecrated priests: May the Lord bless thee and keep thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord make His countenance to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee: so may it be His will. May the Lord turn His countenance unto thee and give thee peace. So may it be His will. May our voids and blanks be filled with creations of intense significance, aesthetic, spiritual, and practical. Here with the Lord may we find the roots of much imaginative endeavour. May a space feel like an invitation to bridge it. #RandolphHarris 26 of 28
May we be confident people, who can draw on a sense of competence (“I am grand—I can do it”), may find a void pleasurable and attractive: it can become filled with all kinds of Christian efforts. The gap, the emptiness, the interval, the space, seem inviting to creative Christians. We see faces in the clouds. On a larger scale, people with lonely moors, with isolated lives, who have lost their parents or have empty parents, may God fill their World with vivid people and events. Painters need their empty canvasses. Dr. Barnardo, Albert Schweitzer, and others who are creative people, see what is missing and what is needed, and set about putting it there. Two people who encounter one another may create a relationship where there has been nothing This is he more fascinating because, if the creation is to endure, here has to be an element of truth, which makes the encounter one of exploration and discover. Who can tell how much invention-creation there is in such a relationship and how much discovery-creation? It must vary from person to person. Indeed, who can insist on the difference between invention and discovery in our love and hate of each other? We are so varied in our potential qualities, and so prone to have them called into being by other people’s love and hope, or hate and coldness. Do not the old stories of cruelty and redemption tell us so? #RandolphHarris 27 of 28
Scientific invention is also a matter of filling a blank. This kind of creativity seems to some in two forms: interpolation and extrapolation. Interpolation is closest to the process of “discovering the object”: the scientist has a set of starting-points, which seem connected with a phantasied endpoint or outcome which one wishes to reach. At first tis gap can conceivably be filled wit a shifting multitude of possibly useful concepts. Some of these are eliminated when we cannot get evidence, cannot get the facts to coincide with out phantasies. Eventually, if we work hard enough and are blessed enough, the pieces fall into place and bridge the gap from phantasy to outcome in a way which can be tested further. The process of extrapolation is of a more space-loving kind—discovery rather than invention. “Surely if we sail west we will come to the Indies,” said Christopher Columbus—and landed in America! Starting from the known, the discoverer takes the next step (perhaps the next logical step) and then the next and then the next. All kinds of good things can happen when conceptual activity does not eventuate in the anticipated outcome. Creative processes happen, imaginative play, artistic endeavour, invention, discovery. They all start with the kind of mental processes called phantasy (that is, untested unconfirmed concepts). In this state of mind there are (at least during the “period of hesitation”) no clear concepts, no clear contours. Bits of “self” and of “not self” are available for potential concept-formation. #RandolphHarris 28 of 28
CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
These charming neighborhoods 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
Residence Four at Mills Station boasts approximately 2,700 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.
The Home Hub, located off the entry, can be used as a study, office, or kids play room. The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters and opens onto the spacious great room. Upstairs you’ll find the Owner’s retreat, two bedrooms, and the loft perfect for a game room or TV lounge. The Owner’s retreat is spacious and inviting with a large bedroom and spa like bathroom featuring a free-standing soaking tub, walk-in shower, dual vanities, and large walk-in closet.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
Cresleigh Ranch offers expansive, award-winning luxury home designs. There are single-level and two-story, open-concept floor plans, on nicely appointed home sites, and range size from approximately 2,000 to 4,000 square feet. Flex rooms allow for added bedrooms, multigenerational suites or office space to fit your family’s lifestyle requirements. Come and get your glimpse of Heaven and see why Cresleigh is America’s Favourite!
Randolph Harris II International 